Comparative analyses of labour often assume a dividing line between free and forced labour which is universally applicable. The contributions to this special theme argue that the tensions between “freedom” and “unfreedom” may be identified more precisely as those between multiple notions and practices of contract, status, and social conditions. Free and unfree labour on the one hand, status and contract on the other, are historically determined categories. This introduction argues that those histories do not run in parallel but are strictly intersected. From that point of view, social and economic inequalities are mutually linked to legal entitlements; a modification in legal entitlements strongly influences the economic and social equilibrium, and vice versa. Underlying this conclusion is a perspective that is resolutely non-Eurocentric and global. We do not endeavour to find the “missing” freedom of contract in the “periphery”, nor do we consider the “cultural” and economic domination of “the West” as a starting point. We stress instead the mutual connection between “peripheries” and “core” categories and practices. Such a bilateral circulation of ideas and practices contrasts with the argument according to which “the West” invented “freedom” and coercion as well.

Between 1963 and 1983, unions in the US launched a major campaign to try to organize J.P. Stevens, the nation's second-largest textile firm. Labor leaders felt that if they could organize Stevens, other gains in the nonunion South would follow. Stevens resisted the campaign by firing and intimidating union supporters, repeatedly breaking labor laws in the process. This article examines the union's organizing efforts and argues that the campaign's failure was not due simply to the company's lawlessness. In particular, the influx of African Americans into the workforce had an important impact on organizing. While African Americans did respond enthusiastically to the union, their activism tended to scare off whites, and the union struggled to build effective interracial unions. Other factors, such as the company's willingness to match union wage rates and the economic decline of the textile industry, also prevented the union from making more progress.

This article uses the concept of labour commodification to critique common historiographical portraits of skilled workers in transition to industrial capitalism. The meanings with which skilled workers in late nineteenth-century Australia understood their own labour went far beyond a repertoire of technical abilities. They viewed skill as a socio-biological disposition specific to a human type (adult, male, Anglo-Saxon), and this view intimately connected artisans' work and selfhood. Capitalist industrial change threatened to disrupt those connections. The notoriously exclusive union policies skilled workers invented can thus be seen as designed not simply to position their members more advantageously on the labour market, but to protect artisanal selves and identities from the corrosive effects of labour commodification.

On impulse one afternoon during the early stages of my research into the Dirty War in Argentina and the political past of the former Minister of Agriculture, Jorge Zorreguieta, I sent an e-mail to an Argentinian friend and colleague asking for suggestions about recent literature.

In 1917, in the midst of war, the internationalist ideals of the old Second Socialist International came close to achieving an unparalleled diplomatic triumph of non-governmental initiative by bringing together responsible political leaders of the left from the countries of opposing belligerents to discuss peace terms with neutrals on neutral ground at Stockholm.

The strike of stevedores and dock labourers in the Port of London in 1889 has come to symbolise that ferment and upsurge of labour activity, in favour of combined action, which found expression in the “new unionism”. Indeed the great spread of union organisation in the London area at this period has usually been regarded as the main phase of new unionism. It is true that labour historians have long been aware that widespread agitation and union recruitment were also afoot among both provincial dockers and other groups who had been either unorganised, or whose previous attempts at unionism had proved sporadic and abortive. The Liverpool dockers, in particular, became engaged in 1890 in a protracted struggle involving almost as great a number of strikers as on the London docks in the previous year. This Liverpool strike had all the makings of a “labour war”, and it resulted in a profound impact upon industrial relations on the Mersey waterfront. However, the events and consequences of this dispute together with the activities of the National Union of Dock Labourers which organised it have so far received less detailed attention than either the dock strike in the metropolis or the London dockers union.

The history of prostitution, defined as the commercial exchange of sexual services, provides a fertile ground for the study of the intersections between gender, race and class. Obviously, the sale of sexual labour has implications for constructions of gender, although the specific implications may change with time. Commercial sex offers particularly sharp insights into the ways in which gender considerations intersect with class and race because of the physical intimacy and potential for procreation involved in the sex act. Prostitution literally forces societies to come face to face with their assumptions about and attitudes to class and race hierarchies and relationships. The Australian case is especially useful for studying these relationships because of the imbalance in the ratio of men to women which has characterized colonial society generally and certain types of communities in particular, and the ways in which this imbalance affected some classes and ethnic groups more than others. Colonial Australia also provides a complex tapestry of ethnic/racial issues because it included divisions not just between “white” settlers and indigenous Aborigines, but also between both of these groups and various groups of immigrant, “coloured” workers. In the twentieth century, when demographic patterns became more balanced in gender terms and more homogenous in racial terms, the international sex industry continued to be important because it played a part in Australia's quest for recognition as an independent member of the community of “civilized”, white, nations. Finally, the process of reassessing Australia's place in the world was intimately connected to a reassessment of Australia's domestic policies, both in relation to prostitution generally and to the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women.

