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.

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.”

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 article examines the social and spatial embedding of the Indonesian prison island of Nusakambangan within the colonial society of the Dutch East Indies. It challenges the conception of the colonial prison site as an unquestioned symbol of discipline and control in the hands of the authorities, doing so by studying the various images, reputations, and stigmas of the island that circulated in the colony. Its reputation was established and disseminated by journalists, politicians, and other “informed outsiders”, who paid short authorized visits to the island, and their conclusions and evaluations determined, to a large extent, the effectiveness of Nusakambangan as a deterrent and as a symbol of colonial discipline and control.

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.

This article will demonstrate how jokes are used to foster the perception of community among workers on the shopfloor of a garment workshop in Hanoi, Vietnam. Although jokes cannot be considered as overt resistance on the part of workers, by containing an element of collective reality and desire a sense of collectivity among the workers is heightened. The article will analyse two jokes in their embedded contexts to highlight the importance of humour in the workers' struggle against management.

This article examines the changing role of the Swedish state in employment and welfare regulation in an environment that has become more market driven, commodified, and Europeanized. It begins with a theoretical reflection on the role of the state in capitalist development and a review of the recent debate on the spatiality of state regulation: the state as employer, redistributor, and arbiter, and as a shaper of employment relations and welfare. In the latter role, the state is conceptualized as employer, guarantor of employment rights, and procedural regulator, as intermediating neo-corporatist processes, as macroeconomic manager, and as welfare state. From this theoretical basis, the paper identifies changes in state employment and welfare regulation by comparing two periods: the original and mainly nation-state-based founding stage of the Swedish welfare and employment model as it developed after the 1938 Saltsjöbaden Agreement, and the period after Sweden’s accession to the European Union in 1995.

The British General Strike of 1926 was one of the turning points of the inter-war years. The defeat which the trade unions suffered at the hands of the Government successfully discredited the idea of widespread industrial action as a method of obtaining the demands of labour. It did much to ensure the relatively quiescent acceptance by labour of the persistent unemployment of the thirties. It removed the threat to the established order which had existed since the turbulence of the immediate post-war years and provided the necessary preliminary to the increasing respectability of trade unions as a pressure group. The definitive history of the general strike has yet to be written, and that the subject remains open to differing emphasis and interpretation is evidenced by the most recent writing on the subject by A. J. P. Taylor and John Saville. The Public Records Act of 1967, by making available a large collection of Cabinet and Departmental papers, has opened up the possibility of a revision of our view of the strike and provided much important additional detail, notably about the Government's role in the events of 1925-26. Of the matters which still exercise the minds of historians of the General Strike, four main questions have been selected for consideration. First of all, there is the intriguing problem of the 1925 industrial crisis when the Government averted an embargo on the movement of coal by granting a subsidy to the coal industry and appointing a Royal Commission to enquire into the future of the industry.

Financial self-help organizations can be found in many parts of the world, and the cities of Java are among the areas where they are particularly widespread. Since about the 1950s, interest in these institutions among anthropologists and development sociologists has increased considerably. Analyses of financial self-help organizations have most often focused on their economic or their social function; few scholars have pointed to their function as providers of security and identified self-help organizations as typical forms of local social security institutions. The main shortcoming of most of these studies is that they base their conclusions solely on an analysis of the financial arrangements provided by these self-help organizations, neglecting the accommodating practices that people undertake in order to fit the provisions of self-help organizations to their own household needs. This essay explores the observation that financial self-help organizations do not simply provide security through the different kinds of insurance mechanisms they might contain, but that, particularly through the way in which people use them and participate in them, these institutions become meaningful for coping with insecurity. It examines the question of whether participation in financial self-help organizations contributes to the ability of households to cope with adversities and deficiencies in a concrete social context. Research aiming to answer this question was conducted in Bujung, an urban ward on the outskirts of Yogyakarta, on the island of Java.

In the decade since the publication of Chartist Studies there have been published a considerable number of studies of Chartism in different towns and regions of the country. These have been of great use in the correction of generalization in our knowledge of the subject; in assessing the type of support for Chartism and the regional strength of that support; in showing the local factors which caused people to join the movement and assessing the relative importance of economic and political motives; and many other aspects which have deepened our knowledge. In this flow of studies the north east has been neglected, situated as it is between the importance of Chartism in Lancashire and Yorkshire (in Chartist literature invariably referred to as the north) and the equally interesting moderation of Scottish Chartism. As a result there has been only one article on Chartism in the region, by W. H. Maehl, which, although it contains much useful information on 1839, tends to exaggerate the significance of Chartism in the area and the extent to which the pitmen were active in the movement. This article is an attempt to look at further evidence in order to draw some new conclusions with regard to Chartism in the area.

The search for the origins of government intervention in the nation's economic life has long interested historians of Victorian Britain. Indeed, in recent years it has given rise to an extended and enthusiastic controversy. This debate is so well known and has been so often summarised that it is only necessary to observe here that the core of the argument has been about whether government growth was generated more by ideology (Benthamism) or force of circumstances (Professor MacDonagh's “intolerable situation”). There is, however, consensus on several other points, namely, that the mid nineteenth century was not the “golden age” of laissez-faire that Dicey supposed and that government inspection was crucially important as the agency of state intervention.

