The revolt aboard the American slaving ship the Creole (1841) was an unprecedented success. A minority of the 135 captive African Americans aboard seized the vessel as it sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, to the New Orleans slave markets. They forced the crew to sail to the Bahamas, where they claimed their freedom. Building on previous studies of the Creole, this article argues that the revolt succeeded due to the circulation of radical struggle. Condensed in collective memory, political solidarity, and active protest and resistance, this circulation breached the boundaries between land and ocean, and gave shape to the revolutionary Atlantic. These mutineers achieved their ultimate aim of freedom due to their own prior experiences of resistance, their preparedness to risk death in violent insurrection, and because they sailed into a Bahamian context in which black Atlantic cooperation from below forced the British to serve the letter of their own law.

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.

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.

Despite an abundance of literature on the Second International relatively little is known about the work of the International Secretariat of National Trade Union Centres (ISNTUC). Foundect in 1901 by the German and Scandinavian labour leaders, this exclusively trade union International (the forerunner of the post-war International Federation of Trade Unions) included representatives of most of the major labour movements of Europe and the USA. Under German leadership it occupied itself with exclusively trade union issues, a limitation which was contested by revolutionary labour federations. Study of the ISNTUC therefore reveals much about conceptions of internationalism within the internationally organized labour movement.

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.

In the period between the 1760s and the 1850s boatmen were the most important transport workers in early colonial eastern India, at least numerically. Unfortunately, they have received little scholarly attention so far. By looking at the regime of work, which surprisingly had strong bases in the notion of contract from as early as the 1770s, this article explores the nature of work, work organization, and resistance by boatmen. It argues that although work was structured according to the wage or hire-based (thika) contract regime, the social, political, and ecological conditions in which contract operated were equally crucial. The centrality of contract was premised upon how effectively it was enforceable and, in fact, historically enforced. Boatmen being one of the most important “native” groups with which the British were left on their often long journeys, this article suggests that contract helps to understand the formal “structure of work”, and the minute details of the journey help to understand the “world of work”, of which clandestine trade, weather, wind, rain, torrents, tracking, mooring, internal squabbling, and, not least, preparing food were some of the main components.

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 origins of the British Labour Party are many and complex. They have formed the subject of innumerable works of historical scholarship and of journalism, for it is possible to tell the story equally forcefully in terms either of political theory or of personalities. But no matter how much weight may be given to the role of political ideas, and no matter how much importance one may attach to the appearance of the “right” men and women at the “rightrd; time, the crucial part played by the trade-union movement cannot be denied. It was the growing support derived from the trade unions which breathed life into the Labour Representation Committee after 1900, and this in spite of strongly-entrenched hostility from within the trade unions to socialism and all its works. The stages by which the unions became reconciled to, and then enthusiastic supporters of, the Labour Party are well known. Self-interest, not socialism, prompted the unions to support separate labour representation in Parliament. Until January 1901 only 29 per cent of those unions affiliated to the Trades Union Congress had decided to back the Labour Representation Committee. In the space of two years that proportion rose to over 56 per cent.

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.

Brief notices in French newpsapers of October 22, 1940 announcing the death of Willi Münzenberg failed to attract the attention of the international press occupied with reporting the progress of the Second World War. Münzenberg's body had been discovered in the woods of Cagnet in Southwestern France with a wire garrote around the neck. The cause and macabre circumstances of death were shrouded in mystery. More than twenty years have blurred and obscured the career of the most exceptional propagandist of the communist movement.

The separation of the contributions to the theory and practice of socialism by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was not seriously posited during their lifetimes, but only in the following generation. The separation, as opposed to the contributions of their entire working lives, of the respective quality of thinking in either case, was a matter of which Engels was conscious, for he wrote: “Marx was a genius, we others were at best talents. Without him the theory today would be far from what it is. Therefore it rightly bears his name.” The evaluation by Engels of the relation between the two was duly repeated by their biographers. Mehring wrote: “There is no doubt that Marx was philosophically the greater of the two and that his brain was more highly trained.” Mayer compared the two: “Marx was driven by the harsh goad of genius; Engels lived under the gentler domination of his rich humanity.” Ryazanov simply posited that the collaboration of the two and their mutual support proceeded in perfect harmony, with the minor thesis of Engels's supportive role. Both Mehring and Ryazanov cited Engels's own words of modesty quoted above. Auguste Cornu has written with reference to the beginning of the collaboration: “Engels' study of the origin of communism was more on the economic and social level than on the philosophical and political plane, and portrayed it as a necessary product of the development of capitalist society. This lent definition to Marx's still theoretical and abstract conception.” Cornu, who is of the orthodox school, had reference to the articles on political economy in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (1844) by Engels. While he concedes nothing to the higher intellectual attainments of one over the other, he develops the theme of the power of abstraction of Marx, of concretion of Engels. That there was identity of thought and activity of Marx and Engels is the view which seeks to establish orthodoxy of the socialist doctrines of various parties; the qualitative difference of their brain power, accordingly, implies no difference in the substance of the production in either, whether in the theory or practice of socialism resp. communism.

