Thomas T. Meadows, an experienced British diplomat in China during the nineteenth century and author of The Chinese and Their Rebellions, wrote: “Of all nations that have attained a certain degree of civilization, the Chinese are the least revolutionary and the most rebellious.” Meadows had ample opportunity to make such a remark since he was witness to some of China's fiercest rebellions, those committed by the Taipings, the Nien and Moslem groups during the time of his tour. These revolts, although mass-based and widespread, were put down with particular ferocity by the Qing monarchy. Meadows's remark directs attention to the delicate question of when does a rebellion become a revolution? In the case of these movements, they did not become revolutions because there was no transformation either in the structure of Chinese society or in the system of political power. These incidents may have been “revolutionary situations”, but they did not have “revolutionary outcomes”.

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.

Colonial and postcolonial port cities in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions functioned as crucial hubs in the commodity flows that accompanied the emergence and expansion of global capitalism. They did so by bringing together laboring populations of many different backgrounds and statuses – legally free or semi-free wage laborers, soldiers, sailors, and the self-employed, indentured servants, convicts, and slaves. Focusing on the period from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, a crucial moment in the establishment of the world market, the transformation of colonial states, and the reorganization of labor and labor migration on a transoceanic scale, the contributions in this special issue address the consequences of the presence of these “motley crews” on and around the docks and the neighborhoods that stretched behind them. The introduction places the articles within the context of the development of the field of Global Labor History more generally. It argues that the dense daily interaction that took place in port cities makes them an ideal vantage point from which to investigate the consequences of the “simultaneity” of different labor relations for questions such as the organization of the work process under developing capitalism, the emergence of new forms of social control, the impact of forced and free migration on class formation, and the role of social diversity in shaping different forms of group and class solidarity. The introduction also discusses the significance of the articles presented in this special issue for three prevailing but problematic dichotomies in labor historiography: the sharp borders drawn between so-called free and unfree labor, between the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, and the pre-modern and modern eras.

In his study of the effect of technological change on families working in the Lancashire cotton industry in the first half of the nineteenth century, Smelser has argued that the family as a work unit was disrupted by the introduction of larger mules, which required more child assistants in the spinning mill than one family alone could provide. The result was the disruption of the family work unit, hitherto preserved in the earlier cotton mills, and the decline of the old apprentice-ship system based on kinship.1 It should be instructive, therefore, to attempt a comparative investigation of conditions in the family work unit in Black Country nailing in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the trade faced increasing competition from factory-made nails and died a lingering death similar in some ways to that of handloom weaving.2 For the purposes of this article, the family work team of the nailers of Stourbridge and district will be examined in the light of the quantitative evidence of the 1851 census returns, and then the decline and disintegration of the work unit will be discussed, with particular reference to changes in familial roles. Here of course it will be impossible to separate work roles from social roles within the family, since so much time was spent by all members within the nailshop, and the distinctive life-style of nailers was strongly conditioned by their mode of work. Lastly, some suggestions will be made as to the causes of decline, and the general significance of the changes which took place in the family.

Asa Briggs has pointed out that the parliamentary-reform movement of the early 1830's differed considerably in nature and direction between one city and another. In Birmingham, the middle and working classes usually co-operated. Class distinctions were blurred. Steam power and the factory – socially disruptive forces – were lacking. Master and artisan worked together in small workshops, frequently changed places with each other in a socially mobile city, and united in advancing an inflationary paper-money programme appropriate to the Midlands iron interests. These were concerned with the home market and the need for expansionist credit. In Manchester and Leeds, on the other hand, the classes were separated by the factory, and had competing reform movements. Manchester's middle-class reformers were concerned with the needs of the cotton industry's export markets; they wanted a stable metallic currency, and stressed the encouragement to trade that would follow the repeal of the Corn Laws. Often they presented repeal in terms the working class found uncongenial

The years between the late 1940s and late 1950s constituted a critical period in the historical formation of the working class in Turkey. During that period, Turkey experienced a number of structural transformations. It also saw the elaboration of a new discourse on the working class by labor representatives, organizations, and by workers themselves. That discourse provided the workers and their organizations with the channels necessary to articulate their demands when other forms of expression were considered ineffective and dangerous. Using the language of equality, justice, and human rights, workers appealed for improvement in their status both at the workplace and within society at large. This new political culture and language was built on the critical assessment of the corporatist construction of labor relations and the rejection of the idea that employers and workers were members of the same (national) family. Based on worker and union newspapers, the primary objective of this essay is to discuss the basic components and characteristic features of this new discourse and its place in working-class politics in early republican Turkey.

