Several eminent Conservatives, including Winston Churchill, believed that wartime schemes of education in the Armed Forces caused servicemen to vote Labour at the Election of 1945. For instance, R. A. Butler wrote: “The Forces' vote in particular had been virtually won over by the left-wing influence of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs.” So frequently was this view stated that ABCA became a scapegoat for Tory defeat.

For most of the nineteenth and twentieth century, universal conscription has been by far the predominant system of military recruitment, but the phenomenon has received surprisingly little attention from social historians. This lack of attention is all the more surprising if one considers the interesting position occupied by conscription at the crossroads of wage and non-wage labour and free and unfree labour.

The following articles by Khaled Fahmy, Erik Jan Zürcher and Stephanie Cronin deal with the spread of the conscription system in one specific area (the Middle East) where it has been the most prominent feature of the establishment of increased and centralized state control over societies which, until relatively recent times, consisted of largely self-sufficient agrarian communities with very little contact with the outside world. The introduction of universal conscription confronted both states and populations with entirely new demands and problems.

Historians have recently paid serious attention to the roles of working-class groups in the creation of British social policy, but have largely ignored involvement by sweated workers. This article reveals among chainmakers long-run campaigns against sweating – successively demanding state action to abolish domestic workshops, regulate hours, restrict female work, fix rates for the job, and institute co-operative production. Failure in these campaigns led, with major initiatives from female workers, to advocacy of a statutory minimum wage. The Trade Boards Act (1909) reflected such pressures for state aid, though the form the legislation took brought only limited benefits.

Many historical studies, some of them comparative, have explored the foundations of welfare states and the birth of unemployment policies in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Nearly all have focused on political debate at national level. This paper bases its analysis on labour market reforms initiated in Strasbourg and Liverpool in the decades preceding World War I. It explores how bona fide unemployed workers, the proper clients of official help, were distinguished from the mass of the poor and indigent. The labour market had to be defined and organized before policies for the unemployed could be put in place. The object is to demonstrate not only how this was done, but also how different perceptions of social justice and economic efficiency influenced both the process and the outcomes of public interventions, in this instance undermining attempts to transfer specific policies from one country to another.

The contemporary North Atlantic world has been marked by a waning enthusiasm for and salience of the study of workers. Yet the current ebb “in the traditional capitalist ‘core’ countries” (not to mention eastern Europe), Marcel van der Linden recently suggested, is far from being a “crisis” in the field of labor history as such. Rather, it is best understood as “only a regional phenomenon” since in much of “the so-called Third World, especially in the countries of the industrializing semi-periphery, interest in the history of labor and proletarian protest is growing steadily”. Citing encouraging recent developments in labor history in Asia, he noted how the field has grown in parallel with “the stormy conquest of economic sectors by the world market [which] has led to a rapid expansion of the number of waged workers, and the emergence of new radical trade unions”. Van der Linden's description fits well the study of labor in Latin America and the Caribbean, where the field first gained visibility in the early to mid-1980s and has now won recognition as an established specialization among scholars of many disciplines. After surveying the Latin American boom and its political context, this article offers a Brazilian/North Atlantic example in order to illustrate the intellectual gains, for students of both areas, that come with the transcendence of geographical parochialism.

In Mughal India, accounts were kept by individuals and institutions for purposes of reference and planning. Accountancy required a set of objectives and techniques for collecting, organizing, and presenting information so that it could then be put to use. It also fostered learning. Subsisting on formal or informal training, professional accountants equipped themselves with linguistic and mathematical skills, the art of notation, mnemonic devices, and the ability to translate loosely defined units into precise terms and numbers. Accountants were an important component of the state apparatus, village administration, and elite household management. In the seventeenth century manuals were produced in Persian by private individuals for the guidance of persons seeking to acquire proficiency in accountancy (siyaq) and clerical work. No study has been made so far of the manuals themselves nor of the people who compiled or used them. This introductory essay examines the manuals (generally titled Dasturu-l Amal) and the information they contain about the system of accountancy as well as about the professional ethics and norms of ideal behaviour of the secretarial class.

The first edition of the Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser was published on November 18th, 1837, with Feargus O'Connor as proprietor, Joshua Hobson as printer and publisher, and the Rev. William Hill as editor. Its price was 4½d. Together with the platform the Northern Star provided the essential medium of national communication and organization for the Chartist movement. The Star was the most important agency for the integration and transformation of disparate local radical agitation and organization into the national Chartist movement. Throughout the Chartist period the Star gave local working-class protest a national focus. It brought national perspective to the localities and gave local radicalism national coverage.

