For most of the present century economic and social historians have intermittently debated the question of the standard of living during the first phase of the Industrial Revolution, 1780–1830. As both the “pessimists” and the “optimists” acknowledge, too much emphasis can easily be placed on wage levels and the more easily measured aspects of the question, to the neglect of the quality of life and its non-quantifiable aspects. Insufficient explicit attention has also been paid to the divergent experience of different occupations and different districts of the country.

In 2002, Dirk Hoerder published his magnum opus, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, NC, 2002). In this book, Hoerder describes and analyses, with an unusual breadth of scope, the origins, causes, and extent of human migration around the globe from the eleventh century onward to the present day, paying particular attention to the impact migrations have had in the receiving countries and the cultural interactions they have triggered. At the 28th Annual Meeting of the American Social Science History Association, organized in November 2003 in Baltimore, Dirk Hoerder's book was the winner of the Allan Sharlin Memorial Award for the best book in social science history.

In this review symposium, seven migration scholars from differing national and cultural backgrounds give their comments on Hoerder's book, with a concluding response by Dirk Hoerder.

The International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) was a radical trans-Atlantic network for the propagation of black proletarian internationalism, established by the Red International of Labour Unions in 1928. Its key mastermind was James W. Ford, an African American communist labour union activist who was in charge of the organization and its operations until the autumn of 1931. This article critically highlights Ford's ambitions as well as the early phase of the organization. Both in terms of its agenda and objective as well as in its outreach among black workers in the Black Atlantic, the ITUCNW and its main propagators stressed the “class-before-race” argument of the Comintern rather than the pan-Africanist “race-before-class” approach. This is not surprising as the ITUCNW was one of the organizations that had been established when the Comintern and the RILU had started to apply the “class-against-class” doctrine, which left no room for cooperation between communists and radical pan-Africanists.

Each society has myths about the successful adaptation of former migrants. Historians need to deconstruct these myths by dealing with the imagined boundaries between “indigenous” and “foreign” people that give way to them. This essay does so by comparing how children of Polish interwar immigrants and children of Italian postwar immigrants came to be seen as insiders in the Belgian Limburg mining region. Oral testimonies, associational records, and population data reveal that Poles achieved the status of industrious, adapted people around 1960, due to the equal promotion of Polish and indigenous miners' sons in the mines and to the labour migration regime which constructed Italians as unskilled outsiders. Around 1980, the industrial recession caused unemployment among young Italians. However, migration politics has, since the recession, primarily focused on culture. Moreover, European legislation constructed foreignness as non-European. Consequently, it is not class, but European culture which has turned Italians into “integrated” people.

This article explores the motives of Ghana’s Trades Union Congress in securing development assistance during the era of decolonization and early independence. African interests and agency in these complex processes of negotiation have not been sufficiently untangled to highlight the decisions that African trade unionists made as they aligned with, and fostered, international networks and alliances to meet particular development goals. By highlighting the perspectives and actions of Ghana’s trade union officials, the article demonstrates what Africans sought to achieve through connections to international trade union organizations. The Ghana case illustrates the ways in which African trade unionists actively engaged in the variable and competing politics and policies of local, regional, and global trade unionism in order to strengthen their union apparatus and meet shifting needs.

Um den Lebensstandard der Bevölkerung in Deutschland vom Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts zu erforschen, kann man versuchen, ihn nach den Haushaltseinkommen zu quantifizieren, und prüfen, wie er sich im Lauf der Zeit verbessert oder verschlechtert. Das ist oft erfolglos, weil die Quellen versagen. Dann kann man versuchen, die verschiedenen sozialen Stufen der Lebenshaltung zu qualifizieren, und darstellen, wie ihr Zuschnitt und ihr Verhältnis untereinander sich im Lauf der Zeit auf den einzelnen Stufen verschiedenartig verändert.

The history of migration is the history of human connections. Migration, then, is a powerful element in world history precisely because it identifies points of contact among peoples and nations and thus provides a deeper understanding of the human experience than institutional or diplomatic perspectives. Here, I seek to connect the global history of migration to family systems, demographic patterns and gender relations – those most intimate connections that bring life to our analyses of the past. A global perspective on historical migrations offers a fascinating challenge to the Europeanist, familiar with the rhythms of European migration and the social and economic systems that gave rise to them. In response to Adam McKeown's observations about Asia in world migrations, I focus on Chinese family and gender relations.

This article analyses the process by which the issues of debt and structural adjustment were redefined by a plurality of actors, from institutional experts to activists, during the 1980s and 1990s. Although it mainly focuses on the 1990s, when the Jubilee 2000 campaign emerged, blossomed, and died, it takes into account the institutional mobilization preceding it. It then points to the need to think about the dynamics of competition and the division of labour among international players. While the leading Jubilee 2000 coalition in the Global North opposed debt on economic and religious grounds, African anti-structural adjustment programme (SAP) activists who joined the Jubilee Afrika campaign promoted an alternative framework: according to them, debt was not just economically “unsustainable”; it was first and foremost “illegitimate”, as were any conditions attached to its reduction, beginning with the implementation of SAPs. The story of the anti-debt campaign is the story of their failure.

