A number of Bronterre O'Brien's disciples were the leading lights of London clubs that provided the silent majority to the Social Democratic Federation (S.D.F.). Even after the O'Brienites came to accept the need for collective ownership of the means of production, their political strategy remained that of O'Brien. An understanding of the role played by the O'Brienites helps to explain various problems in the history of the S.D.F. such as why most members remained with Hyndman rather than follow Morris into the Socialist League and why the S.D.F. adopted an ambiguous attitude to trade unions and to palliatives.

The work of E.P. Thompson has had an enormous impact on the writing of history in South Africa since the 1970s. This article traces the rise of this historiographical trend, focusing especially on the History Workshop at Wits University (Johannesburg). It outlines how a South African version of Thompsonian historical practice was theorized, and sketches some of the ways in which Thompson’s ideas were utilized by South African historians. The article shows how the History Workshop attempted to popularize their research, and examines the political projects behind these activities. Finally, the article suggests that although the influence of Thompson-style South African social historians has declined, their work has had a lasting impact on the country’s literary culture, well beyond the academy.

This introduction highlights the main subjects and research questions addressed in the articles making up this Special Issue on the labour histories of transport in the Global South. Although historiographical interest in the history of transport labour is growing, scientific knowledge on the subject is still very limited. This is especially true for histories from outside Europe and North America. Important topics and research problems covered here are: (1) transport labour as facilitating the exchange and mobility of goods but also of peoples and ideas – as such transport constitutes a noteworthy element of social history; (2) transport labour as a factor of production which is relevant for industrial and agrarian societies, as well as for market-driven and socialist economies; (3) the extent to which the processes of globalization, imperial expansion, and the emergence of global capitalism owe a debt to transport labour of the global south and its micro-histories.

How did the abolition of slavery influence the relations between urban centres and rural areas? How did “new” French citizens experience access to the urban environment? Based on the archives of the correctional courts, this article focuses on how race and citizenship determined the accessibility of French colonial urban spaces and institutions after 1848. The abolition of slavery in the French Antilles on 27 April 1848 led to a modification of the legal and judicial systems: the changing legal status of former slaves gave them new opportunities to move around the colonies, at least on paper. In theory, after 1848, everyone should have had freedom of social and spatial mobility and access to the urban centres and their institutions; what happened in practice, however, still needs to be researched. This article shows that the abolition exacerbated two dynamics already at play since the beginning of the nineteenth century: the control of the population and the attraction of the urban environment for the elite. The plantation system in the mid-nineteenth century was suffering both economically and politically: the newly acquired freedom and possible migration of former slaves to the towns (Saint-Pierre and Fort-de-France in Martinique, Pointe-à-Pitre and Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe) threatened to destabilize the system of private justice as well as the economic apparatus. To counteract these legal changes, vagrancy laws were implemented to restrict citizens’ mobility while, at the same time, the white elite's discourse on urban spaces changed from them being seen as a hotbed for revolutionary ideas to representing a safe environment to which access needed to be restricted.

The “transnational turn” is one of the most discussed topics in historiography, yet it has inspired more theoretical tension than empirically saturated studies. This article combines both aspects by examining the transnational network formation of one of the most important social movements in late imperial Russia, the Jewish Labour Bund. It furthermore introduces into historiography one of the most fruitful theories in recent social sciences, “actor-network theory”. This opens the view on the steady recreation of a social movement and reveals how closely the history of the Bund in eastern Europe was interwoven with large socialist organizations in the New World. Based on a large number of sources, this contribution to migration and movement history captures the creation and the limits of global socialist networks. As a result, it shows that globalization did not only create economic or political networks but that it impacted the everyday lives of authors and journalists as well as those of tailors and shoemakers.

The age of mass migration that commenced in the 1840s has traditionally been conceived within the orbit of Atlantic history, and rendered as a narrative of modernity and industrialization. At an individual level the departure for the New World was propelled by rising expectations, which nicely fitted the macro-pattern of converging labour markets between North-America – as well as Australia for that matter – and Europe. Many of the assumptions that brought global migration under the aegis of modernization have been refuted, or at least seriously questioned. But that still leaves us with the important question whether there are alternative paradigms available that fit the realities both within and outside the North Atlantic world. Some have already answered the question negatively. According to Hatton and Williamson, it is impossible to find a unifying paradigm that would enable us to develop a global migration history. Their argument is too important not to be cited:

The gradual acceptance by politically influential people of the belief that deliberate control of town growth was both feasible and fruitful is a theme in the history of town planning which has many aspects. The transformation of nineteenth century cities by means of street improvement was one of these; and Mr. David Pinkney has recently made a mature assessment of the range of motives underlying the sweeping changes wrought in the configuration of Parisian streets under the Second Empire. By contrast with Paris under the prefecture of Baron Haussmann, the transformation of London was tentative, not to say hesitating, and not undertaken for all the same reasons. In Paris, Mr. Pinkney has shown that political and strategic aims were mixed with desires for aesthetic and social amelioration. “In London”, Napoleon III is reported as saying, “they are concerned only with giving the best possible satisfaction to the needs of traffic.” But were they? It is the purpose of this brief note to comment on the validity of this assertion, and in doing so to illustrate an early approach to matters of urban improvement which are still at the heart of some contemporary town-planning problems.

