This article compares the experiences of independent women migrants in the textile cities of Preston, England; Paisley, Scotland; and Lowell, Massachusetts in the period 1850–1881. There are essentially two models describing single women's migration in the current historical literature. Both describe young women primarily in terms of personal economy and what kind of relationship they maintained with their parents before and after migration. The first emphasizes that though the European migrants were physically removed from their parents, they remained economically tied to their families; the second refers specifically to American women, defining them as emphatically independent, economically and socially, and cut off from their families. Direct comparison reveals remarkable similarity of experience for these young women. Though migrants in each city chose different occupations, each chose occupations that provided accommodation. Most became financially independent, rather than primarily contributors to a family economy, but maintained important supportive ties with family.

We have called this collection of essays Before the Unions. What exactly do we mean by (trade) unions and what preceded them? Exactly a hundred years ago Beatrice and Sydney Webb defined a trade union as “a continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment”. These permanent organizations of wage earners of the same occupation, according to most labour historians, started at a local level and tended to develop into national and sometimes even international unions and they formulated political as well as economic demands.

Historians of Chartism face a dilemma. On the one hand, they are obliged to interpret this national political movement on the national level, to attempt to explain why millions of British working men and women were engaged in organized political activity over several decades. But, on the other hand, many of the richest sources on Chartism are found on the local level. Older histories of the movement treated Chartism from a national perspective, but failed to take note of many of its complexities. More recently, a good deal of local research has rigorously tested our assumptions about Chartism, but the task of carefully analyzing the movement on the national level still remains.

Matters of labour organisation and control are clearly related to the progress of mechanisation. Economic growth results from increases in productivity brought about by management's combination of trained men and “skillful” machines in productive work. In isolation neither management, labour, nor capital can in themselves achieve sustained growth in the output of goods and services; the efficient co-ordination of a trained and disciplined workforce with equipment designed to perform specific activities is always required. In a period of changing technology such as the nineteenth century, however, the proper co-ordination may be difficult to achieve because the introduction of workers with new talents or machines which can perform multiple functions is apt to disturb existing work routines, upset prevailing cost relationships, and force management to reorganise entire sections of the productive process. This is particularly true if the various functions performed by new types of machinery have hitherto been assigned to more than one man or group of men.

Beyond Imagined Communities. Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Ed. by Sara Castro-Klarén and John Charles Chasteen. Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Washington DC; Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore [etc.] 2003. 280 pp. $45.00. (Paper: $22.95.)

Boyer, Christopher Robert. Becoming Campesinos. Politics, Identity, and Agrarian Struggle in Postrevolutionary Michoacán, 1920–1935. Stanford University Press, Stanford (Cal.) 2003. xii, 320 pp. Ill. £45.95.

Forment, Carlos A. Democracy in Latin America, 1760–1900. Volume I, Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru. [Morality and Society Series.] University of Chicago Press, Chicago [etc.] 2003. xxix, 454 pp. Maps. $35.00; £24.50.

Larson, Brooke. Trials of Nation Making. Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810–1910. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2004. xiii, 299 pp. Ill. Maps. $70.00; £45.00. (Paper: $24.99; £17.99.)

Studies in the Formation of the National State in Latin America. Ed. by James Dunkerley. Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, London, 2002. 298 pp. £14.95; € 20.00; $19.95.

The ideology of domesticity that identified women with a domestic role became more articulated in north-western Europe throughout the early modern period. At the same time, perceptions of work changed and a new appraisal of labour emerged. These seemingly contradictory tendencies prompt the question how women fitted in with the ideology of work. This article discusses common notions of the economic role of women as they emerged from the debates on women, gender relations, and work; how these notions were translated into practical advice in conduct literature; and with what norms women were confronted in everyday life. It appears that work was valued positively for both women and men. Women's involvement in remunerated work was not considered problematic. There was a dividing line, however, and that was drawn between work within the home, which was deemed women's work, and work outside the home, which was deemed men's work. In practice, a differentiation was made between social groups; women who lacked income from capital were supposed to earn their living from work.

Peasants in general, and rural rebels in particular, were mercilessly ridiculed in the satirical cartoons that proliferated in European cities from the mid-nineteenth century. There was more to these images than the age-old hostility of the townspeople for the peasant, and this article comparatively explores how cartoons of southern Italian brigands and rural Irish agitators helped shape a liberal version of what was modern by identifying what was not: the revolting peasant who engaged in “unmanly” violence, lacked self-reliance, and was in thrall to Catholic clergymen. During periods of unrest, distinctions between brigands, rebels, and the rural populations as a whole were not always clear in cartoons. Comparison suggests that derogatory images of peasants from southern Italy and Ireland held local peculiarities, but they also drew from transnational stereotypes of rural poverty that circulated widely due to the rapidly expanding European publishing industry. While scholarly debates inspired by postcolonial perspectives have previously emphasized processes of othering between the West and East, between the metropole and colony, it is argued here that there is also an internal European context to these relationships based on ingrained class and gendered prejudices, and perceptions of what constituted the centre and the periphery.

