“Could a Nation, in any true sense of the word, really be born without war?” Such was the question raised by Michael Howard, the eminent Oxford military historian in a public lecture delivered on the topic of “War and the Nation State”. Looking generally at European history in the past two centuries he argued that war was indeed central for the appearance of the modern nation-state and that modern armies are somehow intimately linked to the rise of nationalism. During the first half of the nineteenth century this argument could very well be applied to Egypt. Having been incorporated in the Ottoman Empire for more than two and a half centuries, Egypt, by the beginning the nineteenth century and mostly through an unprecedented war effort that was concurrent and often synonymous with state-building, had come to play an increasingly independent role on the international plane.

“No nation is supposed to be so advanced as the British nation, no race so progressive as the white”, declared Cotton's Weekly, the newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Canada. “BUT HERE IN TORONTO NO CHINESE, NO HINDOOS, NO JAPS, NO INDIANS, NO BLACKS, NO FOREIGNERS NEED BE IMPORTED. WHITE GIRLS AND MEN OF BRITISH BIRTH BREAK THE STRIKES.” It was 1911. The newspaper was commenting on strike-breaking by “white” workers during a strike at a Toronto garment factory where male and female Jews had walked out. The newspaper compared this with cases out West: “In British Columbia when miners rise up in rebellion against the shameful conditions, Chinese are brought into the mines. In this and other western provinces, Japs, Hindoos, and Indians fill the places of the white toilers because they live on cheaper food and under such intolerable conditions no white people can stand it.”

In the heat of the battle for parliamentary reform William Cobbett preached to the working people of England in his inimitable blustery dictums. “[I]f you labour honestly,” he counselled, “you have a right to have, in exchange for your labour, a sufficiency out of the produce of the earth, to maintain yourself and your family as well; and, if you are unable to labour, or if you cannot obtain labour, you have a right to maintenance out of the produce of the land […]”. For honest working men this was part of the legacy of constitutional Britain, which bequeathed to them not only sustenance but, “The greatest right […] of every man, the right of rights, […] the right of having a share in the making of the laws, to which the good of the whole makes it his duty to submit”. Nonetheless, he warned, such rights could not legitimately negate the toiling lot that was the laborer's fate: “Remember that poverty is decreed by the very nature of man […]. It is necessary to the existence of mankind, that a very large proportion of every people should live by manual labour […]”.

Between 1599 and the end of the 1650s, the French Crown sustained a policy of land reclamation at a large scale. It was led by the French aristocracy who were helped by representatives of the merchant elites of Amsterdam, such as Hieronimus van Uffelen and Jean Hoeufft. The works in both Arles (Provence) and Petit Poitou (Poitou) show that land reclamation involved a radical change in society, reinforced the authority of the Crown in the areas concerned, and disrupted the former social balances built around the marshes. Thus, land reclamation aroused several conflicts which revealed its deep impact on the environment. So, this article demonstrates how the making of the modern state, backed by the development of European trade and banking, caused ecological and social changes by connecting the political and financial powers on a European scale.

This article focuses on the diverse body of seafarers from the Indian Ocean region known as “lascars”. Very little is known about mutiny amongst those employed aboard European merchantmen during the age of sail. Private voyage journals and other sources offer scattered glimpses of demonstrations, strikes, and assaults on officers. Lascars used such tactics to air grievances, resist unpopular orders, and extract concessions from their superiors. They also took part in more serious forms of mutiny, in which they murdered captains, commandeered ships, and expropriated cargoes. The depositions taken in connection with such incidents provide an unparalleled window on to their working lives. Labour intermediaries known as serangs and tindals feature prominently in these various disturbances. The unique position they occupied enabled them to undermine European officers and even depose captains. Their involvement in shipboard uprisings serves as a reminder of the ways in which mutiny could be staged, manipulated, and controlled.

In this century British socialism has rarely engaged in serious internal debate about the fundamental concepts of its political vocabulary. In this respect, as in others, British socialism has been true to the wider traditions of British political life. There has, of course, been much vigorous controversy on policy and programme, but also a remarkable absence of genuine doctrinal debate, certainly as compared with continental socialisms. A major exception to this, however, is to be found in the decade which has the First World War at its centre. Indeed, this may be regarded as the most creative period in British socialist thought in the twentieth century (notwithstanding the superficially more turbulent 1930's); and it is a period which ends, interestingly, in the early 1920's, when Labour becomes securely established in the world of parliamentary politics.

