This article analyses female labour in Spanish mines during the golden age of the sector in Spain between 1860 and 1936. Although they were a small percentage of total employment, women accounted for a significant share of the workforce in certain Spanish districts. On the one hand, the study quantifies work performed directly by women, who were mostly engaged in preparation and concentration of the minerals, as well as the extent of female child labour. This has been done by using official statistics, analysing the share of women employed for each type of mineral extracted, the mining area where this activity took place, and other variables. In the article, the authors seek to identify possible causes of such a heterogeneous distribution of female labour in the mining industry in Spain. This situation was common in the sector throughout the world. On the other hand, the article analyses attitudes of institutions, unions, and the like that limited employment opportunities for women in mining (banning them from performing underground tasks and other activities) and even proposed excluding them altogether, responding to workers’ demands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We examine the objectives pursued by these institutions, which in some cases related to protection (physical and moral) of female workers but overall aimed mainly to preserve the social role of women (particularly reproduction) and exclude them from the workforce. The pressure on female workers was the most pronounced in the workplace. These factors gave rise to a global setback in female employment, especially among the youngest workers. Given this situation, the quantitative data used, together with information drawn from different sources, reveal that women resisted giving up these jobs, particularly in the districts with a larger share of female workers.

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.

Comparisons between the English and German labour movements have a long tradition in historiography. In Germany they were primarily discussed in the context of the “German Sonderweg”, a debate which was opened in the 1920s and continues in the 1980s. The article presented here analyzes the methodological problems of Sonderweg comparisons of labour history and confronts the major arguments with the results of empirical research. It concludes that many old Sonderweg arguments can not withstand this confrontation. Nevertheless, the article proposes that the debate should be continued, since empirical research focuses on new aspects and supports the diagnosis of two different paths of labour history.

Arthur Henderson was the only member of the industrial working classes to lead a British political party. He was the only trade unionist to lead the Labour Party, and, as well, one of only two active Christians to do so. In the history of the Labour Party's first thirty years he seems to have a centrality shared by no other man. But what constitutes his centrality is a genuine problem, and both his contemporaries and his colleagues were aware of it. J. R. Clynes once wrote: “I would not class Mr. Henderson as a type, but as one quite unlike any other of his colleagues.” In this article I would like to test this judgement, to examine both Henderson's “typicality” as a historical figure in the labour movement, and the significance of his career as a labour leader.

A crucial aspect of the regulation of domestic service is the regulation of people's status. Because of its emphasis on freedom and equality, the French Revolution is particularly interesting. “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good.” These principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (26 August 1789) did not seem to leave room for slavery and master/servant hierarchies. Yet, their impact on slaves and servants was ambivalent, as I shall show by focusing on France and its Caribbean colonies. Dependency, race, and gender are crucial in my analysis. After sketching the features of servants, serfs, slaves, and indentured servants at the end of the Ancien Régime, I will analyse how the Revolution affected them, focusing on serfs and servants in metropolitan France, on black colonial slaves, and on female slaves and servants. While I investigate the “French imperial nation-State”, I will also provide some comparison with the American case. The Revolution led to a feminization of dependence both in metropolitan France and in the French Caribbean, making dependence more gendered. It abolished serfdom and slavery, and enfranchised male domestiques. Thus, on the one hand, it was really revolutionary; on the other, colonial slavery was first replaced by bonded labour and then reintroduced. Male domestiques were enfranchised briefly and only on paper; they would be enfranchised when slavery in the French colonies was abolished (1848). Women were excluded: mistresses and maids had to wait until 1944 to become full citizens. This makes it impossible to establish clear-cut distinctions between pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary times, and in part challenges the difference between metropole and colonies.

This article investigates Chinese women labour models (or labour heroines) of the early 1950s as actors and symbols of socialist transformation. It centres on the example of Shen Jilan (1929–2020), who was one of the most prominent women labour models of the time. Shen rose to fame through her struggle for equal pay for equal work in her native village, became a delegate to China's National People's Congress, and even participated in the Third World Congress of Women in Copenhagen in 1953. The article critically engages with the concept of “state feminism” and proposes a shift in focus from state–society relations to work as a means to understanding the transformation of women's lives under socialism. Socialist society was a society of producers and work shaped people's daily lives; it was central to identity formation and constituted the regulating mechanism of social relations. Indeed, women labour models, together with related categories of working women, came to typify the new Chinese woman, who was integral to and symbolic of socialist modernity. They epitomized communist theory about women's participation in production being the mechanism of their liberation. The article has three main parts, each of which addresses a different level (local, national, international), different constellations of actors and agency, and different aspects of the relationship between working women and socialist transformation. By tracing Shen Jilan's activities in various contexts, the article reveals the complexity, contradictions, multilayered nature, and also incompleteness of socialist transformation.

The image of the Belgian Workers' Party as a solid party unchallenged by ethnic tensions and united around a common Belgianness does not stand up to historical scrutiny. Using the key concepts of imagined communities, ethnies, mythomoteur,and oppositional patriotism, this article argues that despite its undeniable integration into the political, social and economic structures of the Belgian nation-state, the BWP was ethnically divided between Flemish and Walloon socialists in the period 1885–1914.

