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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Although recent years have seen growing theoretical interest among historians in the use of visual material, researchers continue to neglect the importance of photographs as source material. This is particularly striking since, now that iconographic material is becoming more widely available and archival institutions are beginning to place greater emphasis on visual material as use of the simple camera becomes more widespread, photographs often provide the only source of essential information for study. They illuminate the concept of the everyday, which in turn casts light on the significance of consumer goods, domestic comfort, the aspirations of men, women, and children, in short the banality of everyday life which echoed their mentalities and how they viewed the world.

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.

Traditional frontier literature identifies a positive correlation between land availability and fertility. A common explanation is that the demand for child labour is higher in newly established frontier regions compared to older, more densely populated farming regions. In this paper, we contribute to the debate by analysing the relationship between household composition and land availability in a closing frontier region, i.e. the Graaff-Reinet district in South Africa’s Cape Colony from 1798–1828. We show that the number of children in farming households increased with frontier closure, while the presence of non-family labourers decreased over time. Contrasting with the classic interpretation, we explain this by acknowledging that the demand for family labour was not a function of its marginal productivity and that farmers reacted differently to diminishing land availability depending on their wealth. Poorer households, which made up the majority of this frontier population, responded to shrinking land availability by employing relatively more family labour, while the wealthiest group invested in strengthening market access.

TRANSLATED ABSTRACTS FRENCH – GERMAN – SPANISH

Jeanne Cilliers et Erik Green. L’hypothèse sur la disponibilité de terres et la main d’œuvre dans une économie de colons: richesse, main d’œuvre et composition du ménage à la frontière sud-africaine.

La littérature traditionnelle de la frontière identifie une corrélation positive entre la disponibilité de terres et la fertilité. Une explication courante est que la demande de travail des enfants est supérieure dans les régions frontalières nouvellement établies, par comparaison avec d’anciennes régions agricoles plus densément peuplées. Dans cet article, nous contribuons au débat en analysant la relation entre la composition du ménage et la disponibilité de terres dans une région frontalière en train de fermer, le district de Graaff-Reinert dans la Colonie du Cap en Afrique du Sud, entre 1798 et 1828. Les auteurs montrent que le nombre des enfants dans les ménages agricoles augmenta avec la fermeture des frontières, tandis que la présence d’ouvriers agricoles non familiaux déclina au fil des ans. Contrairement à l’interprétation classique, nous expliquons ce phénomène en reconnaissant que la demande de travailleurs familiaux ne dépendit pas de sa productivité marginale, et que les exploitants agricoles réagirent différemment selon leur richesse à la disponibilité de terres diminuante. Les foyers plus pauvres, qui constituaient la majorité de cette population frontalière, répondirent à la disponibilité de terres déclinante en employant relativement plus de main d’œuvre familiale, tandis que le groupe le plus riche investit dans le renforcement de l’accès au marché.

Traduction: Christine Plard

Conflicting interpretations of economic and social conditions in inter-war Britain are a staple diet of the historiography of the period. Can it be best characterized as one of social deprivation and economic decay or of social and economic improvement? The level of unemployment and its effects on those who experienced it is a critical element in the debate and this study will contribute to it in a number of ways. It will, through a case study of the East Midland coalfields, emphasize that underemployment (or short-time working) has been comparatively neglected in accounts of unemployment and the “real” incidence of the latter therefore underestimated. Moreover, the effects of underemployment were no less real in terms of depressing living standards than more permanent forms of unemployment. The traditional view of the relatively prosperous underemployed East Midlands' miner compared to his fully employed Durham or South Wales counterpart is, therefore, no longer tenable, The view, popularized recently by Benjamin and Kochin, that this form of unemployment was voluntary in nature will also be questioned as will the generalization that miners' trade unions preferred wage maintenance to maximising employment levels in their industrial relations strategies. Trade union officers gave a high priority to achieving an employment situation which combined work spreading and the receipt of statutory unemployment benefit by their members. The partial failure of these endeavours to mitigate the full impact of short-time working on miners' income is further evidence of the need to qualify the “optimistic” interpretation of living standards in inter-war Britain.

Not long ago, sociologists and labor economists used to talk confidently about the “natural history of the strike”. By that they meant its rather smooth progress along a line that supposedly rose rapidly in the early stages of industrial growth, gradually flattened out with the establishment of stable collective bargaining, and slowly fell as the strike proceeded to “wither away” in the prosperity of “advanced industrial society”.

Since 1917, the European social democratic movement has given fulsome support to Zionism. The article examines the ideological basis on which Zionism and, in particular, Labour Zionism gained, from 1917, the backing of social democratic parties and prominent socialists. It argues that Labour Zionism's appeal to socialists derived from the notion of “positive colonialism”. In the 1930s, as the number of Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution increased considerably, social democratic pro-Zionism also came to be sustained by the fear that the resettlement of Jews in Europe would strengthen anti-Semitism and the extreme right.

Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Minas Gerais was heavily reliant on its slave labor force and invested in the social order shaped by slavery. The main systematic challenge to slavery was discrete negotiations of manumission that resulted in the freedom of a few individual slaves. This practice fueled the expansion of a free population of African descendants, who congregated most visibly in the captaincy's urban centers. Through an examination of manumission stories from two African-descendant families in the towns of Sabará and São José, this article underscores the relevance of family ties and social networks to the pursuit and experience of freedom in the region. As slavery remained entrenched in Brazil, despite Atlantic abolitionist efforts elsewhere, urban families’ pursuit and negotiation of manumissions shaped a historical process that naturalized the idea and possibility of black freedom.

When Warren Hastings established the English East India Company's opium monopoly in Bihar in 1773, the contractors who undertook its management were expressly forbidden to compel the ryots (tenant-cultivators) to grow poppy. Later, Warren Hastings allowed this restriction to be quietly dropped from the contracts, and in the 1780's the ryots were protected only by implication, in that the contractors were required to deliver to the Company as much opium as could be procured “lawfully and reasonably”. Although no legal powers of coercion were granted, it accorded well with native custom that the ryots should be compelled to keep up the cultivation where it had previously existed, and when Lord Cornwallis investigated the matter in 1788 he found it to be generally understood that such compulsion was in force. Cornwallis intended to bring to the Company's terriories the benefits of personal freedom under the rule of law, but he did not wish to disrupt the opium arrangements. He therefore laid down fixed scales of remuneration for the opium ryots which he hoped would be generous enough to make them willing to continue and extend the cultivation, but did not immediately proclaim their emancipation. The contracts of 1789 were ambiguous; they did not say whether the continuance of existing cultivation was to be comulsory, but only that its extension was to be left to the option of the ryots. In 1793, however, when the ryots had had time to experience the benefits of the fixed rates of pay and their deliveries were increasing satisfactorily, the cultivation was declared to be completely optional. This caused no difficulties in Bihar.

With the “forward march of labor halted”, and labor movements everywhere in retreat, T.H. Marshall's state-based emphasis on social welfare as “social right” has reminded those interested in reform that appeals to membership in a national community, the essence of citizenship, have served to rally groups to successful struggles for reform. Those aspects of Marshall's ideas, best summarized in his classic 1949 address, “Citizenship and Social Class”, with the greatest resonance for modern social theorists revolve around the relationship between citizenship, rights and markets. For Marshall, “the universal status of citizenship” was a plane of equality such that “all who possess the status (of citizenship) are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed”. Rights were embodied in a common culture and enforced by state power. Marshall believed that, gradually, one particular kind of rights, “social rights”, would come to limit the power of the market. While markets would continue to exist and to generate social inequality, government redistribution would increasingly expand the plane of equality to include the most important aspects of material and cultural life. The distinctive feature of these social rights according to Marshall is that they were not exemptions, privileges or paternalistic solicitude for those excluded from what he labels the “national community”, but social rights were benefits given to members of the community to encourage and facilitate their continued participation.

The controversy around Bruce Gilley's article “The Case for Colonialism” has drawn global attention to a stream of revisionist claims and visions on the history of colonialism that has emerged in academia and in the media in recent years. Authors such as Nigel Biggar in the UK, Niall Ferguson in the USA, and Pieter Emmer in the Netherlands, have all published similarly revisionist claims about colonialism, arguing that postcolonial guilt and political correctness blind the majority of their colleagues to the positive side of the colonial project. Their argument chimes with wider societal trends, transforming the revisionist defenders of empire into heroes of a reinvigorated nationalist right within and beyond academia. The public influence attained by these approaches to colonialism requires historians to expose the deep methodological flaws, misreading of historical facts, and misrepresentations of prior scholarship that characterize the writings of this emerging revisionist trend. It is for this reason that the Editorial Committee of the International Review of Social History (IRSH) has decided to devote its first ever Virtual Special Issue to labour history's case against colonialism. This article, also an introduction to the Virtual Special Issue, sifts through the logical implications of the claims made by Gilley and like-minded scholars, providing both a contextualization and a rebuttal of their arguments. After assessing the long absence of colonial labour relations from the field of interest of labour historians and the pages of the IRSH itself, this article shows the centrality of a critique of colonialism to labour history's global turn in the 1990s. Using a selection of articles on colonial labour history from the IRSH's own archive, the article not only reconstructs “labour history's case against colonialism”, but also shows why labour history's critical insights into the nature of colonialism should be deepened and extended, not discarded.

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.

Between the wars, the response of the British Labour Party and Trades Union Congress to the problem of the unemployed was extremely limited. Committed to gradualist philosophies, the leaders of the labour movement were unwilling to attempt genuine socialist remedies in office, and, in opposition, to provide a militant leadership for the protest movement. The National Unemployed Workers' Movement, begun in 1921 and not finally dissolved until after the outbreak of the Second World War, was the only body which attempted to mobilise unemployed discontent. After 1926, the Labour Party Executive and the General Council of the TUC consistently refused to have any contact with this organisation on the grounds that, like the National Minority Movement and the later Rank-and-File Movement, the NUWM was merely a subsidiary of the British Communist Party. This article is an attempt to show that by a process of induction the Labour leaders branded the unemployed movement as a whole on the basis of the known Communist allegiance of a number of its leaders, and to demonstrate that they allowed themselves to become so sidetracked by the issue of whether or not the NUWM was a Communist front that their own efforts on behalf of the unemployed suffered in consequence.