The English Chartists of the nineteenth century were men who lived in very modest circumstances, and their mobility, their empiricism, their lack of filing facilities, the housepride of their wives and the discontinuity of their particular organisations militated against the proper preservations of their archives. For the history of Chartism we rely upon contemporary printed sources, Home Office Papers, a handful of Collections and a few autobiographies. Thus when A.R. Schoyen set out to write Chartist Challenge, book a centred round the person of the Chartist leader George Julian Harney, he was obliged to open his Preface as follows: “The impersonal nature of most of the available materials on Julian Harney, mainly newspapers and periodicals in which he wrote, leave one with no more than conjectures about some aspects of his life.”

On 1 August 1893, already feeling the pinch of economic downturn, management at the Pray, Small & Co. shoe factory in Auburn, Maine, posted new wages for its employees. Twelve days later, facing their first lower pay checks, female stitchers in the factory walked off their jobs. The union which represented the stitchers declared the shop non-union a week later and called for all of its members to join the stitchers' strike. Only about a dozen male workers answered this call, as the two most highly-skilled groups of male workers, the lasters and the shoe cutters, remained on the job. These workers belonged to their own separate unions, which had either already agreed to the new wage list (the cutters) or were in the middle of negotiations over it with the company (the lasters). It took the cutters another week before they decided to join the stitchers' action; it would take the lasters a month and a half and a citywide expansion of the strike to make the same decision.

As Christopher Johnson rightly argues in the introduction to this collection of essays, de-industrialization is not a recent phenomenon. It has attracted much interest among historians, but that interest has focused primarily on its economic causes and consequences. The social, cultural, and political aspects of de-industrialization have attracted less attention – perhaps because our discipline is more concerned with the formation of social relationships and social movements and less with their disappearance. Do the close ties between social historians and social movements play a role here? Does their involvement blind them to the process of decline? Significantly, the most famous and impressive analysis of an anti-de-industrialization movement sheds little light on that aspect; it was the radical resistance to the parallel process of industrialization that captured the author's imagination.

This essay offers approaches to reading worker autobiographies as a genre as well as source of historical “data”. It focuses primarily on one example of worker narrative, the autobiographical notes of Eduard M. Dune, recounting his experiences in the Russian Revolution and civil war, and argues that such texts cannot be utilized even as “data” without also appreciating the ways in which they were shaped and constructed. The article proposes some ways to examine the cultural constructions of such documents, to offer a preliminary typology of lower-class autobiographical statements for Russia and the Soviet Union, and to offer some suggestions for bringing together the skills of literary scholars and historians to the task of reading workers' autobiographies.

Underground mining in Potosí was a male sphere. Nevertheless, women were actively involved in the early stages of silver mining in Potosí, when traditional technologies were still in use. They also played an important role in the local ore market. After the introduction of new technology and the reorganization of the labour force, the process of refining ore was much more complicated. Women then participated in some stages of the process: in selecting the ores and sieving. This implies that mining is a complex process with a labour and gender division that has been underrated and underestimated. More importantly, women became owners of rudimentary mills (trapiches) where the ore was processed, selling different amounts of silver to the Spanish authorities, making their living in this way.

The São Francisco River provided very obvious, close-by forms of sustenance for local communities. Beginning in the mid-1950s, the river became the place for large hydro-electric facilities, large-scale flooding, and population resettlement. A decade later, the federal government began working on pilot irrigation projects that would lead to areas described today as the Brazilian California. Hydro-power for Brazilian cities such as Recife and Salvador and irrigation for grapes and mangoes destined for the United States and Europe are among the eco-system services this river supplies. The purpose of federal policies for the north-east went beyond mitigation of the consequences of droughts, the hydraulic approach, and started to follow an economic approach based upon development; as a consequence, river and user came to be distant from one another. The two major intensive uses of the river, electricity and irrigation, threaten the long-term sustainability of this system.

