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.

In considering how “radical” histories of ordinary whites under apartheid might be written, this essay engages with several traditions of historical scholarship “from” and “of” below. For three decades, Marxist-inspired social history dominated radical historiography in South Africa. It has, however, proved little able to nurture historiography of whites that is politically engaged and acknowledges post-Marxist currents in the discipline. I advocate a return to theory and suggest that new sources may be drawn from the academy and beyond. Historiographies “of” below need not necessarily be historiographies “from” below and this article proposes the idea of a “racial state” as an alternative starting point for a history of apartheid-era whites. It goes on to argue that Subaltern Studies, as a dissident, theoretically eclectic and interdisciplinary current in historiography offers useful perspectives for exploring the everyday lives of whites in South Africa. After suggesting a research agenda stemming from these theoretical and comparative insights, I conclude by reflecting on the ethics of writing histories of apartheid-era whites.

In the last third of the nineteenth century, the relationship of poverty and drunkenness became a topic of bitter social controversy. The debate often had hopelessly polarized positions, being reduced in crudest form to a disagreement over whether poverty caused intemperance or the reverse. The very emotionalism and repetition of the argument, while disappointing to the logician, was a clear sign of the deep passions that the question invoked. While contributors to this debate stretched across the spectrum of religious and political alignment, the controversy was essentially the creature of the left. As will be argued, the question of self-inflicted poverty through drunkenness excited the Liberal and emergent socialist-labour parties far more than it did the Conservative-Unionist sector.

During the last week in July 1893, the largest industrial dispute Britain had hitherto experienced was initiated when over 300,000 miners in the Federated District stopped work. The Yorkshire miners played an important part in the lockout which was the first major trial of strength which the Miners' Federation of Great Britain had to face. The significant role of Yorkshire's pitmen in the dispute was not surprising since the colliers of the West Riding had taken a leading part in the formation of the MFGB only four years earlier, and the Yorkshire Miners' Association formed the cornerstone of the new organization. The stoppage occasioned extremely little violence, except in the West Riding, where a series of turbulent incidents plunged many of the mining districts into a state of anarchy and mob rule. The climactic event occurred at Featherstone when two miners were shot dead by the army. It is the aim of this article to examine the civil disorders which resulted from the lockout in Yorkshire, and to present an analysis of the Featherstone “Massacre” together with an assessment of the way in which the authorities handled the disturbances.

Riding down Main Street in East Hartford, Connecticut toward the six smokestacks dominating the front of Pratt & Whitney's mammoth aircraft engine factory, one cannot help noticing numerous artifacts associated with rapid industrial decline: empty and trash-strewn lots, boarded-up storefronts, and vacated triple-deckers, once homes for Pratt & Whitney workers. A short drive away on the other side of the Connecticut River one can observe the dichotomies between East Hartford and downtown Hartford with its glittering insurance companies, banks, and the headquarters – known around Hartford as the “Gold Building” – of Pratt's parent, the United Technologies Corporation (UTC). The various social clubs, bars, and purveyors of fast food, ice cream, and fresh baked pies, that have served thousands of lunches and early suppers to members of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) are at risk.

The telegraph strike of 1908 occurred at many nodes of the telegraph system in British India and Burma, paralysing governance and business. In this paper, I suggest that the strike was a symptom of the systemic crisis in world telegraphy faced with technological change and competition. I introduce the category of transregional economic general strike as a tool to analyse strikes in the communication sectors. The strike demonstrated the ability of one of the earliest virtual communities in India to combine and organize worker protest. This multistage strike momentarily transcended the specific, and usually rigid, distinctions of race, class, and ethnicity through the production of community-at-a-distance. The strike occurred simultaneously among different sections of workers in Rangoon, Moulmein, Calcutta, Allahabad, Agra, Bombay, Madras, Lahore, and Karachi, to name just a few of the places involved. Both telegraph signallers as well as the subordinate staff went on strike. By concentrating on the relationship between technological change and labour, the paper demonstrates how workers across this part of the British Empire were capable of charting a general agenda in the first decade of the twentieth century, using technology to combine and combat technological rationalization.

