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.

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.

Authors writing about the history of the “coolie trade” in Cuba have generally focused on the multinational effort to halt the trafficking of Chinese workers. Little has been written about either the role of consuls as middlemen or of Spanish participation in the traffic in treaty ports. Yet, several sources indicate that many officials at Spanish consulates in coastal China were intensely involved in the shipment of Chinese emigrants to Cuba and other coolie trade destinations, and were also at the centre of international scandals. These consular officers frequently used their authority to obtain a monopoly over the trade. In this article, I argue that the coolie trade was the main objective of Spain's consular deployment in China, and that the involvement of these consular officials was crucial in developing an abusive migratory system and sustaining the mistreatment of Chinese immigrant workers throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.

The overthrow of the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile and the human rights violations under the military junta of Augusto Pinochet spawned one of the most iconic and sustained human rights campaigns of the Cold War. Human rights scholars have argued that this movement on behalf of Chile signalled the “breakthrough” of human rights as the lingua franca of transnational activism. They have emphasized the global dimensions of these campaigns, which inspired movements mobilizing on behalf of other issues in the Third World. However, such narratives have not been corroborated by research on the campaigns as developed in Europe. Historians have so far focused on the impact of the Chilean crisis in specific countries or on particular organizations, and on the ways in which human rights activism was coloured by local and national contexts. This article aims to shift the scope of the debate by establishing relations with and crossovers from other transnational causes and campaigns, analysing the ways in which campaigns on behalf of Chile became intimately related to campaigns on intra-European issues during the 1970s and 1980s. It explores the so far little-studied connections between campaigns over Chile and simultaneously burgeoning movements on behalf of East–West détente, resistance against authoritarian regimes in Southern Europe, and the plight of dissidents in Eastern Europe. It argues that campaigns on behalf of Chile were reconfigured around European themes, created bonds of solidarity within a divided Europe, and drew on analogies rather than a juxtaposition between Europe and the Third World.

This article focuses on African women (Quitandeiras) who worked in the food sector of the fast-growing port city of Rio de Janeiro during the first half of the nineteenth century. The growing need to supply the harbour workers as well as the crews and captives on the slave ships stimulated the food economy in Rio de Janeiro. The absence of effective government food infrastructure offered opportunities for small businesses. The maritime world on a ship was, in many ways, male. However, there were a high number of female workers in the ports, especially in the informal food sector, frequently mentioned by contemporary authors. This article analyses the involvement of these women as part of a growing working class, who contributed to Rio de Janeiro's crucial role in global networks. The research also focuses on the formation of self-organized groups of female vendors. Thus, it provides further insights into strategies of local actors. By grouping together, the women gained some measure of protection, which empowered them to survive in a difficult and highly competitive market. Through their activities, they also changed the urban space of the port area, leaving their mark on it. They acted as crucial vectors for establishing different diaspora dishes, which met huge demand among many consumers. In doing so, they contributed to the formation of an African-American food culture on the streets of Rio de Janeiro.

Decolonization challenged people across the globe to define their place in a new postcolonial order. This challenge was felt in international political and economic affairs, but it also affected daily lives across the globe. The history of fair trade activism as seen from the Netherlands highlights how citizens in the North grappled to position themselves in a postcolonial consumer society. Interventions by fair trade activists connected debates about the morals of their society to the consequences of decolonization. They reacted to the imbalances of the global market in the wake of decolonization, joining critics from the South in demanding more equitable global relations. It was around this issue of “fair trade” that a transnational coalition of moderate and more radical activists emerged after the 1960s. This coalition held widely dissimilar views regarding the politics of the left and the use of consumer activism. The analysis of their interventions demonstrates that during the postwar era attempts at transforming the global market were inextricably interwoven with visions of a postcolonial order.