This article discusses four areas of research essential for a measured evaluation of Italian syndicalism before the fascist dictatorship. The first section presents a synoptic historical account. The second section critically summarizes the literature on the sociology of Italian syndicalism. The third section disentangles the ideological influences upon Italian syndicalism. The fourth evaluates the uniqueness or otherwise of Italian syndicalism within prefascist industrial relations. The conclusion explains the marginalization of Italian syndicalism after 1918 using international comparisons. This article provides a detailed critical bibliography of the literature on Italian syndicalism published since the 1960s.

From the twelfth and certainly from the thirteenth century onwards, a social group of artisans with their own political and economic aspirations can be clearly delineated in Netherlandish towns. Bound through common skilled work, they made up a distinctive group with a self-image and a developing political vision and economic programme. Their “guild ideology” is increasingly clearly expressed in the sources they produced from the fourteenth century onwards as a self-confident group in urban society. Labour, certainly when organized within guild structures, was the cornerstone of community life, cultural experiences, and practical ethics. Even though there were socioeconomic differences among guildsmen and many geographical and chronological variations in the degree of political power they wielded, the ideal of artisan ideology in the late medieval Low Countries was one of a community of brotherly love and charity centred on the value of skilled labour.

There are three good reasons at the present time to try to arrive at an historical model to explain the development of anti-Jewish stereotyping and prejudice, and in this way, provided it is worked out at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, at an historical model of racism.

The first reason is that both the Netherlands and its neighbours are increasingly faced with racism and that for a good line of action it is necessary to collect all kinds of knowledge. Moreover, it is desirable that historians prove willing to co-operate by making their particular contribution to this collection of knowledge. The second reason is that in contemporary thinking about history a tendency seems to have made itself felt that considers the narrative element of history as the only true activity of the historian, so that a hypothetical-deductive, one might say Popperian, approach to the past seems to be wrong. Although I do not want to enter into a methodological discussion, which I am glad to leave to my friend P. H. H. Vries, who has very capably formulated a point of view that I subscribe to, my intention is to show the usefulness of an abstract, partially mathematical, model in this article. By the way, in the framework of an article it is impossible to present an extensive test of the predictions of the model by means of source material. It can only be hinted at. This article is not non-narrative because I want it to be non-narrative, but because of lack of space. A full exposition would need a book. I shall only present in summary what I hope is the logical argument that lies at the basis of the model.

This article explores the discursive and practical entanglements of women’s work and sex trafficking, in Britain and internationally, in the early twentieth century. It examines discussions about trafficking and women’s work during a period that was instrumental in codifying modern, international conceptions of ‘trafficking’ and argues that porous and faulty borders were drawn between sex work, women’s licit work, and their sexual exploitation and their exploitation as workers. These borders were at their thinnest in discussions about two very important sectors of female-dominated migrant labour: domestic and care work, and work in the entertainment industry. The anti-trafficking movement, the international labour movement, and the makers of national laws and policies, attempted to separate sexual labour from other forms of labour. In doing so, they wilfully ignored or suppressed moments when they obviously intersected, and downplayed the role of other exploited and badly-paid licit work that sustained the global economy. But these attempts were rarely successful: despite the careful navigations of international and British officials, work continued to find its way back into discussions of sex trafficking, and sex trafficking remained entangled with the realities of women’s work.

Phyllis Moen and Elaine Wethington were absolutely right when they called family strategies “the intuitively appealing metaphor for family response to structural barriers”. This appeal probably explains the avalanche of studies on the subject since the 1970s and especially since the 1980s. The last contribution, to my knowledge, is a collection of articles edited by Laurence Fontaine and Jurgen Schlumbohm in 2000. I will not even try to outline the vast historiography. This paper focuses on another problem. It is an attempt to show that concepts built on appealing metaphors lose much of their appeal in empirical research for the simple reason that their application tends to be more complicated than expected. In the following pages an example of such an experience is presented. Within the virtual walls of the Dutch National Research Institute for Economic and Social History, the N.W. Posthumus Institute, we have been struggling with family strategies since 1994. Now that we are about to publish the third volume on the subject, it is time to evaluate what we have accomplished.

This article is a study of the Owenite community established in Co. Clare, Ireland from November 1831 to November 1833. It examines the role of economic crisis in Ireland in stimulating interest in Owenite solutions. It analyses the differing motivations of the various actors (landowner, Owenite reformer, the peasantry) in joining the venture. It examines the sources of the community's stability – economic, sociological, and cultural. It argues that the community was destroyed by the contradictory roles of its founder, Vandeleur, who was both owner and President. In the process a detailed description of the community is provided, covering matters such as institutional arrangements, the division of labour, wages and benefits, gender relationships, and religion.

