The following article examines the role of popular intellectuals in the rise of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, a mass-based movement opposed to the building of large dams in the Narmada Valley of central India. In particular, it focuses on two of this struggle's most prominent public figures and spokespersons, Medha Patkar and Arundhati Roy. The article examines the relationship between these individuals and the movement itself – how issues have been framed by Patkar and Roy for local, national, and international audiences, how support for the anti-dam struggle has been mobilized, and how each of these figures are themselves perceived and portrayed. The article will also examine some of the challenges faced by the movement and its leaders, not only from proponents of the dam projects, but also from other social activists and intellectuals. The latter have raised questions about representation, voice and strategy, as well as insider/outsider authenticity and legitimacy in the anti-dam movement, issues that this paper considers in some detail. Finally, the article draws on the Narmada case to ask some broader questions regarding popular intellectuals and social movement organizing and strategy.

In her comments on my article, Utsa Patnaik makes a number of interrelated claims. First, that I unjustifiably characterize the “semifėdal” thesis as revisionist. Second, that my view about the existence of a link between capitalism and unfree labour is commonplace. And third, that I fail to differentiate unfreedom in terms of its implications for and effects on metropolitan capitalist countries on the one hand and developing ex-colonial countries on the other. According to her, this difference arises from a situation in which surpluses generated by Indian agriculture during the colonial era were exported to finance industrialization in metropolitan contexts, resulting in forced commercialization by landlord, trader and usurer; in short, a process which failed to eliminate semi-feudal unfree agrarian relations and consequently to develop capitalism in colonial countries, and thus promoted in these contexts not proletarianization but pauperization.

In the last third of the 1700s Barcelona was a city undergoing a major transformation. The regional specialization process that took place in Catalonia, and the intensification of exchange, generated spectacular economic growth and an unprecedented increase in population. The city of Barcelona tripled its population in just over seventy years; in 1787 it already had around 100,000 inhabitants. Immigration, both from the Pyrenean areas and from the proto-industrial areas of central Catalonia, the natural growth of the population, the intense process of urbanization, and the dynamism of the labour market explain the densification of the city and the rise in the price of rents.

Rebellion, Repression, Reinvention. Mutiny in Comparative Perspective. Ed. by Jane Hathaway. Foreword by Geoffrey Parker. Praeger, Westport (Conn.) [etc.] 2001. xix, 282 pp. Maps. £56.95.

The last three decades of the nineteenth century were marked in British social history by a vigorous and far-reaching debate about the causes and incidence of poverty amongst the elderly. By the early 1890s this controversy had produced a sharp cleavage of opinion between those commentators who held that old-age pauperism was largely a product of character defects and those who attributed it to certain social and economic ills which the individual, acting alone, could never hope to remedy. Social thinkers who subscribed to this latter view – the loosely labelled collectivist school of thought – were not content, however, merely with the work of analysis; they were equally anxious to find a panacea for one of the main social problems of the day. In the end the solution they most widely canvassed was the introduction of an old age pensions scheme in which the state would have a vital rle to play. But perhaps of more significance for the development of social services in Great Britain, three of the leading advocates of state intervention endeavoured, in their own distinctive styles, to translate this general declaration of intent into detailed programmes of action.

The period 1780-1850 marked the rapid industrialization of the British economy. This not only meant the creation of new industries. Profound changes took place within these industries. Engineering was one of these. During the period 1780-1850 the British engineering industry was transformed from a labour to a capital-intensive one. This was the result of technological change.

The conference held at Bradford in 1893 to form an Independent Labour Party was accompanied by a Labour Church service which some 5,000 people attended. It was organised by John Trevor, who in 1891 had left his Unitarian pulpit in Manchester and founded the first Labour Church. “God in the Labour Movement”, he explained “– working through it, as once he worked through Christianity, for the further salvation of the world – that was the simple conception that I had been seeking, and which at last came to me…” The fullest account of this movement created by Trevor has been given in H. M. Pelling's The Origins of the Labour Party, where it is sensibly cited as a stage in the “transfer of social energy from religion to politics.” The purpose of the present article is to dissent from certain judgments made by Mr. Pelling and to suggest, in some particulars, a different interpretation.

The aim of this study is to examine, by analysing marital origin-related homogamy and mobility, the fluidity of a system of social stratification marked by a heterogeneous working class and likely to lead to increasing social-group solidarity during the phase of a more active labour movement in the early twentieth century. Data from Winterthur, a Swiss town characterized by the expansion of an important engineering industry, reveal that occupational homogamy was most pronounced at the top, among higher managers and professionals, and at the bottom of the social hierarchy, among unskilled factory workers. There is no empirical evidence of increased homogamous behaviour after the nationwide general strike of 1918, which is said to have had a long-term impact on workers' class-consciousness. Our analyses show, however, that the association between the social background of spouses depended on their geographical origin. This result may point to a regionally determined class-consciousness.

