The supporters of the Nazi party prior to 1933 can be divided into two groups. Much the larger of these were the millions of voters who, beginning in the summer of 1930, cast their ballots for Hitler and his party. The second group, whose adherence to the Nazi movement included but also went beyond voting for its candidates in elections, were the formal members of the NSDAP. Between February 1930 and May 1932, they increased in number from approximately 170–180,000 to some 850–900,000.

For the historian of modern European society the problem of the extent and nature of unemployment at any particular time and in any particular place is a challenging and even frustrating one. It is clearly an important question to ask and yet, except for very recent times, it is almost impossible to answer satisfactorily. Where there are data they are incomplete and their reliability doubtful. This is true even of such a society as Victorian Britain, which might be thought to have a considerable amount of useful material. The early Victorian social investigators in Britain seldom dealt with the problem of unemployment, preferring to focus on educational, sanitary, and similar elements of working-class living standards. Admittedly, from the middle of the nineteenth century continuous series of unemployment figures become increasingly available relating to particular trades and from these aggregate figures have been calculated.1 But the defects of these returns, made by various trade unions and based upon the numbers receiving unemployment benefit, have been recognized almost from the time that they began to appear. As for official labour statistics in general, those for the period before 1886 have recently been described as “deficient, chaotic, and unmanageable”.2 The unemployment statistics improved little after 1886. They continued to be derived from the same sources as before, though a much greater number of unions made returns. But the very nature of the returns means that they were biassed towards the unionised workers in industries like heavy engineering.

Between 1787 and 1868 a total of 830 convict vessels left the British Isles bound for the Australian penal colonies. While only one of these was seized by mutineers, many convicts were punished for plotting to take the ship that carried them to the Antipodes. This article will explore the circumstances that shaped those mutiny attempts and the impact that they had on convict management strategies.

This article examines the various experiences of slavery and freedom of female household workers in the Dutch and English East India Company (VOC and EIC, respectively) ports in Bengal in the early eighteenth century. Enslaved household workers in Bengal came from various Asian societies dotting the Indian Ocean littoral. Once manumitted, they entered the fold of the free Christian or Portuguese communities of the settlements. The most common, if not the only, occupation of the women of these communities was household or caregiving labour. The patriarchy of the settlements was defined by the labour and subjection of these women. Yet, domestic service to VOC/EIC officials only partially explains their subjectivity. This article identifies the agency of enslaved and women of free Christian or Portuguese communities in their efforts to resist or bypass the institution of the European household in the settlements. These efforts ranged from murdering their slave masters to creating independent businesses to the formation of sexual liaisons and parental/fraternal/sororal relationships disregarding the approval or needs of their settlement masters.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield was born in London in 1796. For part of his childhood his grandmother, Mrs. Priscilla Wakefield, was his guardian. She was a prominent Quaker, author of several books including A Family Tour through the British Empire (1814), an active social worker and founder of a savings bank. His father was also a philanthropist and author of An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political (1812), but he does not appear to have been an active member of the Society of Friends.

Zahlreiche monographische Arbeiten zur sozialdemokratischen Parteigeschichte führen wohlbegründete Klage über das Fehlen einer modernen Gesamtdarstellung, die zu erarbeiten ein erstes Anliegen der Geschichtsschreibung der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung sein müsse. Dass es noch einer umfassenden Darstellung ermangelt, ist um so eigenartiger, als sich eine Fülle von historischen Zeugnissen und Dokumenten dem Historiker zur Bearbeitung anbietet. Gleich-wohl erschöpft sich die bisherige parteigeschichtliche Bibliographie in Einzeldarstellungen – abgesehen von einigen gedrängten, zu partei-politischen Zwecken geschriebenen übersichten—, und es gilt die etwas verfrühte Rüge Adolf Mengers über die mangelhafte Geschichtsschreibung des Sozialismus heute – trotz Mehring – in erhöhtem Masse für die Geschichtsschreibung der sozialdemokratischen Partei.

On going deeper into the life-history of Bakunin, it becomes evident that his first stay abroad (1840—1851) had been decisive for the whole of his spiritual development. Of quite special importance are his activities during the revolutionary epoch of 1848/49; this period of his life has hitherto not been considered with the attention it deserves. Bakunin's contributions to the “Dresdner Zeitung” in the months of March to May 1849 have not been explored at all up to the present.

