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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

On January 8, 1893, the voters in the second electoral district, Department of the Tarn, cast ballots in a partial election of more than local interest. The Marquis de Solages had resigned his seat in the Chamber of Deputies on the previous October 14 during the bitterness generated by the strike against his Carmaux coal company. The socialists of the district, at first with considerable hesitation, nominated as their candidate Jean Jaurés, who had emerged as the outstanding champion of the Carmaux miners in 1892. When he carried the election against Héral, his chief opponent, by a vote of 5317 to 4843, it meant the return to Parliament of the man who emerged as one of the three most important socialists in the prewar Republic.

The emergence of wage labour in Europe has traditionally been seen as a transition from peasant agriculture to employment in urban industries involving permanent migration from rural areas to the cities. In this context migration was often depicted as a flight from the land forced by enclosure or by famine. This particular form of proletarianization-cumurbanization was indeed of major historical significance. Recently, how-ever, many historians have tried to shift the emphasis in another direction. According to one such scholar, Charles Tilly, European demographic growth from the Middle Ages to the late nineteenth century was caused predominantly by the proletarianization outside the cities which was induced by the modernization of agriculture and, above all, by proto-industry. Migration also plays an important role in this model. Firstly, early modern European proletarianization led to net migration losses of European proletarians who left for white settlement colonies, as in the cases of Spain, England and southern Germany. Secondly, proletarianization had major mobilizing effects on the rural population by way of short-distance and temporary or seasonal migration, followed by long-distance migration during the nineteenth century. As a rule, proto-industry caused indirect proletarianization through self-employment which brought the work to the labourers rather than causing migration.

Popular conceptions of the politics of Robert Owen have changed surprisingly little since the early nineteenth century. Within a short time of the advent of his national campaign for Poor Law reform, Owen came under attack from radical parliamentary reformers on the grounds of his ostensible political conservatism. Among the rumours then afloat among the reformers, Richard Carlile later wrote, one was “that Mr. Owen was an instrument of the Government, to bring forward this plan of providing for the lower and poorer classes, for the purpose of drawing their attention from Parliamentary Reform”.

The appeal issued by the St Petersburg Soviet on December 1, 1905, and known as the Financial Manifesto, served as a pretext for the Witte Government to liquidate the Soviet and to start a counterattack which, in a short time, completed the defeat of the first Russian revolution. The Manifesto represents a unique attempt to further the objectives of revolutionaries by undermining the monetary system, but it did not inaugurate a new strategy for revolutionaries in Russia, nor has it influenced revolutionary movement elsewhere. The originality of the Manifesto lies in its advocacy of a set of actions designed to bring about the downfall of Tsarism by exerting pressure on the gold base of the monetary system and by undermining government credit, rather than through withholding of tax payments. Refusal to pay taxes has been a widely used political weapon, at least since the American Revolution. It found its place in the program of the British Chartist movement, one of the first political movements rooted essentially in the working class.

The failure of the ILP to convince a Labour opposition, and then a Labour government after 1929, to abandon its view that banking and politics were quite separate fields of activity is well-known. Politicians were not bankers: it was as simple as that. Ramsay MacDonald, though not averse to political programmes as such, was certainly suspicious of “unauthorised” programmes. In a veiled but unmistakable reference to ILP policy statements, he told the 1927 Labour Party conference that

“authorised programmes might have a certain number of inconveniences, but unauthorised programmes had many more inconveniences, and he was not at all sure that during the last twelve months or two years the Labour Party had not suffered more from unauthorised programmes and statements than it had suffered from the issue of well-considered and well-thought-out documents and pronouncements.”

Philip Snowden was much more explicit. Unlike Sir Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, Snowden did recognise a causal relationship between changes in the availability of credit and changes in the levels of production and employment, but thought that this was a relationship which politicians should not interfere with. Control of credit held within it the possibility of inflation. “It might be highly dangerous”, Snowden warned the 1928 Labour Party conference, “in the hands of a Government that wanted to use this means in order to serve some purpose, or to gain popular support.” One might achieve temporary benefits, such as the reduction of unemployment from one and a quarter million to a quarter of a million in nine months, but there would be a terrible price to pay later – all the more terrible because unspecified.