The emergence of drivers’ unions in the 1920s and 1930s highlights the wide range of strategies for social and economic organization available to workers in the Gold Coast. Particularly among workers who operated outside the conventional categories of the colonial economy, unions provided only one of many models for labor organization. This article argues that self-employed drivers appropriated unions and an international discourse of labor organization in the early twentieth century in order to best represent their interests to the colonial government. However, their understanding of the function and organization of unions reflected a much broader repertoire of social and economic organizing practices. Rather than representing any exceptional form of labor organization, drivers highlight the circulation of multiple ideas surrounding labor organization in the early decades of the twentieth century, which informed the ways in which Africans engaged in the wage labor economy and implicitly challenged British colonial assumptions about labor, authority, and control.

This article studies the strategic disciplinary and productive function of the colonial penal system of the Dutch East Indies (1816–1942). Developing convict labour as the main punishment for minor public and labour offences, the Dutch colonial regime created an increasingly effective system of exploitation that weaved together colonial discipline, control, and coercion. This system was based on two major carceral connections: firstly, the interrelated development and employment of different coerced labour regimes, and, secondly, the disciplinary role of the legal-carceral regime within the wider colonial project, supporting not only the management of public order and labour control, but also colonial production systems. Punishment of colonial subjects through “administrative justice” (police law) accelerated in the second half of the nineteenth century, leading to an explosion in the number of convictions. The convict labour force produced by this carceral regime was vital for colonial production, supporting colonial goals such as expansion, infrastructure, extraction, and production. The Dutch colonial system was a very early, but quite advanced, case of a colonial carceral state.

An insistence on the broad similarities and structural linkages of migrations across the globe since the 1840s is important because it can clear the ground for more effective comparisons. Only after questioning the a priori distinction that privileges “modern” transatlantic migrations as categorically distinct from those in the rest of the world can we begin to understand each migrant and migrant flow as emerging from a distinct nexus of global, regional, local, and historical processes. I think I am in agreement with all of the participants in this forum on this basic point. Rather than quibble over numbers and definitions, all of the contributions have attempted to refine our historical comparisons and question some of the interpretive frameworks that are rooted in depictions of the Atlantic migrations as a norm. Once this global foundation is established, we can engage in the detailed empirical and conceptual work that will better address the sticky problems of numbers and categories. Who and what is actually being counted and not counted? When and why should we distinguish between long and short distance, or between international and domestic migration? How should we deal with return and repeat migrations? What is revealed or obscured by taking individuals, families or more extended networks as the basic units of migration? What is the practical or discursive significance of “free” migration?

Britain's tradition of political asylum has for centuries brought refugees of many nationalities to her shores. The influence both direct and indirect, which they have exerted on British life has been a factor of no small importance. The role of religious immigration has frequently been examined, that of the socialist emigrés from Central Europe has so far received less detailed attention.

The first World War was an important period in the history of the British trade union and labour movement. It is well known that at a national level the leaders of the trade unions were consulted by the government to a greater extent than ever before, and that the signing of the Treasury Agreements represented a recognition of their importance, and made them partners in the prosecution of the war. Labour Party leaders also became members of the administration, thus confirming once and for all that they were “fit to govern”. These were significant developments for the working class movement, but they did not take place without sharpened disagreements within the movement and the growth of increasingly radical political and social attitudes. The purpose of this article is to show that at a local level there were almost precisely parallel developments for the working class movement during the war years. There was a similar accession to power, if more limited, and to prestige in the local community, if often more grudgingly conceded. At the same time there was a growth of general disillusionment with the work which was undertaken, and by the end of the war, an increasingly militant attitude on trade union and general political questions.

The article begins with a discussion of labour intellectuals as knowledge producers in labour institutions, and of the labour public in which this distinctive kind of intellectual emerges, drawing on our previously published work. Next we construct a typology of three “modes” of the labour intellectual that were proclaimed and remade from the 1890s (the “movement” the “representational”, and the “revolutionary”), and identify the broad historical processes (certification, polarization, and contraction) of the labour public. In a case study comparing the 1890s and 1920s we demonstrate how successive generations of labour intellectuals combined elements of these ideal types in different ways to develop traditions of intellectual work. The article concludes with a sketch of the labour public after the crisis of the 1920s. It considers the rise of the “militant” intellectual in the 1930s, the role of publicists, planners and experts in the 1940s, the skill of “generalship” in the polarized 1940s and 1950s, the failure to meet the challenge of the new social movements in the 1970s, and the decline of the agitational, movement-identified intellectual.