This article explores the experiences of white workers on the Copperbelt in Northern Rhodesia during World War II. Much of the existing literature on the region focuses on African labour, yet the boom that began in the copper-mining industry also attracted thousands of mobile, transient European workers. These workers were part of a primarily English-speaking labour diaspora with a global reach that linked mining centres around the world. The experience of this workforce generated seemingly contradictory trends of labour militancy, political radicalism, and racial exclusivity. A focus on two significant events during this period will seek to examine how these trends shaped events on the Copperbelt: the 1940 wildcat strikes and the 1942 arrest and deportation of white mineworkers’ union leaders. These events shed light on the international world of European labour and illustrate how the Copperbelt was linked to other mining centres around the world.

This paper examines the consumer movement in Malaysia, especially the Consumers' Association of Penang and the Federation of Malaysian Consumer Associations. It traces their history from the late 1960s, through a period of rapid social and economic change associated with the New Economic Policy of the 1970s and 1980s. Partly because of the absence of other NGOs in Malaysia (due to government clampdowns on civil society), consumer groups were able to take a prominent position and to develop socio-political campaigns on behalf of the poor and the disadvantaged. This proved an inspiration to consumer organizing globally, especially in the developed world, but it is not clear that consumerism as a social movement can be sustained. Since the mid-1980s, other NGOs have emerged, eclipsing the influence of consumerism, and promoting a human rights agenda which has overtaken the politics of consumption as the dominant oppositional rhetoric of non-governmental groups.

In September 1896, the city of Bombay witnessed the beginning of a long-drawn-out epidemic crisis, with the outbreak of bubonic plague. This article investigates one particular dimension of this crisis – its effects upon the city's cotton textile mills, and its profound, though temporary, alteration of the relations between employers and workers. It argues that the structure of industrial relations in the textile mills in the second half of the nineteenth century rested upon the retention of wage arrears by mill managements, which forced workers into permanent debt, and bound them to the mill and their employers. The demographic and industrial crisis ushered in during the plague years, the article shows, cracked open this structure of industrial control, and workers were able to sustain a new, fleeting system of industrial “regulation from below”, based on the daily payment of wages. Through a study of the tensions in textile mills in 1897, situated within the broader context of a crisis of urban labour relations, the article shows the ways in which industrial relations were both deconstructed and reconstituted in a new form.

This essay notes the extent to which poststructuralism/postmodernism have generally espoused hostility to historical materialism, surveys some representative examples of historical writing that have gravitated toward the new critical theory in opposition to Marxism, and closes with a discussion of the ironic evolution of a poststructurally inclined, anti-Marxist historiography. Counter to the prevailing ideological consensus that Marxism has been brought to its interpretive knees by a series of analytic challenges and the political collapse of the world's ostensibly “socialist” states, this essay argues that historical materialism has lost neither its power to interpret the past nor its relevance to the contemporary intellectual terrain.

Despite the attention paid by economic and labour historians to mid-Victorian trade unionism, the development, organization and objectives of the employers' counter-organizations have been neglected. Research on this subject has tended to concentrate on the post-1880 period and has to a great extent overlooked the origins of the employers' offensive tactics. The two major lines of attack which were to be adopted by employers in the 'eighties were already taking shape in the mid century. Employers' industrial organizations had been formed to counter unionism, while employers' pressure groups attempted to resist what employers described as “grand-motherly” governmental interference. The aim of this article will be to conduct a preliminary investigation of the origins and strategy of employers' organizations, and to evaluate their impact in the industrial and legal fields.

This article explores how Russian revolutionaries, in particular the Russian Marxists, used the image of Jesus to explain their political choices and commitments. These revolutionaries were almost uniformly hostile to institutional Christianity. Yet a number of Russian Marxists, such as Anatolii Lunacharskii, considered Jesus a genuine precursor of socialism. In 1917 many Bolsheviks and Bolshevik sympathizers interpreted the October Revolution in Christian terms, principally as a spiritual resurrection and rebirth. And in 1924, following Lenin's death, some Bolsheviks analogized Lenin to Jesus, and claimed that both were revolutionary martyrs. Finally, the article argues that Russian revolutionaries invested the Russian lower classes with a Christlike virtue, making it easier for the revolutionaries, once in power, to justify everything they did as advancing the interests of these classes.

This article follows the administrative usage of the term “labour” and its political effects in the period from roughly 1918–1924 in Madras Presidency, India. In this short period, I will argue, fundamental tensions in the ability of the concept to refer coherently to its object came violently to the surface. The prevailing tension in both governmental discourse and in the sphere of political representation concerned the extent to which either caste status or economic class were to be understood as the primary determinant of the meaning of labour. At the nub of this conflict lay the contested status of the descendants of hereditarily unfree labourers who supplied the bulk of the Presidency's labour requirements and were referred to in this period as Adi-Dravidas. Should they be construed as ritually disadvantaged caste subjects who also happened to labour, or as paradigmatic labourers who were also subjected to caste discrimination? Adi-Dravidas provoked both the anxiety of the elite political classes who wished to incorporate them into larger nationalist projects, as well as the reformist zeal of the colonial state, throwing the category “labour” into crisis. By navigating the use to which “labour” was put by caste elites, state officials, and Adi-Dravidas themselves, I will reflect on the coherence of caste and class as analytic concepts for political and social struggles of the kind I am describing.