Australian data can reflect on British questions, about the quality of immigrant labour, and the opportunities gained by migrating, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Three case studies are presented. The first uses quantitative methods and convict transportation records to argue that Ireland suffered a “brain drain” when Britain industrialized, siphoning off the cream of its workers to England and some, eventually, to Australia. Drawing on an entirely different type of data, the second study reaches strikingly similar positive conclusions about the qualities of Australia's early assisted immigrants: three splendidly visible immigrants stand for the tens of thousands of people who sailed out of urban and rural Britain to the distant colonies. A no less optimistic view of Australia's immigrants half a century later is demonstrated in the third case study on female domestic servants. Often referred to as the submerged stratum of the workforce, the most oppressed and the least skilled, the label “domestic servant” obscured a wide range of internal distinctions of rank and experience, and too often simply homogenized them into a sump of “surplus women”. This study helps to rescue the immigrant women from this fate and invests them with individuality and volition, offering the vision of the intercontinentally peripatetic domestic, piloting her way about the globe, taking advantage of colonial labour shortages to maximize her mobility and her family strategies. Best of all, these migrants emerge as individuals out of the mass, faces with names, people with agenda.

This article explores the British Empire’s configuration of imprisonment and transportation in the Andaman Islands penal colony. It shows that British governance in the Islands produced new modes of carcerality and coerced migration in which the relocation of convicts, prisoners, and criminal tribes underpinned imperial attempts at political dominance and economic development. The article focuses on the penal transportation of Eurasian convicts, the employment of free Eurasians and Anglo-Indians as convict overseers and administrators, the migration of “volunteer” Indian prisoners from the mainland, the free settlement of Anglo-Indians, and the forced resettlement of the Bhantu “criminal tribe”. It examines the issue from the periphery of British India, thus showing that class, race, and criminality combined to produce penal and social outcomes that were different from those of the imperial mainland. These were related to ideologies of imperial governmentality, including social discipline and penal practice, and the exigencies of political economy.

The Social Democratic Federation is usually regarded by historians as of only marginal importance to the working-class movement of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To support this view reference is often made to its naive and mechanistic interpretations of Marxist theory, its small membership and sectarian nature, and the futility of its concentration upon political activity amongst the unemployed at the expense of support for the industrial action of trade unionists and the Parliamentary representation of labour. The stereotype of a narrow, doctrinaire sect with incompetent leadership contains more than a grain of truth, but like most stereotypes conveys only a partial verity. Too often it is used as an excuse for neglecting the SDF on the precept that it was irrelevant and “misguided” in its conception of the right path for the working-class movement. The comparative failure of the SDF, however, owed at least as much to the deeply engrained reformist and trade-unionist tradition amongst the English working class as it did to the inadequacies of the SDF itself.

Joseph Rayner Stephens's active participation in the Chartist movement was limited to three months in the autumn of 1838. His Chartist career began in mid-September when he was elected as a delegate to the Convention by the men of Ashton-under-Lyne and had ended before he was arrested at the end of December. During that time he spoke at meetings not only in Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire but also at places as far afield as Carlisle and Norwich. He was elected a delegate to the Convention at Ashton, at the great South Lancashire demonstration, at Stockport, and at Norwich. He was a commanding figure on Chartist platforms, and historians of the movement have devoted a great deal of attention to him. His vivid and forceful language, prominence in the early stages of the agitation, early arrest, and seeming recantation of Chartism all provide choice material for historians, who have been quick to exploit it. By all hands, Stephens is given credit for the part he played in arousing the working men of the North of England and for fostering in them a sense of identity to which the Chartists could appeal. This was a fundamentally important contribution to the development of the Chartist movement. But historians have not clearly raised two important questions about Stephens's role in the movement. First, did Stephens think when he was participating in the movement that its immediate goal – enactment of the People's Charter – was worth-while? Timing is important here for many historians have noted that he renounced the movement between the time of his arrest in December, 1838 and his trial in August, 1839. Second, did his impact on the agitation extend beyond arousing the men of the North? These questions are related, for his skepticism about Chartist goals helped to shape his impact on the movement.

In May 1928 The Watling Resident, a local newspaper directed at a readership among the inhabitants of a working-class estate created by the London County Council on the north-western outskirts of the city, published its first issue. It took the opportunity to represent what it saw as its readers' urgent and existential difficulties: “We have been torn up by the roots and rudely transplanted to foreign soil.” According to the newspaper, these painful feelings of displacement were voiced “over and over again” by people living on the new estate. These migrants and their mouthpiece spoke and wrote in terms that prefigure the pioneering historical work of Oscar Handlin or suggest they were of one mind with the Chicago School of sociology. In this light it is remarkable that these migrants were not recent arrivals from Poland, or even from Ireland or Scotland; rather they had moved to the estate from inner London, and more than half had previously lived a few miles away in the north London boroughs of St Pancras, Islington, Finsbury, and Paddington.