This article compares the racially heterogeneous, privately-owned American telephone industry, and the relatively homogeneous, publicly-owned British system, to examine how race and gender constructions implicit in the national identities of the two countries influence employment opportunities. For all the differences in the histories of the two telephone industries and variations in the construction of racial, national, and gender identities, blacks in the United States and Britain had remarkably similar experiences in obtaining employment as telephone operators. This leads to the conclusion that the power of national identity in the workplace is strongly based on “whiteness”. Despite their limited access to national identity, white women experienced advantages that were denied to black women, which illustrates how race modified the impact of gender on the privileges of national identity.

This paper offers an environmental history of a group of forced migrants who were sent to work on a Soviet industrial project in the far north during the 1930s. As part of the drive to industrialize the country rapidly, the Soviet state deported thousands of peasants who had been declared class enemies to the previously desolate Khibiny Mountains in order to serve as the labor force for a new socialist mining town. These forced migrants became known as “special settlers”. I argue that the integration of the environment as a dynamic force in the social history of Stalinism enriches current explanations for why the Soviet state was often unable to carry out its intentions during industrialization. I also maintain that through the pursuit of the global process of industrialization, the Soviet government contributed to making the special settlers in the Khibiny Mountains vulnerable to natural hazards.

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 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.

This article seeks to explore from a new angle the massacre associated with the slave ship Zong – that is, the murder of around 130 slaves at sea in 1781. Hitherto, the massacre has been looked at largely in terms of the law, particularly insurance law, and the commercial logic of the British slave trade. This article gives due weight to the overriding concerns of commerce in the Zong atrocity, but it also explains it in terms of the culture and context of the selection of captives for the slave trade, a process in which ships' surgeons were prominent. It argues that this process habituated surgeons and captains – the Master of the Zong was both – to the possibility of death (at the hands of African controllers) of the captives they deemed unfit for the Atlantic slave trade. The article proposes that in the slave trade, medical expertise became yoked to the fateful decision of whether or not to accord commodity value to the captive. Where the surgeons decided to deny commodity value to a captive in the trade, he or she suffered “commercial death”, which was all too often followed by death itself.

In a well known study of the building industry written some years ago, Richard Price argued that the institutionalisation of trade unions and general formalisation of industrial relations that occurred during the latter half of the nineteenth century were influences that tended to restrict the capacity of work groups to regulate the conditions of their working lives. Whereas earlier labour historians, from the Webbs onwards, had emphasised the part played by formal organisations in the improvement of working conditions, Price stressed the capacity of informal groups to control the way work was conducted. Price's approach, and that of other writers adopting a similar perspective, has been extremely influential, not least because it accorded well with developments taking place in the modern industrial relations setting of the 1960s and 1970s, where interest was focussed upon autonomous work group activity. In the context of the mid-nineteenth century, however, Price certainly pushed his argument a long way. The capacity of craft workers, possessing a strong corporate tradition, to regulate autonomously conditions in their trade was one thing, but Price suggested that work group formation and activity extended to labourers, in building and other industries. Dock labourers, in particular, were held to have been capable of such regulative activity, “long before unionisation”. If this was indeed the case, then the argument regarding the negative contribution of formal union organisation and collective bargaining must presumably be held to apply even in those sectors of employment where the new unionism of the 1880s and 1890s made its appearance.

Mid-Victorian Scotland was a remarkably homogeneous society, and the milieu, in which the labour movement developed, had very long traditions of social repression and economic backwardness. A system of democracy inherited from the Calvinist revolution of 1559, social mobility and the comparatively superior educational opportunities of working class children were, in the considered opinion of a large number of journalists, clergymen and members of Parliament, the dominant characteristics of Scottish democracy. In practice, the educational opportunities and social mobility open to the working classes were severely circumscribed by the conditions industrial capitalism had engendered; and in the mid-1860s the labour movement, though influenced by the traditions – and the mythology – of Scottish democracy, looked to America for their model of a democratic society.

The myth or reality of widespread social unrest in Britain in the period immediately before the First World War has attracted increasing attention among historians in recent years. Debate has centred upon two main themes, namely the character and impact of contemporary labour unrest, and the situation and prospects of the Liberal Party. Was British labour fundamentally disaffected from existing forms of industrial relations and from Parliamentary democracy? Was the pre-1914 Liberal Party already in decline and unable to withstand the advance of the Labour Party? Several recent writers have returned sceptical or largely negative conclusions to questions of this kind. In so doing they have sought to dispel a popularly held notion of incipient social breakdown and imminent social change, proposed amongst others by Dangerfield in The Strange Death of Liberal England.