On the 27th May 1797 the High Court at Vendôme sentenced Babeuf to death and Buonarroti, then 36 years old, to deportation, but this being postponed there followed a long life of imprisonment and exile. Buonarroti led a mysterious life, and our knowledge about certain phases of his life and activities since Vendôme is incomplete. Buonarroti has, of course, always been known as one of the important actors of the conspiracy connected with the name of Babeuf, and as the author of a book, dealing with this conspiracy. This rare and famous book, published in 1828, was mainly regarded as the historical account of an eye-witness and participant of a post-thermidorian episode of the French Revolution. The book, however, was also a landmark in the historiography of the French Revolution, and did much for the revaluation and the rehabilitation of Robespierre and the revival of the Jacobin tradition under the Monarchy of July. By exposing the social implications of the Terror, and by a detailed account of the organisation and the methods and the aims of the conspiracy of 1796, the book became a textbook for the communist movement in the 1830's and fourties in France, and the fundamental source for its ideology. In fact, with the “Conspiration” started the Jacobin trend in European socialism.

This article reviews the existing literature on the rise of the New Unionism and suggests some revisions of the nature of the phenomenon based on recent research. One finding is that as institutions the unions were not militant but from their inception favoured a moderate stance regarding relations with employers. The causes of the New Unionism and the strike wave of 1889–1890 are analysed within a framework of neoclassical economics and the major operator in the situation is identified as the dwindling supply of rural labour which increased the value and bargaining power of the unskilled toward the end of the nineteenth century.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, the study of English popular protest was dominated by the work of Eric Hobsbawm, George Rudé, and Edward Thompson, and it is no exaggeration to suggest that their combined approach became the standard against which all subsequent work was judged. It was seminal, innovative and crucial to the emergence of a new “history from below”. But it was, to a degree, also formulaic: it relied on a trusted framework that historians have since struggled to deviate from. Through a detailed investigation of a set of disturbances in Berkshire, England during the so-called “Swing riots”, this essay seeks to demonstrate that a continued reliance on this model can be seen to have stifled a more nuanced understanding of particular “moments” of protest in the locality, and in doing so it places a much greater emphasis on local social – and in particular, parochial – relations than has previously been the case. In sum, within the context of late-Hanoverian popular protest, this essay is a plea for a new “history from within” to supplement the (now venerable) tradition of “history from below”.

The history of Irish republicanism has always suffered from an excessive concentration on its later phases. But much light can be thrown on its essential characteristics by a closer examination of its origins. A full understanding of such a contradictory movement would require an investigation of the mutations in public consciousness during the last three centuries. But most historians agree in tracing its origins to the United Irish Society of the 1790's, when the attitudes and conditions which were to dictate the future course of republicanism and loyalism were crystallised. In the light of recent events in Ireland interest in the United Irishmen has revived. However, even recent research has failed to explain satisfactorily the swift transformation of the United Irishmen's secular republicanism by the traditional fears and aspirations of the Catholic population. Nor has anyone attempted to answer the very basic question of how large sections of a non-political and essentially loyal peasantry could in the short period of the 1790's have acquired many of the fundamental traits of later separatist movements. Already by the turn of the century popular oral culture, latterly dominated by themes taken from Gaelic mythology, speaks instead of dead rebel heroes, of the English oppressor and the Protestant enemy. This new anti-English flavour in popular culture is particularly significant; English rule in Ireland had not been seriously questioned since the twelfth century, and the failure of the Bruce invasion in the fourteenth century was an indication of general Irish indifference to the nature of central government, provided life's daily routine remained undisturbed. This attitude characterised Irish thinking for the next four centuries, and like peasant communities elsewhere, the Irish remained essentially apolitical and parochial in outlook. They were scarcely the material from which a movement of national liberation could be fashioned.

For at least the past twenty years, historians of pre-colonial Africa have studied gender and ethnic relations, but have focused on either gender or ethnicity without making reference to the other. This essay redresses this neglect by demonstrating that changes in gender and ethnic relations within pre-colonial Africa so profoundly influenced each other that it is impossible to understand one without also taking into consideration the other. Documenting this intersection requires more than simply reconstructing how ethnic groups (in their efforts to compete with others for social and political status) altered gender relations within their societies by handling differentially the affairs of their female and male members. It involves more than analyzing how those disadvantaged because of their gender used the prevailing ethnic relations to ameliorate their own situations, and how these actions in turn altered ethnic relations in the societies in which they lived. It requires as well that we reconceptualize the very definition of ethnicity.

Most standard histories of Britain between the wars refer to the development of holidays with pay, albeit briefly. It is widely acknowledged that by the end of the 1930's the majority of the British working population benefited from a paid holiday. The crucial initiative, so it is claimed, was the Holidays with Pay Act of 1938, which gave Parliamentary approval to the principle of payment of wages during holidays. Clearly the growth of paid holidays is seen as yet another instance of a more affluent Britain, an integral element of the growth of leisure. However, there has been very little detailed discussion of the paid-holiday-policy option and the precise reasons for the formulation and implementation of that policy. This neglect is rather surprising given the popular support for this “fringe benefit”, which was perceived as providing a certain degree of financial security during the annual break from the rigours of work. It is true that there has been more specialised treatment, but even this is of a general nature, with little reference to the industrial and political struggle for holidays with pay.