The “Dresdner Zeitung was the organ of the Dresden Democrats. It appeared regularly from the 1st Oktober 1848 until the 6th August 1850. From being a fairly moderate paper, it gradually became more radical in 1848/49.

Decisive for the volte-face of the paper was the action of Bakunin who was staying in Dresden during the months March/May 1849 and who influenced Ludwig Wittig, one of the editors, to a considerable extent. A radical democrat with socialistic tendencies, already in early March, Wittig developed further and further to the left in the course of the stormy year of 1848. His impressions when in Vienna, where he had been sent by the Saxon democrats in 1848 in order to try arid effectuate the connections with the Vienna movement made him specially receptive for the final conclusions, which Bakunin drew from the events.

This essay details the relationship between anti-impressment collective actions, the American Revolution, and the age of revolution. Naval impressment represented the forcible coercion of laborers into extended periods of military service. Workers in North American coastal communities militantly, even violently, resisted British naval impressment. A combination of Leveller-inspired ideals and practical experience encouraged this resistance. In turn, resistance from below inspired colonial elites to resist British authority by contributing to the elaboration of a political discourse on legitimate authority, liberty, and freedom. Maritime laborers stood on the front lines in the struggle for freedom, and their radical collective actions helped give meaning to wider struggles around the Atlantic world.

The Making of a Periphery makes three important claims. First, commodity export production does not necessarily result in peripheralization, which is defined as economic stagnation, depressed wages and impoverishment. Second, peripheralization is instead influenced by the specific mode of production of export commodities. Third, the mode of production is crucially determined by demographic growth and patron-client relationships. This essay investigates these claims using a variety of economic and demographic data on Southeast Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is shown that specialization in primary commodity exports does lower long-term economic growth rates and that indigenous institutions regarding family systems and property rights play an important role in the patterns of economic development.

This article examines the sedentarization of transhumants in northern Greece within the context of the political, legal, social, and economic transformation of the region that occurred throughout the nineteenth century. Based on a wide range of primary sources, this research conducts a chronological survey of the local actors, events, and institutions with reference to a broader political and economic context. It emphasizes that, in the first half of the century, a provincial-elite regime and imperial policies did not create substantial change in transhumance. In the 1860s, however, economic transformations at both imperial and global levels did accelerate change in the region's land and labour regimes. In response, regional landholders began to institute sedentarization, adopting various legal and economic means based on strategies including negotiation, persuasion, and compulsion.

Karl Kautsky's views on the Jewish question are of great import precisely because they are Kautsky's. In the years following Engels' death, Kautsky was the leading orthodox Marxist theoretician, executor of Marx's literary estate, editor of Die Neue Zeit, and a prolific author of popular Marxist tracts. It was Kautsky who drafted the theoretical part of the Erfurt Program of 1891, and Kautsky who wrote the classic rebuttal to Bernstein. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that an entire generation of socialists around the world were taught Marx through Kautsky. There is a sense in which Kautsky's views on the Jewish question were even more influential than were his views on other matters. For Kautsky was perceived as an authority on the Jewish question even by many Marxists who were, or eventually became, sharply critical of his views on other questions.

In 1953 Southern Rhodesia's (Zimbabwe's) only coal mine, Wankie Colliery, was taken over by the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa. The colliery's new owners soon discovered that the elimination of “hand lashing” (shovelling of coal) was the key to better productivity and expanded output. Coal cutting machinery was installed wherever possible, but in the colliery's two oldest shafts existing mining methods were too deeply entrenched and consequently too expensive simply to be swept away. Instead Anglo American attempted to reinforce colonial production relations. Supervision underground was tightened up, and the degree of “self-regulation” enjoyed by lashers in determining the amount of work they did was limited. The introduction of a new mine tub designed to increase productivity precipitated strike action in February 1954 by the colliery's entire black labour force.

