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.

An autocratic regime undergoing industrialization either develops effective techniques to “manage” inevitable labor protest or sows the seeds of its own destruction. Its highly concentrated authority is incompatible with the accumulation of power within the mass movements which industrialization engenders or stirs into action. It must destroy or control them. This problem faced Tsarist Russia as it later faced Soviet Russia. In neither case were the rulers inclined to treat industrial disputes as a private affair between employers and workers and leave the solution in their hands. Yet, the two cases are radically different in methods and consequences. The modern totalitarian state directs and controls labor through worker mass organizations, by channelling the energy of the leaders and the enthusiasm of the followers into predetermined patterns. This method of control, which is essentially indirect and “from within”, contrasts sharply with the old-fashioned method of direct control “from the top down”, which aimed mainly at repressing rather than using labor organizations and at resolving industrial unrest partly through punishment and partly through more positive preventive measures.

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.

Die her mitgeteilten Briefe Rosa Luxernburgs entstammen zum grösseren Teil den Jahren 1898 bis 1902, also der Zeit des heftigsten Streites um den Revisionismus. Sie sind nicht nut Beiträge zur Biographie der Absenderin, insbesondere zur Kenntnis ihrer ersten Tätigkeit in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, die sich in der Redaktion der Sächsischen Arbeiter Zeitung in Dresden abspielte; sondern sie sind darüber hinaus Dokumente, die den Kampf der beiden grossen Richtungen der deutschen Sozialdemokratie in einem seiner wichtigsten Abschnitte ansehaulich illustrieren. Zur Kennzeichnung der Atmosphare, in der sich diese innerparteilichen Auseinandersetzungen abspielten, wurden einige Stellen aus Briefen August Bebels, Karl Kautskys, Adolf Hoffmanns, Parvus', Clara Zetkins u. a. mitgeteilt. Die Briefe sind bisher unveroffentlicht und befinden sich in den Archiven des Internationalen Institutes fiir Sozialgeschichte.

Much current literature argues that the Mexican revolution was not a revolution at all, but rather a series of rebellions that did not fundamentally alter the social order. Similarly, many scholars assert the changes in the Mexican work world during the Mexican revolution were the result of a paternalistic state rather than the product of the actions of workers. This article examines cotton textile workers' relationship to authority in the workplace during the most violent phase of Mexico's revolution, 1910–1921. The results suggest that revolution indeed gripped the country, one that energized the country's still emerging factory proletariat. There is compelling evidence that millhands throughout Mexico continuously and successfully challenged the authority of owners and supervisors, fundamentally altering the social relations of work. It is this “hidden” revolution in the factories that explains changes in labor law, labor organization, and worker power in the immediate post-revolutionary period. The effectiveness of the workers' challenge to authority is what explains: 1) the new regime's need to unionize; 2) the development of pro-labor labor law after the revolution; 3) the power of unions after 1920. In short, workers' challenge to authority during the revolution is what explains the labor outcome of the revolution afterwards.

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.

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.

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.

This article investigates developments in labour policies and social norms on gender and work from a colonial perspective. It aims to analyse the extent to which state policies and societal norms influenced gendered labour relations in the Netherlands and its colony, the Netherlands Indies (present-day Indonesia). In order to investigate the influence of the state on gender and household labour relations in the Dutch empire, this paper compares as well as connects social interventions related to work and welfare in the Netherlands and the Netherlands Indies from the early nineteenth century up until World War II. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, work was seen as a means to morally discipline the poor, both in the Netherlands and the Netherlands Indies. Parallel initiatives were taken by Johannes van den Bosch, who, in 1815, established “peat colonies” in the Netherlands, aiming to transform the urban poor into industrious agrarian workers, and in 1830 introduced the Cultivation System in the Netherlands Indies, likewise to increase the industriousness of Javanese peasants. While norms were similar, the scope of changing labour relations was much vaster in the colony than in the metropole.

During the nineteenth century, ideals and practices of the male breadwinner started to pervade Dutch households, and children’s and women’s labour laws were enacted. Although in practice many Dutch working-class women and children continued to work, their official numbers dropped significantly. In contrast to the metropole, the official number of working (married) women in the colony was very high, and rising over the period. Protection for women and children was introduced very late in the Netherlands Indies and only under intense pressure from the international community. Not only did Dutch politicians consider it “natural” for Indonesian women and children to work, their assumptions regarding inherent differences between Indonesian and Dutch women served to justify the protection of the latter: a fine example of what Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper have called a “grammar of difference”.

During the 1980s and 1990s, violent events occurred in the streets of many African and Middle Eastern countries. Each event had its own logic and saw the intervention of actors with differing profiles. What they had in common was that they all took place in the context of the implementation of a neoliberal political economy. The anger these policies aroused was first expressed by people who were not necessarily rebelling against the adjustments themselves, or against the underlying ideologies or the institutions that imposed them, but rather against their practical manifestations in everyday life. This special issue invites reflections on these revolts and what they teach us about the neoliberal turn in Africa and the Middle East.

The echoes between the present and the recent past are as important for the genesis of this work as they are for those that read it. They must not prevent us from investigating the specifics of these uprisings, with a particular emphasis on the intersection between a global political economy and local challenges, while understanding them through their particular circumstances. This issue aims to stimulate a more general reflection on popular feelings and social responses in the face of neoliberalism.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article examines the main characteristics of the reform of the Soviet social security system in the 1920s and the early years of Stalinism. It uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine the development of the system from many angles: the beneficiaries, the political debates, and the methods used to finance it. The reforms introduced during this period show that the Soviet welfare system depended almost entirely on economic progress; in 1927, the only state-funded provision was for disabled war veterans. Hence, the welfare system was quite specific: it was used as a tool to promote the industrialization of the country, favouring the workers at the expense of the disabled and unemployed, who were forced to fall back on various self-help strategies, some legal, some illegal. The disabled and unemployed constituted the main social problem of the 1920s. Social legislation between 1931 and 1932, under the shadow of the impact which the Great Depression was having on Soviet society, progressively excluded the disabled and unemployed from the welfare system. Thus the USSR attempted to solve the unemployment problem by means of social exclusion.

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).

The cahiers de doléances of 1789 have generally been regarded as unique historical documents. In convening the Estates General, the royal government followed centuries-old precedent in asking the nation not only to elect representatives to an assembly, but to provide them with lists of the demands, wishes, and grievances of their constituents as well. One could hardly describe these documents as resources unknown to historians. Apart from a very few who have seen these documents essentially as fraudulent, historians have generally seen them as uniquely vox populi. Tocqueville, for example, described them as “an authentic account” of the ideas and feelings of the nation drawn up “in perfect freedom”. More recently, Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret saw them as “the truest sampling of opinion ever realized in the France of the Old Regime”.

The “Bread Riots” that broke out in Tunisia on 28 December 1983 lasted barely ten days. Yet, they cost the lives of over one hundred people. The revolt studied here centred on two popular neighbourhoods of Tunis in the wake of massive, World Bank-sponsored development plans. This article seeks to understand how the inhabitants in these quarters reacted to the establishment of a new welfare state that was more concerned with fighting poverty – or fighting the poor – than with equalizing conditions or offering the same opportunities for everyone. Based on this case study, I argue that the great Bread Revolt of 1983–1984 marked a break with past practices of state reform and popular protest and suggest that International Monetary Fund and World Bank prescriptions and state implementations reconfigured the political and social landscape of independent Tunisia.