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.

The mid-seventeenth century English social movement known as the Levellers was perhaps the first liberal-democratic social movement. Among their communicative strategies, to garner supporters while challenging the authorities, humor figured prominently. In this article, the nature of this levelling laughter is highlighted and juxtaposed against Puritan injunctions to mourning and objections against humor. Regarding the latter, four such objections are distinguished and elucidated: “damnable heresies”, “strange opinions”, “fearful divisions”, and “loosenesse of life and manners”. Finally, it is suggested that the Puritan repudiation of the Levellers highlights the need for social movements of democratic dissent against various aspects of the given status quo to use incongruous and relief humor to prompt reflection without relying too heavily on boorishly flouting social prohibitions for the sake of the pleasures of superiority and release. It also suggests that humor will do better in a culture already tolerant of pluralism, comfortable with a measure of non-literal ambiguity, and committed to democratic deliberation.

The principal purpose of these notes is to correct certain misunderstandings which I believe to be widely prevalent concerning the character of British Trade Unionism during the quarter of a century which followed the establishment in 1850—1851 of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. The period covered thus begins with the inauguration of the ‘new model’ type of Amalgamated Society, and extends to the end of the trade boom of the early seventies, stopping just short of the Great Depression which set in about 1875.

The Popular Front's victory in the legislative elections of April-May 1936 caused a great sense of relief and then a joyful upsurge of hope and idealism in its supporters. Spontaneously, thousands of workers began to occupy shops and factories. On June 4, when the Blum government came to office, the strikes had begun to paralyze the economy. In the next two weeks, perhaps because it was clear that the Blum government was not going to suppress the strikes but rather to negotiate an end to them, perhaps because by that time it was also clear that neither the Confédération Générale du Travail nor the Communist and Socialist parties would try to take advantage of the situation for an insurrectionary purpose, the strikes spread like wildfire throughout the country. Hundreds of thousands of workers apparently wanted to guarantee, through “direct action”, that the benefits of the Matignon accords and of the promised legislation would apply in their industry or region. It was in these conditions that the Blum government managed to get the conservative Senate's approval for the most progressive social reforms of the Third Republic.

Comparative social history is still grappling with the problems raised in the debate about history's “cultural turn”. And while a new “social turn” seems imminent at the moment, this means a new departure into an actor-oriented analysis of institutions (including social movements and all forms of contentious politics) beyond the “cultural turn”, incorporating a host of compelling insights into the cultural constitution of social reality – and not a return to the old simplistic views of the “modernization era”.

Several authors have argued that one of the main goals of the International Working Men's Association was to control transnational labour markets. In the eyes of trade unionists, especially in Britain, uncontrolled cross-border migratory movements threatened to undermine wage standards and working conditions. Their solution was to organize internationally, both to prevent strike-breaking and wage-cutting by workers from abroad, and to support unions elsewhere to raise wage standards in their home countries. Cigar-makers operated on a cross-border labour market and were very prominent in the First International. In this article I describe the connections between the German, British, Dutch, Belgian, and American cigar-makers as migratory workers, and their actions to stimulate, support, and coordinate trade unions internationally. I argue that the international cooperation of cigar-makers was primarily motivated by a wish to regulate their cross-border labour market, not so much by an abstract ideal of international solidarity.

Dialectical idealism as applied to social theory may be provisionally defined as an attempt to explain the evolution of Western society through the use of dialectical forms which rely upon the presumed motive power of spiritual, mental, or ideal forces. These forces are presumed to “realize themselves” in the historical process. Hegel and Fichte, of course, first made such concepts familiar. The mighty influence of Marx and dialectical materialism, which kept the form but not the idealism of the Hegelian dialectic, has accounted for a lasting eclipse of interest in this earlier form of dialectical social thought. It is at least partly a symptom of this general decline of interest in dialectical idealism that the work of Lorenz von Stein has become, until quite recently, all but forgotten to modern scholarship.

The agricultural settlement was essential in the process of establishing the state of Israel. In the 1920s the Zionist leadership claimed exclusivity in employing Hebrew workers. This research focuses on the lone Moshava settlement, and examines the reasons why its farmers, opposing the hegemonic ethos, preferred the employment of Arab workers. In the broader historical context, this article's interest is the possible reactions of a peripheral social group straining under the pressure of the hegemonic elite. The research shows how the farmers' position caused increasing involvement by powerful external organizations in the decision-making process of employment, to such an extent that the farmers virtually lost their control of the matter. Furthermore, the research illustrates how the fact that national institutions and the Hebrew workers belonging to the same ideological environment caused social values to be identified with national values and favoured them over economic values.

This article explores the lives of Sümerbank and Etibank workers inside and outside their workplaces during World War II. First, it examines their social origins and the process of recruiting those workers. Secondly, it draws attention to the unhealthy conditions in which they worked, the sundry forms of violence they were subjected to, and the insufficient wages they received. It goes on to analyze social services – nutrition, accommodation, and healthcare facilities – provided by those two enterprises. Drawing on official reports, petitions, and workers’ personal accounts, it highlights the inadequacies of those facilities, and the hierarchical and exclusionary practices inherent in them. Following this framework, it responds to the studies which portray workers in state-run enterprises as privileged government officials and those enterprises as centers of social education. Finally, it focuses on workers’ reactions to their social conditions in the form of high turnover rates. The discussions of politicians, government officials, and journalists revolving around high turnover rates suggest that this reactive form of labor activism played an important role in the formulation and enactment of social policies concerning labor.