Karl Friedrich Köppen was born on the 28th of April, 1808, at Niedergörne, the son of a clergyman. After having attended the Latin School (“Gymnasium”) at Stendal and the Latin Convent school (“Klostergymnasium”) of Magdeburg, he took up the study of divinity in Berlin in the year 1827, but eventually became a teacher. In 1833 he was appointed at a Berlin school. Four years later he wrote a “Literary Introduction into Nordic Mythology” which has retained its value to the present day and the anti-clerical tendency of which revealed him as one of those radical diciples of Hegel who grouped themelves around A Ruge's “Hallische Jahrbücher” Their aim was: “Away from the Christian state and from State-Christendom'” In the “Doktorklub”, the Berlin center of these Young-Hegelians, Köppen mixed with Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx. Under the influence of Marx, the pen of this most prolific of contributors, to the “Jahrbücher” quickly increaed in sharpness. A jubilant publication of 1840, dedicated to his “friend K. H. Marx of Trier”, entitled “Frederick the Great and his adversaries”, proved a publicistic masterpiece which supplied Marx with suggestionss and gained Köppen the recognition of Engels. This publication focussed its secret hopes in the ascent to the throne by Frederick William IV; the Reaction, however, which set in soon after the change of government, crushed the buds of Young-Hegelian idealism.

The role of pro-strike newspapers during the first two decades of labour history in twentieth-century South Africa, an era of intense industrial strife, has not been researched in depth by labour historians. This article examines the emergence of a pro-strike press and examines its position on various strike issues. It served as a conduit for workers' grievances during industrial disputes, such as the strikes of 1911, 1913, 1914, and 1922. Such papers were often also the only means of communication between the strike committee and the strikers themselves. The article also discusses the extent to which such publications might have impacted upon their readership and actual strike action. It concludes that pro-strike literature in essence reflects a “white-labour” discourse and a fusion of the class and racial consciousness that prevailed among the white working class of South Africa.

The Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 saw the first appearance of workers' and soldiers' councils, called Soviets. In 1917 the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, acting for all the Russian Soviets, became the chief competitor of Kerensky's Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks, employing the slogan “All Powers to the Soviets”, used the Petrograd Soviet in their drive for power. In the October Revolution the Soviets, dominated by the Bolsheviks, replaced the Provisional Government as the government of Russia.

La fondation du Parti Ouvrier Belge en 1885 ne se réduit pas à la seule histoire des efforts laborieux poursuivis depuis 1875 par les socialistes belges en vue de constituer un parti politique de la classe ouvrière. Ce point de vue engagé, adopté par les historiographes socialistes, n'a pas permis de comprendre que le Parti Ouvrier Belge fut en 1885/1886 l'organisation qui favorisa le ralliement de la classe ouvrière à l'action politique. Si l'événement de 1885 eut une telle portée, c'est en effet parce que le Parti Ouvrier Belge réalisa la fusion du mouvement socialiste, déjà constitué en parti depuis 1879, et du mouvement syndical des ouvriers de la petite industrie et des petits métiers, alors que ces derniers, abandonnant leur abstentionnisme politique traditionnel, recouraient enfin à des méthodes d'action politique.

The place of Etienne Cabet in the history of French and European socialism has been misunderstood and its real importance diminished in part due to the only detailed study of his life and thought, Jules Prudhommeaux's Icarie et son fondateur Etienne Cabet (Paris: Cornély, 1907). This work possesses many merits but is limited by the framework made explicit in its subtitle: “a contribution to the study of Experimental Socialism”. The author is principally concerned with Cabet as the creator of a communist colony in the backwoods of America. This emphasis relieved Prudhommeaux of the task of investigating the role of Cabet in the turbulent politics of France before and during the Revolution of 1848. By ignoring this period of Icarian history, he inadvertently strengthened the impression that Cabet's historical significance was as the Utopian archetype. Such was not the unique image of the father of Icarian communism during the 1840's, however.

The emergence of nineteenth century socialism as a mass political movement required the cooperation of two distinct elements – a radical intelligentsia, and a working class whose interests the former purported to represent. In theory these two elements were to fuse into a harmonious whole, but in fact certain tensions arose, whether between trade union and party or between workers and intellectuals within the same organization. It is my intention to consider this problem within the context of the Russian Jewish socialist movement. Specifically, this entails an examination of the various forms of worker opposition to the leadership of the socialist “circles” of the 1880's and 1890's and to the leadership of the “General Jewish Labor Union in Russia and Poland” (the “Bund”), founded in 1897.

This study examines the forms of state domination over mine labour and the struggles of coalminers at the Zonguldak coalfield during World War II. It is focused on the everyday experiences of compulsory workers as reflected in petitions by those workers and the surveillance materials of the single-party regime at the time. Its aim is to reveal how, under an authoritarian regime, compulsory workers created a political agency. The compulsory labour system was one of the most coercive devices with which the state controlled mine labour between 1940 and 1947, but the compulsory workers negotiated with the political elite for their living and working conditions, and did so within a political sphere which had been devised by the ruling elite as a governmental strategy for managing and shaping the population. By subverting the political discourse of the ruling elite, the miners contributed not just to the development of workers’ rights, but also helped reveal the merits of a democratic society.