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.

The importance of the “Lavrists” or “Vperedovtsy”, named after the publication Vpered (Forward) (1873–1877) founded and edited by Peter Lavrovich Lavrov, in the evolution of the socialist ideas and groups in Russia has been recognized by historians from Alphonse Thun to Franco Venturi. The journal's role in the dissemination of the socialist credo among Russian Jews has never been seriously disputed, although seldom recorded in concrete terms.

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.

In eighteenth-century Spain the encouragement of commerce and industry occupied an important place in the plans of the Bourbons for reviving national strength after the great crisis of the seventeenth century. Successive royal administrations resorted to a formidable array of measures designed to stimulate economic development. Government policy was directed primarily to furnishing commerce and industry with material assistance: subsidies, tax exemptions, protective tariffs, etc. The crown was also concerned, however, with the deleterious effects upon economic progress of an apparently pervasive and tenacious system of values which looked upon manual labor in an industrial context and economic enterprise in general as dishonorable for noble and commoner alike.

This article examines the labour disturbances which occurred in Freetown, Sierra Leone (Figure 1), between 1938 and 1939. Contrary to the prevailing interpretation that the colonial state in Africa was faced with an alternative of either forcefully pushing the working class out of the city or moving towards some form of corporatism, this article argues that such an option was only feasible in situations where labour was relatively quiescent or where a casual labour problem existed. In Freetown, where a stable labour force existed, the choice was between accepting a militant labour movement over whom officials had little or no control, or creating a labour movement that would eschew militant protest and follow the path dictated from above. The existence of a militant organization committed to continous agitation and the use of strike weapons to force employers to acknowledge the presence of a working class were critical factors in shaping official response to labour disturbances in the British colonies.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, scholars had transformed our understanding of class, race, and ethnicity in the rise and demise of the US coal industry. Under the twin impact of the modern Black Freedom Movement and the rise of the New Labor History, studies of American labor and race relations fragmented during the late twentieth century. Following the lead of pioneering labor historian Herbert Gutman, one influential body of scholarship resuscitated the early history of the United Mine Workers of America and accented the emergence of remarkable forms of labor solidarity across the color line during the industrial era. Before this scholarship could gain a firm footing in the historiography of labor and working-class history, however, social activist and labor scholar Herbert Hill forcefully argued that emerging emphases on interracial working-class cooperation downplayed the persistence of racial divisions even during the most promising episodes of labor unity. In significant ways, the Hill−Gutman debate fueled the florescence of whiteness studies and the myriad ways that both capital and labor benefitted from a racially stratified workforce. Based upon this rapidly expanding historiography of coalminers in America, this essay explores how the overlapping experiences of black and white miners established the foundation for modes of cooperation as well as conflict, but the persistence of white supremacist ideology and social practices repeatedly undermined sometimes heroic movements to bridge the chasm between black and white workers.

This article examines some aspects of the labour involved in generating, recording and transmitting information in eighteenth-century Europe. It centres on the study of a particular occupational group: the men involved in the day-to-day operations of the schemes for the marketing of life-contingent pensions which would develop into modern life insurance, a form of enterprise whose growth was deeply implicated in the emerging “information society”. The bulk of the work these men did was what we would now call clerical work: keeping and processing records and accounts, managing correspondence, preparing reports for publication. It was in the nature of the information regimes within which they worked and the kind of information they were handling, though, that the responsibilities and demands placed on them went beyond those associated with the mechanical function of recording and reproducing. This made for an occupational profile which was relatively fluid, and only gradually came to be distinguishable from other contemporary forms of middle-class employment, in terms of the disciplines peculiar to it and the hazards it incurred. Among the hazards were forms of mental and physical strain that accompanied rapid increases in the volume of data that had to be handled and in the speed of its circulation, as a direct consequence of its character as “information”. While the account focuses on the study of a particular kind of enterprise in a particular place, northwest Germany, it draws on comparative data for officers and staff in analogous forms of commercial and administrative employment in Britain. The article concludes with a consideration of how their occupational profile might fit into an extended account of the historical development of information work.

In German history the concept of a “rising middle class” has been applied to three major periods of development in three different ways. Traditionally, German historians have been concerned with describing (1) the development of towns and an urban bourgeoisie during the Middle Ages; then (2) the rise of a bourgeois class of university trained jurists during the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries; and finally, (3) the rise the modern middle class common to an industrialized society.

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.

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.