The most dramatic agitations and triumphs of the “new” unionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, together with its reversals and defeats by an organised employers' counter–offensive, occurred on the waterfront at British ports. The reasons for the revival and unsteady continuance of trades unionism in the ports at this period have been well detailed, but serious analysis of the origins and growth of countervailing employer interest groupings in labour matters, at a time when shipowners felt compelled to meet organisation with organisation, has been altogether more sparse. The initial strategy of many employers was to set their face against unions “to get back to what they believed to have been the golden age of British labour”, with freedom for men to work on their own terms without union interference or, if not openly attacking unions, at least refusing to acknowledge their existence and come to terms with them as bargaining agents. Conflict was endemic in the British shipping industry at this time, and employment relations were regulated unilaterally either by the employers or, in some cases where they were sufficiently strongly organised, by the unions. Yet, by the First World War employers had granted “recognition” and arrived at an accommodation with the unions over certain clearly defined areas of interest, with the result that henceforth industrial relations in the ports would be conducted via bilateral and joint regulation on a much more orderly and stable basis.

Il est peu d'historiens aujourd'hui qui n'admettent le caractère socialiste de la Commune, ou qu'elle fut à tout le moins l'ébauche d'une révolution socialiste. Nul cependant encore qui ait cherché à traiter vraiment de ce chapitre décisif en la matière que fut l'histoire, pendant les événements de 1870-1871, de l'Association Internationale des Travailleurs à Paris, du rôle exact de l'organisation la plus éminemment ouvrière et socialiste en ces temps. Sur ce rôle, sur cette histoire, que de questions pourtant, d'opinions divergentes, contradictoires! Questions, de nos jours comme autrefois! la première, et non des moindres, pourrait être par exemple résumée en ces conclusions de quelques contemporains, sur lesquelles, selon les cas et leurs goûts, s'appuieront les historiens.

The prevailing image of twentieth-century English “youth” is as a triumphal signifier of affluent leisure consumption. By contrast, this article demonstrates the importance of young working-class people's economic role as wage-earners in the mid-twentieth century. This shaped their treatment by the family and the state and the life histories of the adults they became. Juveniles were crucial breadwinners in interwar working-class households. However, the consequences of high unemployment among adult males helped redefine youth as a period of state protection and leisure in the post-1945 decades. Nevertheless, personal affluence remained limited, and young people's economic responsibilities high, until at least the mid-1950s. The history of twentieth-century youth is best understood as one in which young working-class people's fortunes were closely linked to their family's circumstances and their importance as a supply of cheap labour. Social class thus formed, and was formed by, the experience and memory of being young.

At the World Fair in Philadelphia in 1876, the German goods on display were described as “cheap and nasty”, setting off a vigorous debate about the state of German industry. Social democrats attacked policies of increasing competitiveness of German exports through keeping wages low, and claimed that the quality of the goods produced by socialist workers was higher than those produced by others. An analysis of the debate shows the extent to which social democrats not only resorted to arguments stressing the “national interest”, but also the extent to which nominally Marxist socialists in this period were still attached to traditional artisanal values of pride in the quality of their work.

The publication of Harry Braverman's seminal study – Labor and Monopoiy Capital (1974) – marked a turning-point for labour and social historians. Since then they have increasingly concerned themselves with the nature of the labour process in industrial capitalism. Central to this concern has been the debate on de-skilling and the destruction of craft control over the labour process and its subordination to the needs of capital. Braverman has been heavily criticised for the one-sidedness and simplicity of his account of this development. Among the weaknesses identified in Labor and Monopoly Capital is the omission of any mention of class struggle, or worker resistance to technical change; the failure to grasp how de-skilling can be mediated and, therefore, modified through labour, market and product particularisms; the lack of a detailed analysis of the transformation of formal to real subordination (in the Marxist sense) of labour to capital – the process seems to occur automatically; and, the failure to realise how formally skilled workers can continue to occupy a privileged position in the workforce through either the mechanism of custom, or by their strategic placing in the production process, or both.