This article provides an analysis of the construction of labour regionalism between the 1920s and 1970s. By means of a comparative examination of the supranational labour structures in Europe and the Americas prior to World War II and of the decentralized structure of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), I attempt to defend the argument that regionalism was a labour leaders' construct that responded to three issues: the quest for power among the largest trade-union organizations within the international trade-union movement; mutual distrust between labour leaders of large, middle-sized, and small unions from different regions; and (real or imaginary) common interests among labour leaders from the same region. These push-and-pull factors led to the construction of regional labour identifications that emphasized “otherness” in the world of international labour. A regional labour identity was intended to supplement, not undermine, national identity. As such, this study fills a lacuna in the scholarly literature on international relations and labour internationalism, which has given only scant attention to the regional level of international labour organization.

On 24 January 1936 Rose Karsner of New York City received a cablegram from Norway: “ Personally in Favour of Entry–leo.” The sender of the cablegram was the exiled Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, and the recipient was the wife of the most important “Trotskyist” leader in the United States, James Cannon. The Russian revolutionary thus gave his blessing to a new manoeuvre by which the American Trotskyists were to enter the Socialist Party of America for certain well-defined objectives.

The above article, a chapter from a larger work on the socio-historical foundation of Prussia, deals with the only peasants' revolt of importance that ever took place in Germany east of the Elbe. In September 1525, when in western Germany the after-effects of the great revolt were ebbing down, the peasants in the recently secularized dukedom of Prussia revolted against the rising nobility. The course of the peasants' action and the insufficient assistance they received from the town of Konigsberg and its citizens are sketched separately from material gathered from a contemporary chronicle. Already five days after the outbreak of the revolt and before serious acts of violence had occurred, the aristocratic town-council of Königsberg effected peace between the peasants and the nobility. After the return of the duke from Germany, severe punishments were inflicted, followed in the next year by the statutory regulation of all the new peasants' obligations.

Special attention deserve: the close connection between the peasant movement and contemporary unrests in Konigsberg; the influence that radiated from there; the lack of support from the towns as the cause of the speedy break-down of the revolt; its pronouncedly political character, hardly influenced by religious ideas and aiming at rooting out the aristocratic “weeds”. The leading elements of the revolt were the well-to-do, self-confident, free peasants—of German as well as of Polish descent—and not the mostly impoverished serfs, which proves that no peasants' revolts occurred east of the Elbe not because of the favourable condition of the peasants there, and that also in this one particular case socially higher situated elements were sooner inclined to revolt against suppression.

Maurice Milne's article restricts its discussion of press treatment of industrial disputes in this period to an analysis of coverage of three strikes in three Newcastle upon Tyne papers. He passes from this review to the following conclusion:

The facile assumption that radical political beliefs would predispose their holder to espouse the cause of organised labour will not stand up to close scrutiny, at least where one important industrial region and its newspapers are concerned.

This article examines the impact of internal and external pressures on the parliamentary debate concerning the place of the working class within a newly emerging polity. Based on machine-assisted distant reading and close hermeneutics of parliamentary session transcripts, I ask how the first diet of the modern Polish state (1919–1922) responded to labour militancy and war. My analysis demonstrates that social unrest was successfully used by the left to foster inclusion of the popular classes in a political, social, and economic sense, contributing to the democratization of the state. In contrast, the external threat of war had an opposite effect. Although it justified the left advocating greater inclusion of workers and peasants because of their high death toll on the battlefields, it was actually the right that capitalized on national unity and readily used arguments about the Bolshevik threat or traitors among the landless masses to block or even reverse reforms aimed at democratization. The external threat of war, waged against a nominally leftist political force, helped the weak state to reduce the high impact of labour unrest on parliamentary proceedings.

By analysing and comparing three waves of contentious collective action employed by the pioneering generation of Chinese state workers at one particular state-owned enterprise from the 1960s to the present, this study aims to explain its varying forms and to analyse its effectiveness in different historical periods. I argue that the changing political opportunity structure in various historical contexts has greatly conditioned workers’ “repertoire of contention” at each moment and, hence, significantly affected the processes, strategies, and outcomes of workers’ contentious collective action. This article highlights the paradoxical role of the socialist social contract as a potential but crucial component of “the repertoire of contention”, by arguing that different interpretations of the contract, as conditioned by a certain political opportunity structure in different historical periods, could either empower or disempower workers. Both archival and oral history research are used in this study.