When men in the early nineteenth century appealed to the landed proprietors of England to accept their “paternal responsibilities”, they gave voice to the conviction that gentry behavior had special relevance for the question of social discipline. Conservatives, especially, adhered to the view that subordination and the hierarchy of ranks resting upon it constituted the fountainhead of social cohesion. But at the same time, reliance on this concept of social organization involved the governors in various commitments to their subordinates, for ultimately the cohesiveness of the social order seemed dependent upon the operation of reciprocal obligations. The place of these imperatives in rural relationships arose from, and contributed to, a tradition that saw the subsistence and well-being of the entire community to be dependent upon the social responsibilities of and the connections between the different degrees of interest within the agricultural economy. A characteristic anxiety of the conservative of the period was that the economic individualism of a rising urban and industrial society promised to undermine the social accountability of each component of the social order; this presaged the disintegration of society because the “chain of connexion” between the rich and the poor would thereby be broken. The implication was that the intrusion of self-interest, economic or otherwise, threatened a structure of interdependency and mutual respect and concern between ranks. It appeared, then, that the most serious danger to society would certainly come at that point when the landowners of England — the rulers of what still seemed an essentially rural world — abandoned their paternalist traditions and opted for indolence, indifference, or the allures of commercial farming.

The advent of capitalism has traditionally been associated with a transformation of the economic and political functioning of the family. Capital is presumed to weaken, certainly to modify, gender and age hierarchies by undermining the productive role of the household. The labour market takes over the organization of work and age of consent legislations undermine parental authority in order to create the new legal subject capable of entering “free” labour contracts. The family, though it remains outside the norms of capitalism, primarily undertakes the physical and social reproduction of labour within the capitalist sphere. Such a transformation of the “family” is, however, not inevitable. In nine-teenth-century India the colonial state, though avowedly committed to a free market in labour, in practice often upheld familial claims on women's labour and sexuality. As a result, gender and generational controls within the family were enhanced rather than weakened.

Opening the 21st anniversary of the ILP in Bradford in April 1914, J. H. Palin, one of Bradford's most prominent trade unionists, remarked: “Of ordinary historical association, Bradford has none. In Domesday Book, it is described as a waste, and the subsequent periods of capitalist exploitation have done little to improve it. […] The History of Bradford will be very largely the history of the ILP.”1 Palin's remark – unjust as it is, perhaps, to a distinguished list of Victorian philanthropists – stands as testimony to the authority and influence which the labour movement in Bradford had acquired by that date. It also provides a clue to the origins of that authority and influence, for it demonstrates the importance which he and other Bradford trade unionists attached to their association with the independent labour movement. Whatever the reactions of trade unionists in the rest of the country, in Bradford, trade unionists were vital to its success. Indeed, strong trade-union support proved to be an essential corollary of effective independent working-class political action.

Labor history continues to progress. It continues, too, to transform itself from a field staffed by enthusiasts and partisans into a discipline peopled with scholars sympathetic to their subject but also highly conscious of the methods, theories and interpretive frameworks within which they work. The last few years in particular have witnessed a considerable intensification of scholarly controversy within labor history and a growing sophistication of debate. To some extent the discussion parallels the ongoing conversation among social historians about the boundaries of social history, the power of primarily social explanation and the role of language, culture and politics in social history. Unfortunately, however, the stepping up of debate in labor history coincides with a dip – temporary, one hopes, but perhaps more long-term – in the fortunes of labor movements themselves. This conjuncture seems to have produced a sense of pessimism and malaise as the sentimental accompaniment to many of the debates within labor history.

Systematic comparison was alien to the historicist paradigm which dominated historical research and literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in Germany. Anyone aiming to reconstruct historical phenomena as individual events, study them under the aspect of ”development” and understand them in their context would not be interested in systematic identification of similarities and differences or in their explanation. Narrative and comparison were and are opposites. Without conceptual explanation and theoretical input, historical comparison is not possible. Because German historians were strongly influenced by the historicist paradigm until well into the second third of the twentieth century, systematic comparison did not play a major role in their work. In essence it was left to important outsiders like Otto Hintze and historically oriented sociologists like Max Weber.