On the spectrum of Victorian politics Birmingham stands at one extreme – the exemplar of class harmony and co-operation. Where other towns were torn by strife and discord, here the forces of cohesion and stability were triumphant. An alliance between the middle and working classes remained the cardinal fact of political life from Thomas Attwood's Political Union to Joseph Chamberlain's caucus. Political tranquillity reflected the deeper harmony of a well integrated culture, in which the masters and artisans of a small workshop economy shared a commitment to the social and moral values of the community.

This article examines the rise of an irrigation economy in Hetao along the Yellow River during the nineteenth century, and uses it as a case study to illustrate how the periphery played a major and hitherto overlooked role in the development of the Chinese economy, which confounds the conventional view of a Chinese path of development that replicated smallholder farming. I focus on a group of Han entrepreneurs known as land merchants (dishang) who combined capital and expertise in irrigation development, and introduced a new set of property regime and socio-technical arrangements that fundamentally changed the frontier society. By linking the changes in local society to regional and global processes, this study demonstrates the centrality of the periphery as not only a zone of possibility and experimentation, but more importantly, a “contact zone” that facilitated China's integration into a new global market system.

This paper explores the relationship between social mobility and class formation in a working-class industrial suburb. By establishing the degree of class closure in three periods we can identify the relationship between the country's political history, dominated by the rise of a left-wing Labour Party, and the changing levels of closure. Labour established itself during a period of low mobility then stalled when mobility increased sharply in the 1920s. Comparison with the mobility rates for cities in other countries allows further analysis of the relationship between social structure and political behaviour. Our evidence indicates that voters were not unconscious of the shifting patterns of class rigidity.

Sport, and football in particular, is described in socio-political discourse as an effective way to integrate immigrants. This thesis will be tested by means of a case study examining Polish migration to the mining areas of the Ruhr from the 1870s. It will be shown that, up until World War I, the sport participated in by Polish miners served, in contrast, as a means of nationalization, ethnicizing, and as an aid to furthering Polish ethnic identity. Only during the Weimar Republic were football clubs in the Ruhr actually used as a vehicle for integration and assimilation for males among the Polish minority. After World War II, memories of these footballers from among the Polish minority were either repressed or reduced to folklore. Based on this historical case study, sport appears in principle to be ambivalent between its ability to form “we” groups and the building of bridges between nationalities.

Charles Hall's importance has been recognized by a number of scholars. He has been described by C. R. Fay as “the first of the early socialists”, and by Mark Blaug as “the first socialist critic of the industrial revolution”. According to Max Beer he provided “the first interpretation of the voice of rising Labour”, and Anton Menger regarded him as “the first socialist who saw in rent and interest unjust appropriations of the return of labour, and who explicitly claimed for the worker the undiminished product of his industry”.2 Menger, in his book The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour (first published in German in 1886), devoted three or four pages to Hall and drew attention to his early formulation of the theory of surplus value. Since then there have been several discussions of Hall's work, but almost without exception they have been quite brief: perhaps the most notable are those provided by H. S. Foxwell in his introduction to the English translation of Menger, and by Beer in his History of British Socialism H. L. Beales, who also wrote a few pages about him in his book The Early English Socialists, lamented some twenty years ago that Hall (in common with several other pioneers of socialism and democracy in Britain) had not yet found a biographer. In fact it seems unlikely, owing to the paucity of material, that a biography will ever be possible. But it is nonetheless surprising that Hall has received so little individual attention; and the author of a recent summary of his ideas (again in the context of a general history of socialism) could describe him as “ce précurseur quelque peu oublie”. It appears that an essay may usefully be written drawing together what is known about him and attempting a fuller examination of his writings than has been provided hitherto.

The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. [By] Anthony Carew, Michel Dreyfus, Geert Van Goethem [and] Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick. Marcel van der Linden (Ed.) [International and Comparative Social History, vol. 3.] Peter Lang, Bern [etc.] 2000. 624 pp. S.fr. 117.00; DM 147.00; S 975.00.

British coal miners immigrated to the United States in increasing numbers during the Civil War decade. Their movement from the collieries gathered momentum in the early war years and reached its peak in 1869. In 1862, almost all of the immigrants entering the United States who listed their occupation as “miner” were from Britain. As shown in the table, such men accounted for more than 73% of all immigrant miners in each of the following years of the decade for which data are available, with the exception of 1864. In 1870, the 57,214 British immigrant miners listed in the United States Census represented more than 60% of all foreign-born miners (94,719) in the country. The movement from Britain had already slowed when news of the American economic depression that began in 1873 reached the collieries in Britain, where an extraordinary demand for iron in the early 1870's had hiked coal miners' wages far above normal levels. However, when employment in the American coalfields was readily available in the 1860's and early 1870's, the risk involved in spending hard-won savings on the journey, which cost approximately £5 and took ten days by steamer, appeared reasonable. In comparison with other wage earners coal miners in Britain were relatively well-paid. They could, therefore, accumulate the cost of the trans-Atlantic passage during “good-times” at home.