The paper examines the role of “nationalist” secret societies among the rapidly growing Irish community in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s. The main port of entry, Liverpool occupied a pivotal role as the two main “Ribbon” societies developed secret networks to provide migrant members with political sanctuary and a range of “tramping” benefits. Through its welfare provision, offered irrespective of skill or trade, Ribbonism engendered a sense of identity wider than that of the familial and regional affiliations through which chain migration typically operated. A proactive influence among immigrant Irish Catholic workers, Ribbonism helped to construct a national or ethnic awareness, initiating the process by which ethnic-sectarian formations came to dominate popular politics in nineteenth-century Liverpool, the nation's second city. This ethnic associational culture was at least as functional, popular and inclusive as the class-based movements and party structures privileged in conventional British historiography.

Comment Marx travaillait-il? La question prend une importance toute spéciale si l'on convient que seule une étude de genèse pourrait nous éclairer, non seulement sur le sens réel des oeuvres inachevées ou posthumes, mais encore, à n'en pas douter, sur l'ensemble de l'oeuvre.

Aucun examen de détail n'a été tenté pour étudier une méthode de travail que l'on sait ou devine pourtant toute personnelle, et, plus particulièrement, opposée à celle de Hegel. Un critique russe ayant commenté la methode dialectique de Marx, celui-ci ajoute à la seconde edition du Capital les réflexions que voici: «…le procédé d'exposition doit se distvnguci formellement du procédé d'investigation. A l'investigation de faire la matière sienne dans tous ses détails, d'en analyser les diverses formes de développement, et de découvrir leur lien intime.

Health and pleasure resorts constitute a distinctive, numerous and important kind of industrial town. But they, and the service industries which are central to their economies, have hardly been studied from a social conflict and industrial relations perspective. This paper opens out this theme by analysing a strike in the catering trades in San Sebastián, at the time Spain's largest and most prestigious seaside resort, at the height of the holiday season in August. The course of the strike is charted in its economic and political context, and the reasons for its outbreak, and for an ensuing attempt to escalate it into a local general strike, are analysed. Particular attention is paid to the status in the labour market of the camareros or hotel, restaurant and café waiters who withdrew their labour, and to reactions to the strike among local media who were deeply conscious of the importance to San Sebastián's staple industry of sustaining a carefully-constructed image of tranquillity and security. Comparisons are made with British resort experiences in the turbulent years between 1916 and 1921, and further work on this theme is urged, especially for this important period.

In Recasting Bourgeois Europe, his study of the responses of the major States of Western Europe to the conditions created by the First World War, Charles Maier makes only, according to his standards, passing reference to Great Britain. Initially this must appear quite reasonable, for if one compares the post-war situation of Britain with that of most of Continental Europe it must seem that Britain escaped, or at least experienced with a greatly reduced intensity, the disorder which beset other nations. It might therefore be assumed that the efforts of the British political elite to adjust to the post-war world are less worthy of attention than those of their Continental counterparts.

It is well known that in England the last four decades of the nineteenth century witnessed both the growing importance of the coal-mining industry and the continuation of widespread voluntary charity. But the absence of detailed local studies has made it easy to assume that, as colliery districts did not enjoy the same benevolent institutions as other areas, these were distinct, indeed almost separate, developments. Relegated to a footnote by the historian of English philanthropy, “the imposing sums collected to meet disasters” have been in this respect almost completely ignored.

This article analyses the Stockholm Pride parade as an effective contemporary political stage, built on laughter and festivity. Taking its political point of departure in what is seen as being highly private and intimate, sexuality and the sexed body, the parade turns upside down one of the most central ideas of modernity: the dichotomy of public and private. Combining the theory of carnival laughter with queer theory, the article illustrates the way in which humour and politics work together in this contemporary blend of politics and popular culture.

In the wake of the Great Depression, in the early 1930s the Turkish state decided to undertake an ambitious project of industrialization. Though state factories were presented and celebrated as model institutions of national modernity, their operations were characterized from the outset by serious and chronic problems of inefficiency and low productivity. To secure technical and managerial know-how on the shop floor, the Turkish state approached knowledgeable German industrial managers to organize its industrial production rationally, hoping to take advantage of the increasingly repressive political climate in Germany, which was driving leading experts into exile. This article analyses the transfer of scientific management from the German industrial context, with its craft control of the labour process and predominance of skilled labour with a strong labour movement, to Turkey, with its army of unskilled, cheap, and unorganized labour and where industrial development was in its infancy.

In the past decade a prominent theme in the historiography of nineteenth-century Britain has been the imposition of middle-class habits and attitudes upon the populace by means of new or re-invigorated mechanisms of “social control”. To the apparatus of law enforcement and to the disciplines of the factory and wage labour, historians have added the less overt instruments of social welfare, education, religion, leisure and moral reform. Philanthropists, educators, clergymen and moralizers have all become soldiers in a campaign to uproot the “anti-social” characteristics of the poor and to cement the hegemony of the elite.