The plan of Dynamics of Contention embraces several goals. The first is to revitalize social-movement theory, to make it more dynamic, to transcend sharp distinctions between (for example) actors and trajectories. The second is to tear down the barriers between subdisciplines in social science such as social-movement theory and the study of nationalisms. These are conventional demarcations which the authors see as arbitrary and counterproductive to new insights that may be gained within a broader field of contentious politics. Finally the centrepiece: the authors aim to develop an explanatory strategy that avoids two pitfalls – particularistic history and sweeping generalizations in the tradition of Carl Hempel's covering law model. They propose the following solution. First, identify a number (not too large) of causal mechanisms that are at work in different times and places. Secondly, examine whether these mechanisms link regularly, whether they concatenate into what the authors call “robust processes”, i.e. processes that may be identified in a number of different historical “episodes”. An “episode” is something unique and circumscribed, not something ephemeral. On the other hand, an episode of nation-building may last for years. The authors' ambition seems to be to offer lean and muscular, but not parsimonious, explanations. To use their own words, their programme aims to “uncover recurring sets of mechanisms that combine into robust processes which, in turn, recur over a surprising number and broad range of episodes” (p. 314).

In 1900, Western Australia, a self-governing British colony, adopted compulsory conciliation and arbitration legislation, the first Australian colony to do so. This article focuses primarily on the roles the colonial state and capital played in the adoption of the legislation and proposes a broader, more complex explanation for the introduction of the legislation than current mainstream Western Australian historiography, which, mostly, constructed the event as an unproblematic regional labour triumph. This article argues that the legislation was passed to prevent disruption to gold mining, the industry driving the development of the colony, and to revive the flagging political fortunes of the colonial government. It asserts that the timing of the legislation pre-empted a more effective bill being introduced under conditions less favourable to capital. Organized labour, which, through its lobbying, had created consensus about the desirability of introducing the legislation, was unable to influence the shape of the legislation significantly.

In seinem Anfang 1914 erschienenen Buch über den politischen Massenstreik betont Karl Kautsky, daß die Parteimehrheit, die seit 1899 stets gegen die „staatsmännische Ungeduld” des rechten Flügels vorgehen mußte, sich seit dem Magdeburger Parteitag von 1910 fast ausschließlich gegen die „rebellische Ungeduld” der äußersten Linken zu wenden hatte. Damit liefert er ein bezeichnendes Stichwort der innerparteilichen Diskussion am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges. Die offizielle Ideologic der deutschen Vorkriegssozialdemokratie, die zu Recht mit dem Namen ihres Schöpfers Kautsky etikettiert wird, konnte sich zwar als Element der Integration einer heterogenen Massenpartei im taktischen, organisatorischen und psychologischen Bereich bis 1914 unbestritten behaupten. Insbesondere aber seit der preußischen Wahlrechtsbewegung hatte sie starke Belastungsproben zu bestehen, die von dem linken Parteiflügel ausgingen, der nun mit eigenständiger politischer Kraft und größerem Führungsanspruch auftrat. Der Attentismus des „marxistischen Zentrums”, das unter der theoretischen Führung Kautskys und der politischen Leitung Bebels das Bild der Gesamtpartei prägte, war für die in zahlreichen Nuancierungen sich herauskristallisierende Linke Anlaß zunehmender Unruhe und harter Angriffe. Die Debatten um die Marokkopolitik des Vorstandes dokumentieren dies eindrucksvoll. Die dazu parallel laufenden Bestrebungen eines Teils der Radikalen, die auf eine Reorganisierung der Parteileitung drängten, wurzelten im Boden derselben Kritik

This article looks at the continuing political vitality of the urban crowd in early Pahlavi Iran and the role it played in the crises which wracked Tehran in the first half of the 1920s, examining, as far as possible, the ways in which crowds were mobilized, their composition, leaderships, and objectives. In particular it analyses Riza Khan's own adoption of populist tactics in his struggle with the Qajar dynasty in 1924–1925, and his regime's attempts to manipulate the Tehran crowd in an effort to overcome opposition, both elite and popular, and to intimidate formal democratic institutions such as the Majlis (parliament) and the independent press. In attempting to rescue the Tehran crowd from obscurity, or from condemnation as a fanatical and blindly reactionary mob, this article hopes to rectify the imbalance in much older scholarship which views early Pahlavi Iran solely through the prism of its state-building effort, and to introduce into the study of Iranian history some of the perspectives of “history from below”.

This essay examines the relationship between popular initiatives and government decision-makers during the 1930s. The economic crisis and the reawakening of labor militancy before 1935 elevated men and women, who had been formed by the workers' movement of the 1910s and 1920s, to prominent roles in the making of national industrial policies. Quite different was the reshaping of social insurance and work relief measures. Although those policies represented a governmental response to the distress and protests of the working class, the workers themselves had little influence on their formulation or administration. Through industrial struggles, the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) mobilized a new cadre, trained by youthful encounters with urban ethnic life, expanding secondary schooling and subordination to modern corporate management, in an unsuccessful quest for economic planning and universal social insurance through the agency of a reformed Democratic Party.