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.

David Urquhart (1805–1877), the inspirer of the agitation that took his name, has been succinctly described as “an ex-diplomatic official who carried his Russuphobia to an almost pathological extreme”. As an official at the British Embassy in Constantinople, Urquhart, whose admiration for the Turks knew no bounds, had tried to engineer a war between Britain and Russia. In his eccentric way he ascribed his subsequent removal from a position of diplomatic responsibihty to the work of Russian agents in the British Foreign Office. The phobia grew. David Urquhart, a man of compelling charm and deep idealism, came to regard the Czar as the Antichrist and to see his minions everywhere. In particular, Urquhart turned his attack on Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary who had recalled him to England in July, 1837, and whom he now represented as an agent in an international conspiracy.

This article analyses the establishment of a network of hostels for unemployed workers in Yugoslavia between the two world wars. The analysis investigates the legal, political, and institutional background to these hostels, and how they were conceived and financed. By looking at the development of a new public social policy from the perspective of the jobless, the article aims to examine the nature, goals, and especially the boundaries of a modern provision for Yugoslav workers, namely its strategies and practices of social inclusion and exclusion. The article reveals how a modern concept of unemployment gradually emerged. These hostels were not part of a traditional policy on poverty; they were the expression of a new and more modern form of social policy. The article further shows how new social differences and distances between “non-working” people were created, and what specific impact those differences and distances had on the functioning of these institutions.

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.

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.

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.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British East India Company monopolized salt production in Bengal, and the British sought a new market for English salt in India. As previous studies have emphasized, external political and economic forces devastated indigenous industry and its workers. However, working conditions were influenced more by the natural environments of the salt-producing localities, particularly the availability of fuel, which was indispensable to the process of manufacture. The industry had always benefitted from abundant grass and straw for use as fuel. However, as grasslands were lost due both to constant river encroachment and to land clearance for cultivation, straw prices increased with the emergence of a regional market for biomass fuels, so that increasing difficulties in procuring fuel gradually made the salt industry costly. That state of affairs was accelerated by the advance of economic activity in general and a shortage of coal in particular. The changes made workers much more dependent on the fuel market.

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.

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.

This article analyses the Algerian inquiries of Pierre Bourdieu. It begins by retracing the most pervasive, medium- and long-term interventions of French colonial power in Algerian society: the introduction of capitalism and the internment of civilians in the centres de regroupement. Next, it outlines the social subjects studied by the young agrégé of philosophy and his representation of labour. Subsequent sections deal with shifts in the public stance of Bourdieu regarding the revolutionary propensity of these people. On this tricky testing ground, Bourdieu engaged with and critically confronted the ideas of Germaine Tillion and Frantz Fanon. His position is reviewed from a historical-philological approach in order to set the texts in their temporal and spatial contexts, establish parallels and/or divergences, and verify the effects such comparisons produced. The conclusions emphasize the richness and originality of Bourdieu’s inquiries given the era in which they were made and highlight, in light of the recent global reorientation of labour history, some of the vital viewpoints expressed on the origins of capitalism in the colony.

Naval dockyards have been largely neglected by labour historians, a surprising omission given their importance as industrial workplaces with a distinct culture of labour and labour relations. This article considers labour politics in Karlskrona dockyard, Sweden, in the light of a growing body of research on work and labour relations in the British and other European dockyards. Evidence from Karlskrona suggests that, rather than being repressed by military discipline or bought off by generous state benefits, the dockyard workforce drew on aspects of its unique relationship with the national state to improve working conditions. Particular attention is given to the role of the dockyard trade union in creating a sense of workforce identity as state employees. This is in contrast to the British dockyards where unionism was founded on the rigid division of labour in the shipbuilding industry.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

With the imprisonment of many activists throughout the year, the rejection of the first National Petition in July, the dissolution of the Convention in September, and the catastrophe of the ill-fated Newport Rising in November, early Chartism ended in failure in the second half of 1839. One of the most common reasons given in the literature for the failure has been the lack of internal cohesion in the movement, usually illustrated by reference to the political conflicts between physical- and moral-force groups. Despite the analytical inadequacy of such generic terms it is indisputable that Chartism was deficient in natural unity. It was a coalition of many different radical associations and personalities with a multiplicity of varied experiences, traditions and beliefs. As a consequence, the early Chartist movement only made progress by adopting certain symbols of unification: the National Petition and Rent, and a commitment to a National Convention. These symbols then became specific goals of Chartism. However, little consideration has previously been given to asking whether Chartism was an efficient instrument in itself for achieving these objectives, or if the organization of the Convention undermined the political credibility of the movement. This article attempts to illustrate Chartism's need for organization and leadership from the Convention, and suggests that inefficient organization was an important cause of the relative failure to achieve its immediate objectives, and for the progressive abdication of leadership by the Convention.

E. P. Thompson expressed succinctly the prevailing orthodoxy about the origins of the Independent Labour Party when he wrote, in his homage to Tom Maguire, that “the ILP grew from bottom up”. From what little evidence has been available, it has been argued that the ILP was essentially a provincial party, which was created from the fusion of local political groups concentrated mainly on an axis lying across the North of England. An early report from the General Secretary of the party described Lancashire and Yorkshire as the strongholds of the movement, and subsequent historical accounts have supported this view.

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.

For at least the past twenty years, historians of pre-colonial Africa have studied gender and ethnic relations, but have focused on either gender or ethnicity without making reference to the other. This essay redresses this neglect by demonstrating that changes in gender and ethnic relations within pre-colonial Africa so profoundly influenced each other that it is impossible to understand one without also taking into consideration the other. Documenting this intersection requires more than simply reconstructing how ethnic groups (in their efforts to compete with others for social and political status) altered gender relations within their societies by handling differentially the affairs of their female and male members. It involves more than analyzing how those disadvantaged because of their gender used the prevailing ethnic relations to ameliorate their own situations, and how these actions in turn altered ethnic relations in the societies in which they lived. It requires as well that we reconceptualize the very definition of ethnicity.