This article clarifies the differences between occupational health and workplace health and reveals how the two overlap. It unravels a multi-layered narrative about cotton textile workers’ understandings and experiences of ill-health at work in America and Britain, utilizing a combination of oral histories, government documents, company and union records, and the trade press. It aims to identify the multiple influences on contemporary debates about health at work. Contrary to current historiography, I argue that gender was only occasionally important to such discussions among workers, and that gender did not significantly influence their responses to unhealthy conditions. Workers’ understandings of, and responses to, workplace hazards were individual and related to knowledge about risk, ill-health and socioeconomic factors. American and British workers’ understandings of and responses to their working environment reveals more convergence than divergence, suggesting a universal human response to the health risks of work that is not significantly influenced by national or industrial constraints, or by gender.

Since the 1990s, labor history has been presented as “in crisis”. This negative evaluation is an overstatement. It has nevertheless prodded historians, often productively, to rethink the basic orientations of working-class history. This survey article explores three recent pathways to a “new” labor history: the turn to transnational and global study; the “new” history of capitalism; and the study of slavery as unfree labor. These new approaches to labor history highlight an old dilemma: how the structured determinations of laboring life are balanced alongside dimensions of human agency in understanding the complex experience of the working-class past. It is argued that we need to consider both structure and agency in the researching and writing of labor history. If an older “new” labor history accented agency, new pathways to labor history too often seem constrained by “mind forg’d manacles” that limit understandings of workers’ past lives by emphasizing structure and determination.

This article looks at how rural inhabitants navigated state power under a regime led by a former socialist party that negotiated its conversion to a market economy while keeping tight control on the whole society. In that regard, it addresses adjustment in a very specific context, by analysing a distinctive chronology, raising the ruling party's ability to negotiate with the international financial institutions, and considering popular reactions from a rural point of view. The regime led by the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) managed to delay measures of structural adjustment during the 1990s and 2000s while deepening structures of state control it partly inherited from the former military junta. Brutal structural adjustment plans were refused, while international financial institutions were kept away from the Ethiopian government's policy mix, by way of elaborate ideological and institutional arrangements. The EPRDF coined its own version of the “developmental state” and renewed state control of the economy while deepening its articulation to global markets. Under the EPRDF, all sectors of society and especially peasantries were closely monitored and mobilized in the name of development. But although the open expression of dissent remained rare, peasants resorted to many strategies to cope with political control and to some extent divert it. By taking agricultural policies as a case study, the article describes peasant practices and questions differences between resistance, false compliance, and diversion, underlining how blurred such labels can actually be.

This article analyses the religious aspects of Spanish republicanism of the 1830s and 1840s. From the case of Catalonia, the most industrialized region of Spain, it is concluded that radical liberalism elaborated a synthesis of freedom and religion that was presented as an alternative to traditional religiosity. Re-elaborating old myths popular during the War of Independence of 1808–1814, in addition some liberals and republicans presented their political project in millenarianist terms. This millenarianism was due to the radicalism with which they interpreted the confrontation with political opponents, one of whom was the established Church. It follows that the religiosity and millenarianism exhibited by these republicans also involved a strong anti-clericalism. At the same time, in the political and cultural context of Spain, these proposals were not seen by their followers as a negation of divinity but as its truest expression.

The current stress of the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party on the necessity of “seeking truth from facts” and the accompanying more liberal attitude to research have led to a re-vitalisation, as in other areas, of the study of party history. The portrayal of Mao Zedong in a more fallible light and the ending of the overemphasis on his role in the Chinese Revolution have led to the study, or re-study, of aspects of Chinese communist history in which Mao was not directly, or only marginally, involved, and to evaluations, or re-evaluations, of the contribution of other communist leaders. The contemporary view that the concept of “two-line struggle” has been overstressed in past historiography, particularly during the Cultural Revolution decade, has also helped historians in China to provide a more “objective” account of the role of other key figures. Differences of opinion no longer have to be castigated as outright opposition nor do later “failings” by individuals necessarily lead to a search by historians to expose a “counter-revolutionary” past throughout.

By the late nineteenth century, the hungry increasingly found themselves constructed as objects of compassion. However, there were real limits to the “humanitarian discovery of hunger”. Not every famished body was understood as deserving of sympathy. Compassionate citizens were particularly troubled by the mass distress that often accompanied lengthy strikes. How should they respond to such hunger? A study of newspaper representations of strike-induced hunger reveals that a gendered discourse evolved which repeatedly concentrated attention on the starving “innocents”: the wives and children of male strikers. The discourse was apparently apolitical but, in truth, it was nothing of the sort. It adjudged the “innocents” worthy recipients of food aid, whilst frequently ignoring the hunger of the striking male and denying him support. Labour leaders had to choose their words carefully if they were to get his suffering recognized.

In this dossier, Marx's concept of primitive accumulation is applied to socialist development in the Soviet Union, China, and Romania, three countries in which socialist revolution occurred before the full development of capitalism. The introduction profiles the ideas of Evgenii Preobrazhensky, the Soviet theorist and left oppositionist, who first applied Marx's concept to the problems of socialist development, and was executed under Stalin in 1937. Preobrazhensky advanced the idea of “primitive socialist accumulation”, a process that would fund industrialization by extracting surplus through planned, non-coercive transfers from market-based and state sectors. Preobrazhensky's ideas sparked debates within communist parties over collectivization and the tempo of development. The introduction and articles in the dossier point the way towards future comparative research, suggesting that the processes of primitive capitalist and socialist accumulation shared painful similarities.

The 10th April 1848 is one of the most famous days in the history of the nineteenth century. The Chartists of London had screwed themselves up for a decisive trial of strength with the ruling classes. They found themselves outnumbered by the combined resources of the civil and military powers. They shrank back before the prospect of a collision with the vast forces of law and order and property commanded by the Duke of Wellington and Richard Mayne. What was to have been a triumphant demonstration of the overwhelming power and determination of the people, ended in the anything but triumphal progress of a few hired hackney coaches carrying a dubious petition. “The 10th April, 1848 will long be remembered as a great field day of the British Constitution”, announced the Times. “The signal of unconstitutional menace, of violence, of insurrection, of revolution, was yesterday given in our streets, and happily despised by a peaceful, prudent, and loyal metropolis. That is the triumph we claim…. This settles the question. In common fairness it ought to be regarded as a settled question for years to come. The Chartists and Confederates made the challenge, and chose the field and trial of strength. They must stand by their choice. They chose to disturb the metropolis for the chance of something coming of it. They fished for a revolution and have caught a snub. We congratulate them on their booty, which we hope they will divide with their partners in Dublin. It is, perhaps, a fortunate circumstance that so momentous a question as the free action of the British Legislature should be settled thus decisively….”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.