Since 1981, nuptiality has been identified as the main driver of rapid eighteenth-century English population growth. Over the course of the long eighteenth century, “national” rates of female non-marriage declined while female age at first marriage fell by roughly three years, reaching 22–23 years by the 1820s. The cumulative impact of more and earlier marriage on fertility is believed to have greatly outweighed the effect of falling mortality in generating aggregate population growth. Such a perspective has not gone unchallenged. There have been persistent calls for the re-examination of the place of urban demography within this framework. Concern has also been voiced over the sources which underpin the family reconstitutions on which calculations of marriage ages are based, the technique of family reconstitution itself, and over the representativeness of the marriage samples which family reconstitution yields. However, the most recent work of the Cambridge Group, based upon twenty-six family reconstitutions, appears to confirm the centrality of marriage ages to the English demographic system. Percentile distributions of marriage ages suggest that over the course of the eighteenth century there was an important decline in the proportion of marriages undertaken by women in their late twenties and thirties, more than balanced by the development of an early marrying group in their late teens.

The main concern of this paper is the issue of women workers' identity and class consciousness. This investigation is principally based on in-depth interviews with three generations of female factory workers. Extremely unequal power relations between capital and labour is insufficient to explain the more pronounced exploitation of female workers over males. In spite of these women having the potential for collective power, their factory lives have been characterized by treatment in constant violation of labour laws. Low-caste female workers have gone through a process of effeminization which has acted to curb their class identity and limit their scope of action. In the process of caste and class emancipation, the question of gender has been neglected by trade union leaders and politicians. The radicalism of males is built upon women's maintaining of the families – a reality which strongly contradicts hegemonic gender discourses and confuses gender identities.

The use of informers and agents provocateurs by both the government and the police has not been uncommon in British history. Edward Thompson has made lengthy references to the employment of spies by the authorities in the period from 1790 to 1830. The highest levels of the London Corresponding Society were penetrated in 1794 by an informer known as “Citizen Groves”, and, following this, use was made of informers in combating the Luddite movement, and in the Pentridge Rising, the Despard and Spa Fields Affairs, and, most important of all, the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820. The use of political spies is also known to have occurred during the First World War and immediately afterwards, and allegations were made in Parliament in this respect during the period of the General Strike in 1926. The recent opening of the files of the Metropolitan Police for the 1930's has revealed that informers were also used during the unemployed disturbances of these years, in particular in the attempt to prevent the outbreak of violence during the marches on London organised by the National Unemployed Workers' Movement (NUWM) in 1932, 1934 and 1936, and on the occasion of the National Joint Council of Labour demonstration in Hyde Park in February 1933, although in these instances it has not been possible to establish the identity of the person or persons concerned.

The twin processes of industrialisation and urbanisation lie at the heart of the evolution of modern British society, in North-East England as in other areas of large scale industrial development. Despite the cardinal importance of the interaction between these two processes the relationship is only very imperfectly understood; this weakness is in part due to the limited amount of investigation which has taken place, in part to serious deficiencies in the surviving evidence, and in part to the inherent complexity of the subject. As yet, for example, we have no adequate studies of the major industries of the region, including coal-mining and shipbuilding, while our knowledge of the development of urban communities is very far from complete. In addition much of the archaeological evidence for the older parts of the industrial communities has disappeared, or is disappearing, often without adequate study or record. In these circumstances an essay on the relationship between industrialisation and urbanisation in North-East England must be tentative and limited, and should be seen as an attempt to bring together some of the available material rather than one which offers an explanatory model.

This article analyses Fred Zinnemann's 1948 film, The Search, setting in the context of displaced persons in post-1945 Europe. We concentrate on Zinnemann's treatment of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), arguing that this is central to the film. We also consider the film's references to Americanism, Zionism, gender equality, and children's wartime experiences.

This article argues that during the formative years of the colonial state in Ghana, European employers established new collaborative mechanisms with African intermediaries for the purpose of expanding the modern mining sector. They were forced to do so on account of severe labour-market limitations, resulting primarily from the slow death of slavery and debt bondage. These intermediaries, or “headmen”, were engaged because of their apparent affluence and authority in their home villages, from which they recruited mineworkers. However, allegiances between them and managers in the Tarkwa gold mines considerably slowed the pace towards free labour. Indeed, a system in which managers reinforced economic coercion and repressive relationships of social dependency between Africans, allocating African labour contractors fixed positions of power, resulted from the institutionalization of purportedly traditional processes of labour recruitment into the modern market.