In the late eighteen-seventies, the German Social Democratic Party, while still healing the wounds of old battles between Lassalleans and Eisenachers, was confronted by foes who delivered attacks on two levels. On the one level, Bismarck and his supporters fought energetically to annihilate the party with the passage of the Socialist Law (October 21, 1878). After some initial faltering steps, the Social Democrats found a firm footing and struggled successfully to preserve their political existence. The movement was preserved, even though the party organization, its affiliates and its newspapers were suppressed. On another level, the Social Democrats faced an ideological challenge. Their political suppression broadly paralleled the emergence of a conservative socialism which flourished for a short time in a variety of forms. Whatever clothing it wore, conservative socialism aimed to undermine the growing appeal of Social Democracy to the working-men of Germany. A theory of State Socialism was the most attractive garment designed by conservative social thought. The response of the Social Democratic Party to the various facets of this conservative socialism is a significant chapter in the history of the German socialist movement.

Massive, rapid capital accumulation is usually associated with capitalist development, but historically, socialist states were among the most aggressive accumulators. Accumulation in Maoist China was faster than even in Stalin's Soviet Union, despite the fact that China was a much poorer country with fewer natural resources. China's accumulation rate, defined as the ratio of gross capital formation to gross national income, reached twenty-five to thirty per cent in 1957–1962, peaking at forty-four per cent in 1958. This level proved to be unsustainable, but after a slowdown in the early 1960s, the rate rose back to thirty-six percent.1 As is well known, the cost of China's rapid industrialization was borne mostly by its rural population.2 My aim in this chapter is to show that it was disproportionally borne by rural women, who contributed to socialist accumulation in direct and indirect ways: directly, as collective farmers, growers of the grain, cotton, soy, tea, sugarcane, etc. that fueled industrialization; and indirectly, by biologically, socially, and materially reproducing the country's labor force and by submitting to a regime of extreme austerity that allowed the government to extract scarce resources and direct them to the cities and the export trade. My argument proceeds in three steps. I will begin with an overview of socialist primitive accumulation under Mao, its preconditions and mechanisms, and the ways it replicated earlier Soviet policies or diverged from them. Next, I will discuss the various ways in which rural women's work underpinned capital accumulation and laid the foundation for China's rapid industrialization in the years since Mao's death. Finally, I will look in some detail at rural women's work at home, to show how their self-exploitation, overwork, and underconsumption in the domestic realm created the conditions for accumulation. My focus is on cotton work – both cotton cultivation and domestic cloth production – but I will also look at other ways in which domestic work supported accumulation.

In his most recent return to a thesis first stated in 1957, Professor Norman Cohn remains convinced of the “parallels and indeed the continuity” between medieval millenarianism and modern totalitarianism. While Professor Cohn's treatment of this theme has in 1970 been stated “more briefly” than in 1957, it is difficult to share his view that it has simultaneously been rendered “more clearly”. Indeed the latest edition of The Pursuit of the Millennium might easily persuade the reader that Professor Cohn had surrendered that hypothesis which formed a major interest of his work.

In 1881–1882, Marx undertook extensive historical studies, covering a large part of what was then known as “world history”. The four large notebooks with excerpts from the works of (mainly) two leading historian of his time, Schlosser and Botta, have remained largely unpublished. In this article, Marx’s last studies of the course of world history are contextualized: Marx’s previous historical studies and his ongoing, but unfinished work on the critique of political economy. The range and scope of his notes is astoundingly broad, going far beyond European history and actually covering many other parts of the world. Marx’s focus in these studies supports the interpretation offered in the article: that the author of “Capital” was fascinated by the long process of the making of the modern states and the European states system, one of the crucial prerequisites of the rise of modern capitalism in Europe.

In post-colonial India labour was given the connotation of work in industry. The labourer as a social figure became linked to the modern economy, a direction in which Indian society was to develop at a rapid rate. The agrarian–rural mode of life and work would soon fade away to be replaced by an industrial-urban order. The close association of labour economics with industrial employment was a logical consequence of this restructuring. The expectation of the transformation that was going to take place makes it understandable why authors of authoritative textbooks on the shape of the working class and the trade union movement were able more or less to ignore the non-industrial way of life of the large majority of the working population.