This article analyses the interactions between the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) and its Mexican and Cuban national chapters and affiliated organizations. Focusing on the National Bloc of Revolutionary Women, the Democratic Union of Mexican Women, and the Democratic Federation of Cuban Women, this article studies the ideological foundations these organizations defended and the action programmes they used to materialize them. One of its main contributions is to argue that Mexican and Cuban socialist and communist women contributed to the struggle for women's emancipation within the Eastern Bloc through grass-roots contributions that did not simply emulate European communist organizations, but drew on, and were informed by, national contexts, material conditions, and historical backgrounds. The increasing number of requests, demands, and proposals emerging from Latin America, and more specifically from Mexico and Cuba, ultimately fostered a steady process of decentralization that broadened visions of women's progress within the global leftist feminist movement during the early Cold War.

This article reconsiders the life of Ellen Wilkinson (1891–1947) – British Minister of Education from 1945 to 1947 and leader of the Jarrow Crusade of 1936 – by exploring the transnational aspect of her politics. It seeks to establish the significance of her transnational orientation and how this can allow us to complement and deepen existing understandings of her. Drawing on the literature on transnational activist networks, it outlines the complexity of transnational networks and her repertoire of transnational political practice. Without serious attention to this global dimension of her politics, our understanding of Wilkinson is attenuated and distorted. Crucially, the heroic construction of “Red Ellen” in both labourist and socialist-feminist narratives has obscured her second radicalization (1932–1936) and the sharpness of her metamorphosis into a mainstream Labour Party figure in 1939–1940.

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”.

Where possible, European minorities in Africa during this century have sought to insure their favored position, especially their economic position, through political action. The trend of labor legislation in Southern Rhodesia after it became a “self-governing Colony” in 1923 is a case in point. But this was not always possible. In Northern Rhodesia, for instance, the color bar was far more difficult to introduce, especially after Lord Passfield's 1929 revival of the native paramountcy doctrine for east and central Africa. The history of the white miners' trade union is apposite.

Dynamics of Contention purports to show how social movements, revolutions, strike waves, nationalism, democratization, and other types of contention result from “similar mechanisms and processes”, and claim that more may be learned by comparative studies than through singular topical study. The authors aim to discover “recurring causal sequences of contentious politics” (p. 4), and to breach topical boundaries as well as the demarcation between institutionalized and noninstitutionalized politics. They define contentious politics as “episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims and (b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants”. (“Interest” is uninterrogated). They go on to say, “roughly translated, the definition refers to collective political struggle” (p. 5).

Wenn wir von sozialen Unterschichten im Zusammenhang mit dem Prozeß der Industrialisierung sprechen, denken wir unwillkürlich an die Fabrikarbeiterschaft. Es liegt daher nahe, unser Thema als eine Frage nach der Entstehung der industriellen Lohnarbeiterschicht aufzufassen. In der Tat möchte ich mich auch im wesentlichen auf diese Frage konzentrieren; doch sei gleich eingangs bemerkt, daß, wie immer wir auch die Periode der Frühindustrialisierung zeitlich abgrenzen, das Thema „soziale Unterschichten” damit bei weitem nicht ausgeschöpft ist, ja daß wir uns den Zugang zur Beantwortung wesentlicher Fragen nach Herkunft, Zusammenset2ung, sozialer Bewertung und Lebensgefühl der Fabrikarbeiterschaft verbauen, wenn wir unseren Blick zu eng auf diese selbst richten. Deshalb müssen andere Gruppen, die sog. „unterbäuerliche Schicht”, die Handwerksgesellen, die bald agrarisch, bald gewerblich tätigen Tagelöhner, die ländliche und städtische Heimarbeiterschaft, die Dienstboten und ebenso das herren- und heimatlose Volk der Bettler und Vagabunden einbezogen werden, auch wenn wir sie hier nur als Reservoir für die gewerblich-industrielle Unterschicht behandeln können.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

Working conditions and labour unrest among service employees in the hotel and restaurant sector have, for a long time,have not been at the centre of attention of labour historians, especially in Italy. However, from the late nineteenth century a considerable number of cooks and waiters in Italian cities began to organize in order to improve their working conditions and to create alternative, cost-free forms of employment. From the early twentieth century, the trade unions of the employees of hotels and restaurants (grouped together in a National Federation in 1907) attempted to achieve these goals by means of strikes and demonstrations, some of them remarkably militant. Using a broad range of primary sources and quantitative data, this paper will first describe the characteristics of the working conditions of workers in hotels and restaurants in Italy; second, it will analyse the evolution of organizations, demands, and strike action by these staff from the beginning of the twentieth century to the advent of fascism. Distinguishing two waves of mobilization (1902−1907/1908 and 1919−1920), this paper aims, firstly, to highlight the similarities and differences between union actions by hotel and restaurant employees, on the one hand, and those of other workers on the other. Secondly, it focuses on the ways that the strikes induced serving staff to feel like “real” workers in terms of the outlook and behaviour of industrial workers.

This article addresses the colonial project of “civilizing” and educating indigenous people in the farthest corners of the Dutch empire – South Dutch New Guinea (1902–1942), exploring the entanglement between colonial education practice and the civilizing mission, unravelling the variety of actors in colonial education in South Dutch New Guinea. Focusing on practice, I highlight that colonial education invested heavily in disciplining the bodies, minds, and beliefs of indigenous peoples to align them with Western Catholic standards. This observation links projects to educating and disciplining indigenous youth to the consolidation of colonial power. Central to these intense colonial interventions in the lives of Papuans were institutions of colonial education, managed by the Catholic mission but run by non-European teachers recruited from elsewhere in the Dutch colony. Their importance as proponents of the “civilizing mission” is largely unappreciated in the historiography of missionary work on Papua.

This article investigates the way in which the English poor used the rhetoric of clothing in their engagement with local officials as they attempted to secure poor relief. Using letters written about or by the dependent poor from a wide selection of English communities, the article suggests that the poor employed concepts such as raggedness, lost clothing, nakedness, compromised dignity, and community presence and the link between poor clothing and unemployment, to assert their deservingness. An exemplar of a series of letters from the same person is used to explore how paupers developed the rhetoric of clothing over a sustained period of correspondence, suggesting that paupers had a keen appreciation of the impact of compromised clothing in their negotiations with officials. Ultimately, this paper will argue, paupers and officials had a shared concept of minimal clothing standards and a shared linguistic register for linking clothing and deservingness.

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?

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

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.

This article examines the survival strategies of forestry workers and craftspeople in the late Ottoman Empire. Through the example of the Tahtacı, a semi-nomadic community specialized in lumbering in the forests along the western and southern coasts of Anatolia, it visualizes the adaptation strategies of forestry labourers in the changing economic and ecological environment of the Mediterranean Basin, which became warmer, less forested, and more integrated into regional and global markets after the mid-nineteenth century. Contrary to the generally accepted view that perceives the Tahtacı as a self-isolated, authentic clan with a static way of life, this article considers them a highly adaptive community that developed a wide range of strategies to earn their livelihood under intense commercialization in forestry and agriculture.