This essay draws upon a larger study of over forty strikes which involved both male and female strikers in the United States between the years 1887 and 1903. Here the focus of analysis is on those strikes which began with demands raised by women workers. The essay examines the nature of women workers' demands, the ways in which cooperation with male co-workers altered those demands, and the affect that formal union involvement had on women strikers and their strike demands. Because the original set of case studies examines strikes across the United States, the strikes explored here also highlight a variety of geographic locations. The insights gained suggest future paths for research on the distinction between women's and men's strike demands.

Maarten Prak argues that urban citizen associations remained vigorous in the West from the Middle Ages through the Industrial Revolution, and that their support for commercial activity helped bring about that Revolution. That is half correct. During the two thousand years from 300 BC to 1750 AD, numerous societies had similar peaks of urbanization, commercial activity, and per capita income (often approaching, but never exceeding, a “peak pre-industrial income” level of roughly $1,900 in 1990 international dollars.) Vigorous urban societies produced repeated episodes of comparably high incomes, not ever-escalating levels of GDP/capita. What produced the breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution was a particular manifestation of urban citizenship that occurred only in Great Britain – the victory of Parliament over royal authority creating exceptional religious and intellectual freedom and institutionalized pluralism. This was not common to urbanized, commercial societies except in rare periods; only in Britain did urban associations and culture blend with scientific culture, producing a broad surge of scientific and technical activity that overcame the prior limits on organic societies.

Tito rose to lead the Yugoslav Communist Party by stressing his loyalty to Lenin. As a “Left” critic of “Right Liquidationism” his views coincided with the Left turn in the Comintern which climaxed with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. During the “imperialist” war, Tito, like Lenin, wrote only of the armed uprising and the proletarian revolution; for him this began with the German invasion of April 1941. However, Tito's experiences in Moscow during the height of the purges enabled him to get the measure of Stalin. Twice he emerged unscathed from accusations of Trotskyism, and in his writings began to explore the differences between Leninism and Stalinism.

Eine selbständige Gesamtdarstellung der Geschichte des kommunisti-schen Arbeiterbildungsvereins in London, des langlebigsten deutschen Auslandsvereins, ist ein Desiderat der Forschung. Diese Forschungslücke schließt der folgende Aufsatz nicht. Als Teildarstellung beschränkt er sich darauf, die Anfangs- und Konsolidierungsphase des Londoner Arbeiterbildungsvereins vornehmlich auf der Grundlage einer Auswertung bereits publizierten Quellenmaterials darzustellen; eine Ausnahme ist die Auswertung der Statuten und des Bibliotheksverzeichnisses des Arbeiterbildungsvereinsaus dem Jahre 1845–46. Diese bis in das Jahr 1847 reichende Phase wird in der Literatur zur frü Geschichte der Arbeirterbewegung zumeist skizzenuhaft im Rahmen einer Geschichte des Bundes der Gerechten / Bundes der Kommunisten behandelt.4

Seit der großen Wanderungsbewegung im späten Mittelalter konzentrierte sich die Masse der aschkenasischen Juden auf dem Gebiet der alten polnischen Republik. Mit den Teilungen gelangten sie unter die Herrschaft dreier verschiedener Mächte, die weitaus meisten unter die Rußlands, das 1815 gemäß den Beschlüssen des Wiener Kongresses aus Teilen der annektierten Gebiete ein autonomes Königreich Polen (fortan kurz: Königreich) schuf. Für das gesamte russische Reich wurde das Niederlassungsrecht der Juden auf den sog. Ansiedlungsrayon beschränkt, der im wesentlichen die ehemals polnischen Gebiete, einschließlich des Köningreichs, umfaßte. 1865 lebten im Königreich über 700000 Anhänger des judaischen Glaubens; bis 1885 war diese Zahl auf beinah 1, 1 Millionen gestiegen, wobei nach den offiziellen Angaben das Tempo des Wachstums der jüdischen das des Wachstums der christlichen Bevölkerung übertraf. U.a. war das auf den Zustrom aus den östlichen Teilen des Ansiedlungsrayons ins Königreich, wo den Juden 1862 die formale Gleichberechtigung gewährt worden war, zurückzuführen. Seit den achziger Jahren nahm der Zustrom durch die neuerliche Einengung des Ansiedlungsrayons noch zu.

This article focuses on sex work relations in the Mangue, one of Rio de Janeiro’s red light districts in the 1920s. It follows multiple simultaneous trajectories that converge in Rio’s changing urban landscape: League of Nation’s investigators (some of them undercover), local Brazilian authorities, particularly the police, and Fanny Galper, a former prostitute and madam. It argues that the spatial mobility of the persons involved in sex work is part of broader debates: On the one hand, these experiences of mobility are closely connected to the variegated attempts at surveillance of sex work that characterized Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s and the specific racialized organization of the women’s work as prostitutes. On the other hand, the actors analysed in this article also participated, in different ways, in the production of meanings in broader debates on the international circulation of policies intended to regulate and surveil prostitution. These encounters offer the opportunity to explore some of the intersections between this international circulation of policies, local social dynamics of European immigration, and the racialized history of labor relations in Brazil.