In most cases, and particularly in the cases of Greece and Turkey, political transformation from multinational empire to nation state has been experienced to a great extent in urban centres. In Ankara, Bursa, and Salonica, the cities selected for this article, the consequences of state-making were drastic for all their inhabitants; Ankara and Bursa had strong Greek communities, while in the 1840s Salonica was the Jewish metropolis of the eastern Mediterranean, with a lively Muslim community. However, by the 1940s, Ankara and Bursa had lost almost all their non-Muslim inhabitants and Salonica had lost almost all its Muslims. This article analyses the occupational structures of those three cities in the mid-nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, tracing the role of the state as an employer and the effects of radical political change on the city-level historical dynamics of labour relations.

The International Association, which existed in London from 1855 to1859 and which was founded by French, Polish and German refugees and English chartists, is to be regarded as the first international organization of a proletarian and socialist character, and forms the last and most important link in the series of international manifestations during the three decades prior to the foundation of the First International, which will be briefly sketched here).

When in Europe about 1830 the working-class movement came into existence, When in Europe about 1830 the working-class movement came into existence, there arose simultaneously, as an immediate result of the awakening class-consciousness, the idea of international proletarian solidarity, which has continued to be a basic element of the proletarian ideology and to find expression in manifestations of international solidarity, as well as in the formation of various organizations of an international tenor.

Is “strategy” merely a sympathetic and convenient phrase, on closer scrutiny devoid of explanatory value as a scientific concept? Have we been beguiled by its appeal and should we now, wiser and sadder, return to less pretentious concepts such as tactics or agency? Or do we need more empirical applications and have we just begun to explore strategy's vistas?

In the early twentieth century, like many of their European counterparts, labour unions in the Netherlands established mutual unemployment insurance funds for their members. Various funds made agreements with labour unions in a number of European countries to recognize each other's insurance schemes, enabling union members to work in the Netherlands without losing their entitlement to benefits accumulated in their home countries, and vice versa. Whereas up until the 1930s some of the alliances between Dutch and foreign funds had flourished, in the 1930s the number of non-Dutch workers in the Netherlands making use of such agreements decreased drastically. This article analyses those transnational alliances and explores various causes for their demise, concluding that in the 1930s formal regulation of foreign labour by the Dutch government substantially reduced the number of potential foreign members of insurance funds while government interference in unemployment insurance abroad, and especially in Germany, made the transnational agreements effectively void.

Das Thema “Schulbildung und Industrialisierung” gehört nicht zum klassischen Kanon der von den Historikern der Industrialisierung untersuchten Aspekte. Demgegenüber haben die empirischen Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften, im Zusammenhang mit der Faktor-analyse des wirtschaftlichen Wachstums und mit Blickrichtung auf die Zukunft entwickelter und unterentwickelter Volkswirtschaften, das Thema von verschiedenen Seiten in Angriff genommen. So spricht die Nationalökonomie vom “human factor” oder Dritten Faktor neben Arbeit und Kapital und meint damit “die natürlichen Fähigkeiten der Menschen eines Landes und die Erfolge und Anstrengungen der Bil-dungspolitik und den Ausbau der Forschung in vorausgegangenen De-zennien oder gar Jahrhunderten”. Die neue Disziplin der Bildungs-ökonomie versucht u.a. Vorausschätzungen der Größe und Struktur des Bedarfs an qualifizierten Fachkräften und entwickelt “Strategies of Human Resource Development”.

This article is a contribution to and reassessment of the debate about the concept of ‘white labourism’ hosted in this journal in 2010. White labourism is a concept formulated by Jonathan Hyslop to describe an ideology combining an anti-capitalist critique with racial segregation that he argued was dominant in a transnational white working class in the British Empire in the early twentieth century. The debate about this concept has focused on the appeal and extent of this ideology in South Africa during the early twentieth century. In light of recent scholarship on Southern Africa, we take a longer-term perspective to critically examine the concept and the debate. Specifically, we make three interventions into this debate: we consider the role of white workers outside British imperial networks; we examine how radical and revolutionary ideas disappeared from white-working class politics in the mid-twentieth century; and we reassess the connection between transnational flows of people and ideas. Racial divisions in the working class and labour movement in Southern Africa were persistent and enduring. We argue that racial segregation had an enduring appeal to white workers in Southern Africa, and the sources of this appeal were more varied and locally rooted than simply transnational migration to the region.