There is a real need to integrate local and national approaches to the study of Chartism. The inadequacies of the pioneering studies of the national movement certainly revealed the need to return to the local roots of the movement. However, the pattern of local studies largely established by the important volume of Chartist Studies edited by Asa Briggs has had some unfortunate consequences. The attempt to provide a comprehensive account of Chartism in a given locality, and cover the entire period from 1838 to 1848, has often precluded extended examination of key issues. Such matters as the relationship between Chartism and other forms of popular protest, Chartist ideology and tactics, the relationship between the Chartists and the middle class, and the whole cultural and organisational dimension of Chartism have only recently begun to receive detailed analysis. There has been a marked tendency for one of the most remarkable aspects of Chartism, the extent to which diverse localities were united in a national movement, to be obscured. Indeed it is evident that many historians returned to the local roots of Chartism without adequate assessments of Chartist ideology, tactics, national organisation and national leadership. Some important recent work has done much to enhance our understanding of such matters. A more meaningful assessment of how events in the localities interacted with the national movement is now possible.

The Schuman Plan to “pool” the coal and steel industries of Western Europe has been widely celebrated as the founding document of today’s European Union. An expansive historiography has developed around the plan but labor and workers are largely absent from existing accounts, even though the sectors targeted for integration, coal and steel, are traditionally understood as centers of working-class militancy and union activity in Europe. Existing literature generally considers the role coal and steel industries played as objects of the Schuman Plan negotiations but this article reverses this approach. It examines instead how labor politics in the French Nord and Pas-de-Calais and the German Ruhr, core industrial regions, influenced the positions adopted by two prominent political parties, the French Socialist and German Social Democratic parties, on the integration of European heavy industry. The empirical material combines archival research in party and national archives with findings from regional histories of the Nord/Pas-de-Calais, the Ruhr, and their local socialist party chapters, as well as from historical and sociological research on miners and industrial workers. The article analyses how intense battles between socialists and communists for the allegiance of coal and steel workers shaped the political culture of these regions after the war and culminated during a mass wave of strikes in 1947–1948. The divergent political outcomes of these battles in the Nord/Pas-de-Calais and the Ruhr, this article contends, strongly contributed to the decisions of the French Socialist Party to support and the German Social Democratic Party to oppose the Schuman Plan in 1950.

A series of artisan revolts in the London corporations between 1635 and 1659 found both radical ideas of individual liberty and the guild ethos of fraternity relevant to their aims. The apparent paradox of democratic demands combined with calls for stricter economic regulation can be explained only by examining the participants' concrete grievances and specific demands. The protesters were neither rising industrial capitalists nor a new wage-earning class, but small masters attempting to restrain competition, the use of cheap labour, and the enlargement of enterprises. Their concerns had something in common with those of the Levellers, but the movements diverged in significant ways.

In the nineteenth century, colonial officials relied heavily on coercion to recruit “coolie” labour for “public works” and to provide various support services in the North-East Frontier of British India. “Treaties” with defeated chiefs and the subsequent population enumeration and taxation were strongly oriented to the mobilization of labour for road building and porterage. Forced labour provided the colonial officials with a steady supply of coolies to work on the roads as well as carriers for military expeditions. In mobilizing labour resources, however, colonial officials had to create and draw upon native agents such as the headmen and interpreters who came to play a crucial role in the colonial order of things. Focusing on the Naga Hills, this article will examine the efforts of the colonial state to secure a large circulating labour force, the forms of labour relations that emerged from the need to build colonial infrastructure and the demand for coolies in military expeditions, the response of the hill people to labour conscription and its impact on the hill “tribes”.

The Labour and Socialist Convention held at Leeds on 3 June 1917 was held expressly “to follow Russia”. It adopted four resolutions, the most celebrated of which called for the establishment of what have been termed “extra-Parliamentary Soviets with sovereign powers”. It was described shortly afterwards as “the most spectacular piece of utter folly for which [the Socialist left] during the whole war-period, was responsible – which is saying not a little”. A contemporary journal held that many of the ILP men had become “avowed Syndicalists or Bolsheviks”; and the King, in conversation with Will Thorne after the latter's visit to Russia on behalf of the government, expressed some concern about what had taken place. He “seemed greatly disturbed at the famous Leeds Conference”, Thorne recorded. Thome's reply, however, had “seemed to relieve his mind”. F. W. Jowett, a member of the group which issued invitations to the Convention, referred to it to the end of his life as the “highest point of revolutionary fervour he had seen in this country”.

This article compares the Brazilian Labor Court, created in 1939, and the Italian Magistratura del Lavoro, instituted in 1926 by the government of Mussolini, to “harmonize” the conflicts between labor and capital through judicial means. The text problematizes the Brazilian intellectual tradition which sees the Labor Court either as a typically national product or as the transcription of an international model. It demonstrates that current polemics are fixed within the ambit of the “national problem” such as it was formulated in the 1930s. The approach adopted does not concentrate exclusively on the formal apparatus of juridical structure, but interrogates its functioning over time in different historical conjunctures. The main goal of the article is to understand the Labor Court as an institutional recourse historically appropriated by different subjects, in particular by workers, who gave the courts differentiated political meanings.