This article employs a prosopographical approach in examining the backgrounds and careers of those cadres who represented the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Parti Communiste Français at the Comintern headquarters in Moscow. In the context of the differences between the two parties, it discusses the factors which qualified activists for appointment, how they handled their role, and whether their service in Moscow was an element in future advancement. It traces the bureaucratization of the function, and challenges the view that these representatives could exert significant influence on Comintern policy. Within this boundary the fact that the French representatives exercised greater independence lends support, in the context of centre–periphery debates, to the judgement that within the Comintern the CPGB was a relatively conformist party.

This paper examines the ways in which turn-of-the-century British socialists enacted socialism for children through the British Socialist Sunday School movement. It focuses in particular on the movement's emergence in the 1890s and the first three decades of operation. Situated amidst a growing international field of comparable socialist children's initiatives, socialist Sunday schools attempted to connect their local activity of children's education to the broader politics of international socialism. In this discussion I explore the attempt to make this connection, including the endeavour to transcend party differences in the creation of a non-partisan international children's socialist movement, the cooption of traditional Sunday school rituals, and the resolve to make socialist childhood cultures was the responsibility of both men and women. Defending their existence against criticism from conservative campaigners, the state, and sections of the left, socialist Sunday schools mobilized a complex and contested culture of socialist childhood.

Global history seems to be the history for our times. Huge syntheses such as the seven-volume Cambridge World History or the six-volume A History of the World suggest the field has come to fruition. Robert Moore, in his contribution to the book under review, The Prospect of Global History, is quite confident in this respect: if there is a single reason for “the rise of world history”, it is “the collapse of every alternative paradigm” (pp. 84–85). As early as 2012, the journal Itinerario published an interview with David Armitage with the title “Are We All Global Historians Now?” That may have been provocative but Armitage obliged by claiming “the hegemony of national historiography is over”.

Since the late nineteenth century, job seeking has become increasingly linked to organizations and facilities that offer information on vacancies, offer placement services, or undertake recruiting. The present article focuses on how job placement became a concern for the emerging European welfare states, and how state-run systems of labour intermediation were established between 1880 and 1940. Even more important was the state's regulation of existing job placement practices, which resulted in a slow process of specialization, codification, and homogenization – in short, a slow process of normalization of practices at national levels. State labour exchanges thereby became the dominant reference point for seeking and finding work.

The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) had a long tradition of anti-colonial activism since its foundation in 1920 and had been a champion of national liberation within the British Empire. However, the Party also adhered to the idea that Britain’s former colonies, once independent, would want to join a trade relationship with their former coloniser, believing that Britain required these forms of relationship to maintain supplies of food and raw materials. This position was maintained into the 1950s until challenged in 1956–1957 by the Party’s African and Caribbean membership, seizing the opportunity presented by the fallout of the political crises facing the CPGB in 1956. I argue in this article that this challenge was an important turning point for the Communist Party’s view on issues of imperialism and race, and also led to a burst of anti-colonial and anti-racist activism. But this victory by its African and Caribbean members was short-lived, as the political landscape and agenda of the CPGB shifted in the late 1960s.

Anticlericalism was a decisive trend in Spanish political, social, andcultural life from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the SpanishCivil War. It is true that anticlerical movements also existed in otherEuropean states, but the confrontations were much more intense in Spain.José M. Sánchez recalls this in a concise summary of the violence unleashedby these struggles: from 1822 to 1936, at least 235 members of the clergywere assassinated and around 500 churches and religious centres wereburned. In addition, in the three years of the Civil War, almost 7,000priests, monks and nuns suffered the same fate. Despite this, until a fewyears ago there were frequent complaints about the scant attention paid bySpanish historians to this trend. Julio de la Cueva Merino referred to thislack of research, and even to the ‘historiographic vacuum’, in a summaryof publications on the subject which appeared in 1991. Three years later,Pilar Salomón mentioned the ‘absence of fruitful bibliographic production’, and, as recently as 1997, Rafael Cruz spoke of a ‘shortage of works’,or at least a very scarce production of monographs. Outside the field ofhistory, anthropologists such as David Gilmore and Manuel Delgado havelikewise criticized the lack of interest of their colleagues in the face of whatGilmore defined as ‘as powerful a social and ideological phenomenon asdevotion’, and which should deserve the same intellectual consideration.

This paper was written before the appearance of Leslie Derfler's “Reformism and Jules Guesde: 1891–1904” (International Review of Social History, XII (1967), pp. 66–80). It is not specifically aimed at answering or refuting Derfler's article; however, it adds to his discussion of French reformism and Jules Guesde. Derfler and I agree that an analysis of Socialist theory is of secondary importance for the historian trying to unravel the complexities of French Socialism; for “doctrinal discord” Derfler substitutes “personal enmity” as the key to understanding. I believe that investigation of Socialist organization in France will provide added insights into the reformist and revolutionary movements within French Socialism.