The activity of the Communist League (Kommunisten-Bund), 1847–1852, and of its immediate predecessors – the League of the Just (Bund der Gerechten), 1838–1847, and the Communist Correspondence Committee (Kommunist. Korrespondenz Kommittee), 1846–1847 – was undoubtedly one of the most interesting stages in the large process of the formation of the international labor movement in its initial period. The history of these organizations is important from many points of view: it is important for the understanding both of the true roots of this movement, and of its search for organizational forms; and particularly for the light it throws upon the history of its efforts to develop a program and tactics. This is why research has so often turned its attention to this subject. And yet, in terms of completeness and scientific documentation, there is as yet no study providing a satisfactory survey of the life and activities of these organizations.

There are very few sources available to historians which allow us to hear the voices of Anglo-American women. How can we understand what ordinary women believed were their responsibilities to their families and communities and the responsibilities of their government to them? Petitions provide historians with one of the few opportunities to “hear” non-elite women voice their concerns. In provincial New Hampshire, women regularly approached the royal government with individual requests. By viewing the rights associated with petitioning, the procedure involved, and the variety of applications for petition use, female agency in colonial society becomes more apparent. Through petitions, it is possible to understand under what circumstances women turned to the government for assistance, and under what circumstances the government granted their petitions.

One summer's day, 22 June 1841, fifty-nine year-old John Minter Morgan launched a scheme to establish “self-supporting villages” under the superintendence of the Established Church. It was a stirring attempt to rouse the Establishment to its responsibilities in the face of the Owenite challenge, and it secured a respectable response. An admiral (Sir G. Scott), a general (George Norton Eden) and a respectable muster of clergy, mainly from the Ham, East Sheen and West Molesely districts, all rallied to hear what was afoot.

In the process of establishing continence as the norm of gentlemanly sexual behaviour, continence became a Victorian gospel. The mere narration of the process under Section II in the previous issue of this journal did not in itself yield the historical meaning of the gospel of thrift in semen. To understand the process historically is to ascertain the function of continence in a comprehensive system of relationships. More specifically the gospel of continence reveals its meaning when it is related to (1) the dynamic quality inherent in the structure and functioning of the Respectable Economic System, the compulsion to accumulate and reinvest capital, (2) Respectable thought about the purpose of political economy, and (3) the degree of integration of the virtue of continence into the Respectable Social System.

This article provides an introduction to the two articles in this Special Theme on education, labour, and discipline in colonial Asia. It offers a brief historiography of education to indigenous children in the colonial context provided by non-state as well as state actors. We argue that while many studies have separated the motives behind, and actions of, these different actors in relation to education and “civilizing missions”, it is worthwhile connecting these histories. Moreover, apart from looking at motives, the articles in this Special Theme aim to show the value of studying educational practices in a colonial context. Finally, this introduction identifies several opportunities for future – comparative as well as transnational – studies into the topic of education, child labour, and discipline.

This essay looks at the patterns of pawning in Germany in the decades preceding the First World War. It tries to present pawning and thus also the economy of nineteenth-century working-class households in a new light. Contrary to the generally accepted view of social historians, it is unlikely that pawning served to secure the proletarian household in periods of real hardship. There is much evidence that pawning was only considered when it seemed very likely that the borrower would be able to redeem the pledge in due course. It was therefore part of a rather stable economic situation. Insecurity of prospects persuaded people to refrain from pawning. Pawnshops thrived not on working-class destitution, but on the very modest “affluence” proletarian families were able to achieve in the era of industrialization. The striking differences between the patterns of pawning in Germany and in Great Britain therefore point to significant differences in proletarian standards of living between the two societies in question.

Migration has been a central concern of many areas in the writing of European history, and even more so when dealing with the histories of the white settler colonies of North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In contrast, migration overseas constitutes a mere footnote (if it is mentioned at all) in densely populated China and India, where the total number of those who migrated out of the country in the last couple of centuries was a relatively small percentage of those who did not. In his thought-provoking and far-reaching essay, Adam McKeown challenges us to look beyond the normative model of “global” migration that focuses solely on European migration. Through innovative research and the compilation of range of data on China, India, central Asia, Japan, Siberia, south-east Asia that are seldom collated and analyzed together, McKeown demonstrates that Asian migration from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries was comparable in volume to the trans-oceanic migrations from Europe. The term “global” as the theme of McKeown's essay, used as an adjective, evocatively captures the migration patterns and circulations of the modern world. But the concept of global is also the definition of the process underlying the modern economic and political system that through its very logic of reproduction creates unequal and uneven terrains. My comments explore some aspects of this unequal terrain.

In all of the writing on Chartism, virtually no attention has been paid to the movement in northeastern England. Tucked off as they are in a remote corner of the country, Newcastle, Sunderland, and the industrial and mining communities around have been neglected by scholars who usually mean Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire when they speak of “the North”. Yet Chartism in Northumberland and Durham attained a stridency and vehemence which was rarely matched and never excelled elsewhere.

During the French colonization of Indochina (1863–1954), approximately 8,000 prisoners – many of them convicted of political crimes – were exiled to twelve different geographical locations throughout the French empire. Many of these prisoners came from a Chinese background or a culturally Chinese world, and the sites to which they were exiled (even the penal colonies themselves) contained diasporic Chinese communities. Knowing Chinese might be their greatest asset, or being able to “pass” as Chinese the most valuable tool to facilitate escape. This article explores a group of political prisoners sent from French Indochina to French Guiana in 1913 and their subsequent escape, with the aid of Chinese residents. If exile is, in one sense, the ultimate exercise of colonial power – capable of moving bodies to distant locales – examining these lives through a Vietnamese lens reveals a very different story than the colonial archival record reflects.