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.

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.

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.

With the burning of central Thailand's capital city, Ayudhya, in 1767 and the destruction of virtually all the records kept there by the centralized bureaucracy of that kingdom, and with the Burmese occupation of the north and the devastating years of fighting around 1800 to drive them out, there is virtually no written record left at all for Thailand prior to the nineteenth century. There is a little material on rulers and some of their activities, but for social history the record is nearly blank. Is there then no way to write a social history or a gender history for Thailand?

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.

The anti-Semitism of the mid-nineteenth-century French socialists has often been cited. Charles Fourier saw the Jews as the incarnation of commerce: parasitical, deceitful, traitorous and unproductive. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon attacked the Jews even more violently, declaring the Jew the incarnation of finance capitalism and “by temperament an anti-producer”. The Fourierist Alphonse Toussenel argued in Les Juifs rois de l'époque that finance, that is to say, Jews, were dominating and ruining France, while Auguste Blanqui sprinkled his correspondence with remarks about Jewish usury and “Shylocks”, and in a general anticlerical critique blamed the Jews for having given birth to Catholicism, an even greater evil than Judaism. In the late 1860's Gustave Tridon, who was a close follower of Blanqui, wrote a book entitled Du Molochisme juif, in which he also attacked the Jews on anti-religious as well as racial grounds, in addition to using the usual economic terms of disparagement.

Studies of domesticity tend to take a simple view of the state's role. If the state made reforms, it was because some interest group forced it to do so. These studies risk a charge of functionalism by emphasizing that the state necessarily acted to further capitalist or patriarchal interests. In this paper I argue that the state's response to interests was neither as coherent nor as predictable as is suggested by these approaches. The state is a conflicting ensemble of institutions rather than a monolith. Various state agencies act independently, sometimes in conflicting ways, over domesticity. At the same time, overall, the state has relatively independent imperatives of its own too. Historically, domesticity has not been one of its high priorities. We can see that the New Zealand state undermined domesticity before second-wave feminism of the 1970s. But state powers are circumscribed by its democratic context. Just as there were limits to the state's willingness or ability to impose domesticity, so too were there limits to its power to legislate for equality.

The following survey regards the upper nobility, urban patricians and the clergy of medieval Bohemia as the more privileged, and groups such as the gentry, peasants and urban poor and women as the disadvantaged. There were exceptions within each group. The ethical and moral ideals of Hussite leaders addressed social and economic inequalities and gave hope that a society with greater benefits for the disadvantaged was possible. People from all groups participated in the revolution which in the end however did not produce the hoped for community. Economically, socially and politically Hussite society was not that different from the rest of Europe. Nevertheless, ideas such as religious toleration, popular sovereignty, the dignity of the common man and woman and the destructive powers of greed and violence all raised by the Hussites have survived within European civilization.

The revolt aboard the American slaving ship the Creole (1841) was an unprecedented success. A minority of the 135 captive African Americans aboard seized the vessel as it sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, to the New Orleans slave markets. They forced the crew to sail to the Bahamas, where they claimed their freedom. Building on previous studies of the Creole, this article argues that the revolt succeeded due to the circulation of radical struggle. Condensed in collective memory, political solidarity, and active protest and resistance, this circulation breached the boundaries between land and ocean, and gave shape to the revolutionary Atlantic. These mutineers achieved their ultimate aim of freedom due to their own prior experiences of resistance, their preparedness to risk death in violent insurrection, and because they sailed into a Bahamian context in which black Atlantic cooperation from below forced the British to serve the letter of their own law.

Aristotle's vigorous vindication of rhetoric pairs it with dialectic. Dialectic, for Aristotle, combines logical propositions with induction from rigorous evidence in an effort to prove a case beyond doubt. Rhetoric parallels dialectic, but combines arguments with examples in an effort to persuade. Neither one amounts to science, which for Aristotle requires irrefutable establishment of general principles.

1. political: arguing for or against a proposed course of action;

2. forensic: attacking or defending someone;

3. ceremonial: praising or condemning someone.

The social composition of female RSDRP members (who constituted between 11% and 15% of the total party membership) prior to 1917 is analyzed using prosopographic methods. The analysis reveals that women social democrats tended to come from higher social classes, and to have a higher educational attainment, and professional occupations. Thus, it is misleading to characterize the RSDRP as a “workers' party”, for only its male contingent was composed mostly of workers.

The analysis of the process of radicalization reveals the cultural barriers whioch these women had to overcome before they would join the party. Breaking free from their role in society meant, for them, leading fuller lives as women and an oppurtunity to dedicate themselves to the people.

On 26 December 1933 the front page of the socialist daily Vooruit (Forward) carries a lyrical description of the Christmas Congress of the Belgian Labour Party, already glorified by its old patron Emile Vandervelde as “the most wonderful socialist convention of the past 25 years”. In a long speech on the first day of session “comrade Rik de Man” has elaborated the Plan of Labour. When he leaves the rostrum he is embraced by Vandervelde and flooded by the acclamations of the delegates.

This essay will explore themes of proletarian masculinity (mardaangi) and humor (mazaak) arising from research amongst male migrant workers in a metalworking export factory in contemporary Delhi. The paper seeks to describe and critique metalworkers' vocabularies and practises of joking and horseplay, with particular reference to their homoerotic and heteroerotic imageries, as well as to their subtle auto-critiques. The paper attempts to view mazaak, despite its often vulgar, dualistic, and otherizing imageries, as an assertion of the erosic drive to affirm life, beyond the desire to merely survive, and contra the thanotic will to submit to the life-denying conditions of urban-proletarian existence. The paper probes the capacities and potentialities of certain styles of workers' mazaak, such as satirical and sarcastic humor (vyang), to critique exploitation, oppression, and associated dominant imageries of masculinity and work, and to suggest alternative visions and possibilities for proletarian inter-relations.

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.

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 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.

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”.

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.

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.