Petitioning as a method of expressing grievances in British history was not peculiar to any particular set of individuals, but was widely used by all sections of society for a range of issues. Given its origins, however, it became ritualized as the means of labour negotiation for workers who were employed by the state, and, by the nineteenth century, by municipal authorities. This was before the institutionalization of trade unions and their recognition as representative agencies for industrial bargaining. One of these groups of workers in the state sector were naval dockyard employees, engaged in the construction, repair, and maintenance of British naval ships. For these workers, the nature of labour relations, and the importance of petitioning as an instrument of negotiation between employees and employer, was both complex and dynamic.

This article investigates the relationship between social mobility and status in guilds and the political situation in sixteenth-century Ghent. First, it argues that Ghent guilds showed neither a static picture of upward mobility nor a rectilinear and one-way evolution. It demonstrates that the opportunities for social promotion within the guild system were, to a great extent, determined by the successive political regimes of the city. Second, the article proves that the guild boards in the sixteenth century had neither a typically oligarchic nor a typically democratic character. Third, the investigation of the houses in which master craftsmen lived shows that guild masters should not be depicted as a monolithic social bloc, but that significant differences in status and wealth existed. The article concludes that there was no linear positive connection between the duration of a master craftsman's career and his wealth and social position.

“Never have I seen such a display of selfishness, frigidity to every human sentiment, such ready and happy self-delusion”, wrote Lord Ashley of the opposition to his coal-mines bill in the House of Lords. Historians have tended to confirm Ashley's judgement, and agreed that the motives of the Northern coal-owners in opposing the bill were inspired by simple self-interest, a desire to preserve their right to dispose of their pits, and the men, women and children in them, as they saw fit. It would, of course, be naive to suggest that the Northern coal-owners were not self-interested, but it is perhaps worth analysing the nature of that self-interest, which was not, as the simple and usual dismissal of it would suggest, merely an assertion of proprietorial rights.

This survey of the personnel of the highest bodies of the Comintern is meant to be a tool for researchers and historians studying the history of the international labour movement, especially of the Communist International.

This article deals with cash crop production and its impact on labour relations in postcolonial African peasant agriculture. The focus is on the Lilongwe Land Development Programme (1968–1981) in Malawi. The aim of the programme was to enable African farmers to increase yields and make them shift from the cultivation of tobacco and local maize to groundnuts and high-yielding varieties of maize. The programme failed to meet its goals, because of contradictory forces set in motion by the programme itself. The LLDP enabled a larger segment of farmers to engage in commercial agriculture, which caused a decline in supplies of local labourers ready to be employed on a casual or permanent basis. Increased commercial production was thus accompanied by a de-commercialization of labour relations, which hampered the scope for better-off farmers to increase yields by employing additional labourers. By using both written and oral sources, this article thus provides an empirical case that questions the conventional view that increased cash-crop production in twentieth-century rural Africa was accompanied by a commercialization of labour relations. It concludes that the history of rural labour relations cannot be grasped by simple linear models of historical change, but requires an understanding of local contexts, with a focus on farming systems and factors that determine the local supply of and demand for labour.

This essay examines the use of famine-plot rhetoric in the course of disputes over free trade in the French Atlantic during the late eighteenth century. Seeking to discredit officially sanctioned trade monopolies, French plantation owners frequently suggested that the control exercised by metropolitan merchants over transatlantic commerce was responsible for food shortages among the enslaved population of the colonies. In reality, the planters themselves bore primary responsibility for malnutrition in the French Caribbean, thanks to their reliance on the slave trade and support for the expansion of plantation agriculture. While proponents of the colonial famine plot accepted that plantation slavery had made it impossible for the resources available in the colonies to sustain the growing enslaved population, they remained committed to the plantation system. In advocating expanded free trade as the best means to ensure the continued growth of the colonies, French planters anticipated a response to the environmental problems caused by colonial expansion that became increasingly prevalent among proponents of European imperialism during the nineteenth century.