Our focus here is on time-series regression as a formal analytic tool in social historical inquiry. We have three interrelated purposes. First, we argue that conventional time-series regression is typically ill–suited for social historical inquiry because ahistorical assumptions and conventions regarding time undermine the historical character of social “process–as–analyzed”. Second, we present a modified time-series approach – temporally recursive regression – that takes time seriously and provides a more adequate analytic vehicle for social historical inquiry. Finally, we illustrate the promise of temporally recursive regression by using it to analyze how workplace militancy in post–war America was fueled by massive insurgency waves during successive phases of the civil rights movement.

The present study with pauperism, its causes, its prevention and its significance for the social evolution on the West-European continent, endeavours to provide for one of the gaps which social history, seen as a science of the social dynamics prevailing in history, brings to light. The Rhine-territory here is presented as an exceptionally suggestive illustration.

This investigation shows that both the social associations which the age of pauperism called up in defence against the distress of the masses, and the revolutionary tendencies are a determinant factor in the birth of the modem type of workman, as well as in the origin of the great West-European labour-organisations of the second half of the nineteenth century (trade-unions, cooperations and parties). The shaping of the Farmers'- and the Artisans'-Movement, particularly in Germany, is decisively influenced by them. This evolution of social associations means for the ruling classes the first attempt at neutralising the inner social tensions of the system of industrial capitalism.

Thus the age of pauperism and associations is a period of preparation, of great social-historical importance, without insight into which the later social evolution — upon which our times are based — can be understood and explained in but a very imperfect manner. The investigation of this period again shows the necessity of regarding social history as in independant part of the discipline of the discipline of the social sciences.

Jewish clerks during the Zionist state-building period were intensively engaged in the social construction of productivity, and in turning the latter into a mechanism of social restraint. The clerks' productivism and concern with social utility was manifested in the reproduction of accepted Zionist physiocratic and constructivist notions of productivity, as a strategy in the politics of status; in the modernist transformation of the understanding of productivity to suit their own occupational terminology; in the prescription of the necessary qualities of the productive clerk; and in realization of these discursive campaigns in the practice of labor relations. These manifestations challenge a simplistic approach to the dissemination of the language of productivity as either a one-sided nationalist socialization, or a straightforward managerial strategy of control. Based on primary archival sources of the clerks and their union this paper argues instead that they reflected the intertwining of national attitudes with from-below advancement of group interests.

This paper aims to examine the interplay between individual subjectivities and collective action during a strike which occurred at a moment of political transition in Indonesia from Suharto's authoritarian regime to a more democratically inclined government. It attempts to highlight some of the problems in understanding the nature of protest and collective action and the construction of workers' identities. By following the sequence of a strike, we are able to see the collaborations and conflicts between the leaders and those who are central in the protest action and those who are at the margins; between those who join and those who do not join but hope to obtain the benefits of the results. This also means that it provides us with a better understanding of the complexities involved when we refer to “consciousness”, “identities”, and “experiences” as analytical constructs. Such a focus can counter the often simplistic links made between action and intent, between the economic circumstances and political action.

The struggle by women workers has largely been overlooked in the historiography of trade unions in South Africa during apartheid. This article analyses the strategies of the National Union of Textile Workers (NUTW) to end wage discrimination against women as part of the struggle against poverty wages in the South African textile industry during the last years of apartheid, c.1980 to 1987. The first South African equal pay legislation came into force in 1981, covering the minimum wages of just a small number of the workforce; it was not until 1984 that legislation set minimum wages for all workers. Before the legal reform, new domestic and foreign political opportunities helped the NUTW to create new mobilization structures and offered possibilities to connect levels of scale and make local action visible at home and abroad. Global framing of wage equality combined with a translocal repertoire was used in the cases of multinational companies to make relevant connections between levels of scale (international, transnational, national, and local) to add to the visibility of the violations. After the reform of labour legislation in South Africa, the union made reference to domestic legislation, but translocal activism remained important in bringing foreign companies to the local negotiating table. Drawing on these cases, the NUTW developed a national strategy to make wage setting more transparent across the entire industry, adding to the visibility of all forms of wage discrimination.