This article explores the British Empire’s configuration of imprisonment and transportation in the Andaman Islands penal colony. It shows that British governance in the Islands produced new modes of carcerality and coerced migration in which the relocation of convicts, prisoners, and criminal tribes underpinned imperial attempts at political dominance and economic development. The article focuses on the penal transportation of Eurasian convicts, the employment of free Eurasians and Anglo-Indians as convict overseers and administrators, the migration of “volunteer” Indian prisoners from the mainland, the free settlement of Anglo-Indians, and the forced resettlement of the Bhantu “criminal tribe”. It examines the issue from the periphery of British India, thus showing that class, race, and criminality combined to produce penal and social outcomes that were different from those of the imperial mainland. These were related to ideologies of imperial governmentality, including social discipline and penal practice, and the exigencies of political economy.

The lock-out and strike in the British engineering industry, which took place between July 1897 and January 1898, was one of the most bitter and protracted labour disputes of the 1890s. As “the first major national strike or lock-out in British history”,1 a dispute set against the turbulent background of “new unionism” and socialist influences within the 91,500-strong Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and fought over the issues of working hours, the rights of employers in their own “shops” and the vexed question of the introduction of technical improvements into the industry, the conflict had great political and economic significance.2

Few theoretical paradigms in labour history are so deeply entrenched as “rank and filism”. It was only to be expected, therefore, that a frontal assault on its assumptions would provoke a vigorous reaction. The responses to my article by Richard Price and James Cronin thus offer a welcome opportunity to clarify the theoretical claims of “rank and filism” and reassess its empirical plausibility as an interpretation of British labour history. But as in any clash between rival theoretical perspectives, the points at issue in this debate extend beyond factual disagreements to the meaning of basic concepts and the standards of proof involved in their assessment, and neither party fully recognizes itself in the account of their ideas presented by the other. No accumulation of discordant facts can conclusively disprove a theory, as students of scientific revolutions have demonstrated, but readers will have to judge for themselves whether the counter-evidence I have presented amounts to minor discrepancies which can be satisfactorily accommodated within the assumptions of “rank and filism” or fundamental anomalies which necessitate the abandonment of the paradigm itself.

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.

This article looks at the effect of transoceanic migration on rural Sicilian families. The author focuses on the conflicts, stresses, and transformations experienced by members of transnational families. While the reality of migration rarely reflected the popular notion that emigration would ruin families, the experience did create deep divisions between migrant men and the women who remained behind. Even before men migrated, husbands and wives struggled over the initial decision to emigrate. From their differing positions within the family, men and women separately weighed the potential benefits and risks of migration. When women encouraged their husbands to work overseas, the experience of migration often created new dreams and opportunities that divided family members. This essay highlights the deeply gendered nature of transnational migration, and the role of the family in altering ideas of husband, wife, mother, and father.

Using a variety of archival sources, notably personnel records and municipal minute books, this article builds a picture of the work-life histories of rank-and-file police constables and firefighters in the English cities of Birmingham and Leicester, and contrasts the techniques of behavioural control adopted by their employers. By drawing on an expanding literature on the social history of public institutions, the article compares the experience of managing such disciplined and uniformed public services. The article demonstrates that municipal management combined insidious devices for controlling workers' behaviour with consensual and negotiated tactics deployed by workers aware of the tangible material benefits offered by a career in public service. Moreover, by placing the English experience of municipal policing and fire-fighting in an international context by focusing on the visits and writings made by prominent technical and social reformers, the article offers a framework within which comparative research can be undertaken.

The proposition is not new that the freedom of labour is not a necessary accompaniment of the growth of capitalist production; and that conditions of non-market duress upon labour ranging from outright slavery to indenture and restrictions on mobility have been a typical feature of the world-wide growth of capitalism. Indeed the very title of Eric Williams' seminal book Capitalism and Slavery, which explored the interlinkages between the rise of capitalist manufacturing industry in Britain and the exploitation of the slave labour-based plantation system of the West Indies, exemplified this understanding. Ernest Mandel in his Marxist Economic Theory, which in fact dealt as much with historical description as with theory, also analysed the role of duress in the operation of the colonial system, as did P. A. Baran in his Political Economy of Growth. To the present author who shares Williams's perception, in particular that the colonial system and the later working of imperialism were crucially dependent on the imposition of unfree conditions upon Third World labour (particularly wherever labour migration was induced), Tom Brass's general emphasis on the lack of correspondence between capitalism and freedom of labour seems quite unexceptionable.