Wie kaum ein anderer Theoretiker des Austromarxismus hat sich Otto Bauer eingehend mit dem Faschismus beschäftigt. Sein Beitrag zur gedanklichen Durchdringung des historischen Rohmaterials hat auch heute kaum an Aktualität verloren. Zwar hat der Geschichtsprozeß seit den Analysen Bauers neue „Fakten” gehefert, die er wohl nicht geringer geschätzt hätte, als er es in seinen theoretischen und praktisch-politischen Arbeiten tat, die auch manche Einzelheiten seiner Darstellungen korrigieren oder ergänzen; zu einer grundsätzlichen Revision seiner Begriffsbestimmung des Faschismus in seinen letzten Lebensjahren sind weder Optimismus bezüglich der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung in den ehemals faschistischen Ländern noch der Stand der heutigen Faschismusdiskussion Anlaß genug. Bauers Faschismus-interpretation beschränkt sich nicht auf die vorgeblich „objektive” Aneinanderreihung deskriptiver Satze - solche sind gewiB auch nötig –, sie hat vielmehr den Vorzug, im Rahmen einer exfliziten Theorie der Gesellschaft zu stehen und einen echten Erklärungsversuch anzuvisieren. Faschismus bleibt so nicht ein letztlich Unerklärbares, er wird aber auch wegen Bauers hoher Apperzeptionsfähigkeit nicht zur leeren Formel, die einerseits den historisch-empirischen Befund negiert, andererseits jede Form terroristischer Unterdrückung oder alle Formen bürgerlicher Herrschaft überhaupt gleichsetzt. Bauer hütet sich auch meist vor dem polemischen Gebrauch des Wortes Faschismus, der gerade in den letzten Jahren wieder auf der bürgerlichen Seite, aber auch bei der Linken nicht selten zu beobachten ist, obwohl gerade er nach 1934 alien Anlaß gehabt hätte; auch in der tiefsten Verbitterung nach der Niederlage der österreichischen Sozialdemokratie ist er im Stande, zwischen dem eigentlichen Faschismus in seiner italienischen und deutschen Spielart und halb- oder scheinfaschistischen Dikta-turen wie dem „christlichen Ständestaat” Dollfuß' zu differenzieren.

The following article attempts to trace the course of working-class living standards in Britain in the comparatively neglected period between 1870 and the First World War. A considerable body of historical opinion sees this period as a time of marked improvement in standards of life, an improvement based essentially on rising real wages. Studies of this period have owed a considerable debt to the pioneering work of A. L. Bowley and G. H. Wood, which produced an invaluable collection of indices for wages and real wages, upon which most general accounts of living standards in the later nineteenth century have drawn. Wood's contention that real wages, in the years roughly between 1874 and 1900, rose by 36 per cent lies at the heart of an interpretation which sees the late-Victorian period as a time of crucial economic and social amelioration. The data are sufficiently comprehensive to show these improvements to be common to all occupations and to lead to the inescapable conclusion that “industrialization paid off generally in higher real wages for all groups in society in the second half of the nineteenth century”.

1971 konnte das 100-jährige Bestehen der dänischen Arbeiterbewegung gefeiert werden. Ihre Geschichte begann als die Geschichte der dänischen Sektion in der Internationalen Arbeiterassoziation: noch bevor nämlich der Internationale Arbeiterverein in Dänemark (Den internationale Arbejderforening i Danmark) von seinem Gründer, dem Reserveleutnant, Hauslehrer und ehemaligen Postschreiber Louis Albert François Pio ein festes Organisationsgebäude verschrieben bekam, hatte dieser Kontakt mit Marx in London aufgenommen und ihm in einem Brief die politischen Ziele und programmatischen Vorstellungen der noch zu konstituierenden dänischen Sektion der IAA annonciert (18. September 1871). Die Selbstverständlichkeit, mit der der erst am 15. Oktober 1871 mit einem organisatorischen Dach versehene dänische Arbeiterverein der IAA als dänische Sektion angekündigt wurde, lässt vorbereitende Kontakte zwischen London und Kopenhagen vermuten. Es darf angenommen werden, dass Pio und die Gefolgsleute der ersten Stunde feste Vorstellungen über die theoretischen und organisatorischen Grundlagen der IAA und einzelner Sektionen als Richtschnur für ihr Unternehmen gehegt haben müssen, kurz: dass ihnen die internationale Arbeiterbewegung ein Begriff war. Dafür sprechen auch Pios erste schriftstellerischen Versuche im Dienste des Sozialismus: die Socialistiske Blade I und II mögen noch so dilettantisch gewesen sein – die Absicht, die Lage der dänischen Unterklasse mit Hilfe der sozialistischen Theorie zuerst zu definieren, dann die Betroffenen zu organisieren, wird erkenntlich. Ohne Informationen, ohne Kontakte zur IAA hätte Pio jedoch kaum einen Buchstaben zu Papier bringen können.

The Kuzbass coalmining region in western Siberia (Kuznetsk Basin) was explored, populated, and exploited under Stalin’s rule. Struggling to offset a high labour turnover, the local state-run coal company enrolled deportees from other regions of Russia and Siberia, who were controlled by the secret police (OGPU). These workers shared a common experience in having been forcibly separated from their place of origin. At the same time, foreigners were recruited from abroad as experts and offered a privileged position. In the years of the Great Terror (1936−1938) both groups were persecuted, as they were regarded by the state as disloyal and suspicious. After the war, foreigners were recruited in large numbers as prisoners of war. Thus, migrants, foreigners, and deportees from other regions and countries constituted a significant part of the workforce in the Kuzbass, while their status constantly shifted due to economic needs and repressive politics.