The historical development of employers' associations and the role these organisations played in strikebreaking has been considerably neglected in industrial-relations history. With a few notable recent exceptions, research has tended to concentrate on the development and struggles of the organisations of men, rather than the masters. This is partly the result of the secrecy and anonymity of employers' associations and their reluctance to allow access to their records or to attract media interest, and partly because the defensive and conservative attitudes and policies of employers' organisations have proved less attractive to historians than the more militant political and social theories that lie at the foundation of trade-union policy. In particular, the strikebreaking activities of employers and their organisations were not widely publicised. As a result, this whole emotive area is shrouded in exaggeration, sensationalism, distortion and the propagation of myths by both workers and employers. The object of this paper is to analyse the parameters of employers' coercive strikebreaking tactics from the 1880's to 1914 and to shed some light on the role employers' associations played during industrial stoppages. The first section briefly outlines the main developments in employers' organisation, solidarity and labour-relations policy before 1914. Following this is a discussion of the various strikebreaking tactics utilised by employers in this period, broken down into sections on labour replacement, victimisation and legal action, strike compensation and internal solidarity, and, finally, the lock-out.

The article deals with the development of Catalan cotton textile trade unionism between 1890 and 1914. It has been argued that, given the economic difficulties which faced the cotton textile industry, employers were anxious to cut labour costs and unwilling to negotiate with trade unions. Between 1889 and 1891, therefore, they launched an attack on trade-union organisation within the industry. In many rural areas they were able to impose their will with relatively little difficulty. In urban Catalonia, however, they faced stiffer opposition. The state's response to labour unrest was not uniform. Nevertheless, at crucial moments the authorities supported the mill owners' assaults on labour organisation. The result was to radicalise the cotton textile labour force. This could be seen in the growing influence of socialists and anarchists in the textile unions' ranks, and in the increasing willingness of the textile workers to use general strike tactics.

This essay explores the history of empire and rebellion from a seaborne perspective, through a focus on convict-ship mutiny in the Indian Ocean. It will show that the age of revolution did not necessarily spread outward from Europe and North America into colonies and empires, but rather complex sets of interconnected phenomena circulated regionally and globally in all directions. Convict transportation and mutiny formed a circuit that connected together imperial expansion and native resistance. As unfree labour, convicts might be positioned in global histories of the Industrial Revolution. And, as mutinous or insurgent colonial subjects, they bring together the history of peasant unrest and rebellion in south Asia with piracy in south-east Asia and the Pearl River delta. A subaltern history of convict transportation in the Indian Ocean thus has much to offer for an understanding of the maritime dimensions of the age of revolution.

When Dr Johnson made his famous eighteenth-century remark about second marriages being a triumph of hope over experience, his wit could easily have been directed toward the unions that Steven King has illuminated. It is never entirely clear why people marry or choose to marry the people they do, a situation that is as frustrating to historians as to friends and family. Marriage remains one of life's great mysteries, perhaps the last great mystery left to us. It fascinates and absorbs us, providing an inexhaustible audience for daytime soap operas and evening situation comedies. Romance novels top the fiction charts; and Hollywood returns to the theme time and again.

Marriage fascinates precisely because it is so unpredictable, so much beyond our control. One would think that the riskiness of the lottery of love would frighten, even repel, us, but instead we are drawn to it as a gambler is drawn to the slots or the track. Love is, like gambling, a form of “deep play”, which reveals things about ourselves that we can only discover when we move from the world of choice to the realm of chance. Today, marriage is often the central episode in the stories we tell when we try to explain ourselves to ourselves and to others. It is the most elaborately celebrated and ritualized of all the events of the adult life course, the source of our most precious images and memories. Marriage is simply enchanting.

Beesly was not only friendly with Marx, but was well acquainted with his circle. He knew Lafargue, he got to know Engels, and there were mutual acquaintances, such as Eugene Oswald. Among workmen, he was not only the friend of Odger, Applegarth and Lucraft, but was on close terms with such working-class confidants of Marx as Jung and Eccarius, and to a lesser extent with Dupont. In the sixties he was a familiar figure, not only in the offices of the Carpenters and Joiners, the London Trades Council or the Bee-Hive, but was also at home in the “Golden Ball” where the most radical of London's workmen talked with continental revolutionaries over a clay pipe and a pot of beer. Here one could get the flavour of European proletarian politics: that other “World of Labour” in whose ideals Beesly was as deeply interested as he was in those of English trades unionism. Indeed, for many years he expressed his desire for the amalgamation of trade unionism – with its implicit recognition of the priority of social questions—, and proletarian republicanism – with its generous enthusiasm and its larger view.