This article analyses the implications of the Forced Labour Convention of 1930 on colonial labour policies for road labour carried out under chiefs in the Gold Coast. The British colonial administration implemented a legal application of the convention that allowed the continuation of the existing system of public works. In the Gold Coast, the issue of road labour was most prominent in the North, where chiefs maintained the majority of roads. Indirect rule became crucial in retaining forced labour in compliance with the convention. This article focuses on “hidden strategies” of British colonialism after 1930, contrasting studies of blatant cases of forced labour. The analysis is based on a close scrutiny of the internal discourse among colonial officials on the question of road labour and the Forced Labour Convention.

This article takes as its subject the handspinners of Yorkshire's eighteenth-century worsted industry. When not ignored altogether, historians have presented handspinners as invariably weak and passive. While manufacturers exploited the industry's women workers, spinners were neither submissive nor compliant. Their history, in part, was one of resistance. Spinners' everyday resistance took its most important form in the unauthorized practice of supplementing money wages with yarn and wool from the production process. The scale and extent of such pilfering led manufacturers to one of the more remarkable initiatives in eighteenth-century industrial relations: the establishment of an industrial police force to detect and prosecute embezzlement. Policing would play a major role in the industry. Ultimately, however, its limitations helped to prompt manufacturers to pursue organizational and technological innovations to bring greater order to the spinning sector. Thus spinners' prosaic resistance had the unforeseen consequence of contributing to the demise of their occupation.

Leonard Horner was the most impressive and influential of the first English factory inspectors. For 26 years from 1833 to 1859 he administered the Factory Act mainly in the textile district of Lancashire. His work and that of his colleagues in the Factory Department made a success of this major experiment in legislative intervention in industry and despite the gloomy predictions of their early opponents they did not ruin the British economy in the process. The first generation of Inspectors laid the foundation for successive extensions of the Factory Act so that by the end of the 19th century working conditions and hours of labour for women and children were under legal regulation in all the major branches of manufacturing industry. Horner was acknowledged by his contemporaries to be the major figure among the early Inspectors; he even had the singular honour of being praised by Marx in Capital. This short biography will concentrate on Horner's work as Inspector of Factories since this is undoubtedly his major achievement. However it will also be concerned with other aspects of his life and interests, both because these have some importance in their own right and also in order to examine the extent to which Horner's life and thought form a coherent whole. Finally, an assessment will be made of Horner's place in social reform and in the development of English economic and social policy in the 19th century.

Many studies on proto-industrialization have followed Franklin Mendels' work, and virtually all concern cottage industries in rural areas. Occasionally, authors are also interested in urban proto-industries, which are correctly considered home industries here. This production method (aside from traditional manual labour) has certainly been decisive, both in supplying expanding markets during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in raising capital for commercial production of goods. Cottage industries were the prevailing form of industry at the start of the Industrial Revolution (and during the preceding periods) and were consequently a direct prerequisite for it.

This Special Issue explores the complicated relationship between women's rights and global socialism during the Cold War. This Introduction describes how the articles deal with this relationship in three, partly overlapping, periods. The first set of articles looks at how the ethos of the Popular Front resonated among women's movements in Asia, Latin America, and Europe, and examines the connections between interwar anti-fascist and anti-imperialist feminisms and those that re-emerged after World War II. The second set of articles focuses on the role and development of the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) and its model of internationalism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China in the early Cold War. The final articles centre on the challenges faced by the WIDF from the 1960s, exploring issues such as the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa, the Portuguese wars of decolonization, and the United Nations Decade for Women (1976–1985). Together with this process of decolonization, this Special Issue also examines how the consequences of postsocialism, in particular for women's rights (the loss of social rights, material security, and substantial challenges to reproductive freedoms), have triggered renewed debates about the history and legacies of communist women's liberation movements in the former socialist world.