The declaration of intent forming the title of this article – united to support but not combined to injure– succinctly illustrates a dilemma that confronted trade unions in Britain in the early nineteenth century, and that has since re-surfaced periodically. Successful trade unionism necessarily requires collective action, whether of an overt form, as during an industrial dispute, or implicitly, as in the enforcement of a closed shop. Not infrequently, though, the claims of solidarity and collective interest run counter to the rights of individuals: of employers, fellow workers and third parties. The intervention of the law provides an added twist to the potential conflict between the individual and the group. While the individual has traditionally enjoyed generous legal protection so that he can conduct his lawful business unhindered, the recognition of collective rights has been hesitant and qualified. The Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act of 1875 and the Trades Disputes Act of 1906 effectively legalized peaceful picketing, but the relationship of criminal law and trade unions remained uneasy despite the rarity of prosecutions for offences such as conspiracy. Nevertheless, during the century and a half since 1825 there has been a progressive tendency – at least until the 1980's – for the contradiction between collective and individual interest to assume a relatively muted and non-violent form. The emergence of institutionalized industrial conflict was a logical consequence of British trade unions achieving a position of respectability in the established order.

Recently there has been great interest in the re-organization of work and its effects on labor relations during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, particularly in the metal-working and machine industries. Studies of this issue have generally been framed in terms of technological advances in the steel industry in the second half of the nineteenth century, the exigencies of the market during and after the Great Depression of the late nineteenth century, and the efforts of skilled labor to defend its position on the shopfloor. In France and elsewhere the importance of national and international arms sales before 1914 made the armaments industry one of the main arenas of these developments. Until mid-century the defense industry and the business of defense had been under state control in France. Largely for economic reasons, however, the Third Republic turned over increasing amounts of defense contracting, especially in shipbuilding, to private industry. The Etablissements Schneider at Le Creusot, the Compagnie des Aciéries de la Marine at Saint-Chamond and other large private firms established themselves as profitable arms manufacturers. National and foreign government contracts for weaponry encouraged these companies to make large capital investments, to rationalize work to permit greater managerial control, and to develop authoritarian paternalist systems of labor management.

The numerical determination of the relationship between the sanitary conditions in which people live, and the risks to health and life this may involve is a relatively new method of understanding infectious disease. It came to be known as “sanitary statistics” in the early nineteenth century, when this kind of investigation reached the climax of its social importance. But its roots go back to the late seventeenth century, when England was again visited by the plague, shattering a country that had hardly recovered from two decades of civil unrest. The two basic motives of sanitary statistics, which later made it so potent a reformist tool, were already present then in a first outline, namely the attempt to rationalize the frightful phenomenon of the epidemic and the conviction that its causes were somehow bound up with the social organization of urban life. As long as people had seen in the great epidemics God's punishing hand, the flagellants' reaction made sense. Man could only bow to Him; the arm of flesh might at most seek to avoid His punishment by punishing itself in advance. But when in 1854 the Presbytery of Edinburgh suggested to the Home Secretary, Lord Palmerston, to call for a national fast against cholera, they received the cold reply that “the weal or woe of mankind depends on the observance or neglect of those laws” which sanitary statistics had recently discovered. Divine reference was replaced by statistical reference, and the correlations thus revealed pointed to action by the “arm of flesh”.

The Socialist Labour Party and the Socialist Party of Great Britain came into existence as the result of the “impossibilist revolt” of 1900–1904. The “revolt” was a movement of a few hundred socialists within the Social Democratic Federation, itself a social revolutionary party with a membership of only a few thousands. The absence of widespread support for any of these revolutionary movements in a country whose political tradition has remained predominantly constitutional accounts for the fact that the crisis inside the S.D.F., and with it the origins of the S.L.P. and the S.P.G.B. themselves have been consigned to obscurity in the history of British Socialism.

Among the various methodological prescriptions of Anthony Giddens, perhaps the most useful for labor history are his advisories on social change, on the anxieties and tensions attending a society's transition from one geographical scale to another. Labor's experience in the United States offers a case in point. The nation's transformation from a preindustrial to an industrial society entailed, in addition to the inexorables of accelerated urbanization, industrial expansion, and market extension, certain fundamental changes in the conditions of labor. Industrialization restructured the geography of labor markets, revised principles of wage determination, fomented sectarian division in the ranks of labor, and soured the relations between labor and capital. These structural changes led, in turn, to the inevitable responses of, among others, worker combination, protest, industrial violence, and a splintering in the ranks of labor.