Temporary labour migration was one of the characteristic phenomena of human mobility in Europe during the twentieth century. The predominant answer in several European countries to the growing economic demand for an external labour supply on the one hand, and political demands to limit the numbers of foreign workers and to protect the native workforce from the competition of “cheap” migrant labour on the other, was a growing direct and active involvement of the nation state in regulatory efforts and recruitment operations abroad. Besides bureaucratic organizations on a national level, bilateral recruitment agreements – starting in their modern form in 1919 – became the most important tool to regulate labour migration between two countries. This article takes a look at the evolving system of bilaterally fixed migration relations in Europe and its implications for sending and receiving countries as well as for the labour migrants involved. It argues that the network of bilateral recruitment agreements provided controlled and selective migration channels in Europe between the 1950s and 1970s. These agreements installed and protected certain minimum standards to migrants and led to a general improvement of the rights and conditions offered to temporary labour migrants in Europe.

Most of the contentious-politics scholars who pioneered the study of framing in social movements now also recognize the importance of transnational diffusion between protest groups. Interestingly, though, they have not yet specified how these two processes intersect. This article, in contrast, explores the framing-transnational diffusion nexus by highlighting three historical moments of interaction between African-American intellectuals and Gandhian activists before Martin Luther King, Jr traveled to India in 1959. After briefly reviewing the relevant literature, it illustrates how three different types of “itinerant” African-American intellectuals – mentors like Howard Thurman, advisors like Bayard Rustin, and peers like James Lawson – framed the Gandhian repertoire of nonviolent direct action in ways that made it applicable during the American civil rights movement. The final section considers possible implications for social movement theory and fertile areas for further research.

The period of the great French Wars of 1793–1815 saw a crop of strikes and other disturbances in North East England. The end of the wars in 1815 was followed rapidly by the great seamen's strike of 1815, which turned fundamentally on a question of redundancy. The object of this paper is to consider a series of disputes just before the outbreak of war, and during the war's early years, disputes which turned fundamentally on the equally perennial question of the regulation of wages at a time of rising prices.

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was a measure of major importance, both as an administrative innovation and because of its social effects. The Ministry of Health archives in the Public Record Office include in the Poor Law Papers a very large and valuable source for the social history of nineteenth century Britain. Much more work on this mass of evidence will be necessary before any very reliable assessment of the effect of the New Poor Law can be made. This paper is an attempt to use a small selection of these papers to discuss the way in which the system prescribed by the 1834 Act was introduced into Tyneside, already an important region of economic growth in these years.

This paper analyses the experience of the Spanish Republican refugees who left Catalonia in the Retirada of January and February 1939. The first section – “the Road to Bourg-Madame” – considers issues of interpretation raised by the refugees' texts: it discusses historiography, the politics of memory, and political culture. In “Bourg-Madame”, the second section, the essay considers the refugees' experiences. It discusses previous patterns of Spanish migration, the decision-making process that preceded the refugees' journey, group identity formation during the Retirada, the gendered dimension of their experiences, the despair felt by many on arrival in France and the reception that the refugees met. The paper ends by discussing the surprising resilience of the refugees.

In 1924 and 1925 the Comintern introduced its policy of Bolshevization. A goal of Bolshevization was the creation of mass-based communist parties. In settler societies this meant that the local communist party should aim to be demographically representative of the entire population. This article traces the efforts of the communist parties in Algeria and South Africa to indigenize, seeking to explain why their efforts had such diverse outcomes. It examines four variables: the patterns of working-class formation; the socialist tradition of each country; the relationship between the Comintern and the two communist parties; and the level of repression against communists in both societies. The cumulative weight of the variables in the Algerian case helps to explain why communist activity in the 1920s – including the communist party's ability to indigenize – was far more difficult in Algeria than South Africa.

In the German-speaking areas of Habsburg Tyrol, investigated here, the aim of regional politicians and communal representatives was to perpetuate the status quo of ownership and social structure. The most important instruments for realizing that aim were policies on marriage and settlement. In addition, inheritance was based on male primogeniture, which supported a tendency for the sizes of property to remain stable. Throughout the region there was an attitude generally hostile to industry, so when, in the nineteenth century, branches of the crafts producing wares for translocal markets became unprofitable, industrialization offered no alternative. In those circumstances, marriage can be regarded as practically a privilege. Does that relativize or augment the consideration of homogamy? It seems both cases are possible: slight tendencies to socially downward marriage support the first assumption; the second appears to be supported by the various shifts in marriage habits – reactions to changed social positions – among the most important groups over the course of the nineteenth century.