This Special Issue collects articles on urban slavery in the Atlantic world during the time when the institution of slavery was being abolished globally (c.1770s–c.1880s). At the time of abolition, most slaves were held on plantations, but this did not mean that the urban context of slavery was unimportant. In the cities of the Atlantic world, slavery was pervasive, and the cities themselves played an important role in the functioning of the slave system. This Special Issue seeks to examine urban slavery in its connection to the wider slave-based economy, and to address how slavery in the cities changed when abolition appeared on the political agenda in the Atlantic world. The articles in this issue find that urban communities went through great changes in the age of abolition and these changes proved crucial to determining the legacies of slavery and its abolition. Recovering the history of urban slavery in this area should come to inform the current mainstreaming of the memory of slavery around the Atlantic world. Attention to its history can provide new layers of understanding to the persistence of inequity and historical silencing today.

Gypsies (Ciganos in Portuguese) have been present in Brazil since the earliest days of Portuguese colonization. Part of the (free) masses (o povo, “the people”), they were known primarily as itinerant traders of trinkets, slaves, and animals, and were one category of intermediaries who made the internal economy function. Authorities viewed their lifestyle and activities with suspicion. Focusing on the state of Bahia, in the north-eastern region of Brazil, between the late sixteenth and late nineteenth centuries, this article shows that the tenuous position of Gypsies was amenable to transformations reflecting political priorities and ideas about the proper social order. The continued difference of Ciganos and their independent way of making a living were at times problematized by elites, embodying wider tensions between the authorities and the people. The case of Bahian Ciganos is revelatory within Romani-related historiography in that it foregrounds connected developments within locales enmeshed in a metropole–periphery relationship, continuities between imperial and nation-building projects, and the centrality of race on which they were built.

In 1980, thousands of metalworkers from the region of greater São Paulo known as the “ABC” region carried out one of the most intense and lasting strikes in the history of the Brazilian working class. For forty-one days, striking workers resisted the repression that bosses and the nation's military regime mounted against them, which contributed to the collective worker mobilization that spread throughout the spaces of the city – especially the streets of the São Bernardo do Campo neighborhood. Expelled from factories and major public spaces, workers were able to maintain the strike mainly in the neighborhoods where they lived, thus politicizing the spaces and relationships of their daily lives and redefining the geography of collective mobilization. This article analyzes aspects of this process, highlighting the importance of workers’ social networks to the notable (re)appropriation of urban space that characterized the strike movement.

The author of this article on the activities of the Hungarian refugee and spy Johann Bangya based himself on archival sources hitherto unused. As early as 1845/46 Banya had already occasionally served the Austrian Government in some confidential capacity. A spy in the grand style, however, he became after the collapse of the Hungarian fight for independence of 1848/49. He succeeded in establishing himself among the London circles of emigrants, and it was he who put the authorities on the track of the „Kommunistenbund” in Germany. The arrest of the emissary Nothjung and the Cologne Communist Trial, moreover, may be traced back to him as well. Bangya managed to get into close contact with Marx and he smuggled the former's polemic pamphlet Die grossen Männer des Exils into the hands of the police. Marx subsequently accused him of theft of this manuscript and denounced him as a spy in the New York Criminal-Zeitung of May the 3rd, 1853.

The notion that the leadership of industrial society must eventually be ceded to an educated elite of technical and administrative experts is an important theme in the social thought of the last two centuries. It can be found as early as Saint-Simon's plans for the Système Industriel. As a criticism of the supposedly anti-proletarian aspects of Socialism it is commonly thought to have originated with James Burnham's idea of a “managerial revolution” and appeared later with Milovan Djilas's “new class”. Actually the criticism of “State Socialism” in general, and of Marxism in particular, for an alleged tropism toward managerialism was also a weapon in the arsenal of nineteenth century anarchism. An integral part of Bakunin's criticism of Marx, whom he called the “Bismarck of Socialism”, was the contention that Marxism in power would organize society “under the direct command of state engineers who will constitute a new privileged scientific-political class”. This thesis has had its most consistent and rigorous formulation in the work of Jan Waclaw Machajski, a Polish-Russian revolutionary who based his theory on the conviction that Socialism was not the ideology of the proletariat but of what he called the “intellectual workers”, the new middle class of white collar employees generated by industrial capitalism. The most important antagonism in modern society, thought Machajski, was that between the educated – to whom he gave the inclusive term “bourgeois society” – and the uneducated manual laborers. He argued that a portion of educated society, the Socialist intelligentsia with Marxists in the forefront, was attempting to gain for itself a privileged position in capitalist society by turning the labor movement away from direct action for higher wages and toward a struggle for parliamentary power which could only benefit the intellectual workers.

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.

This article tells the hitherto unknown history of the rickshaw in the Philippines. The Filipinos’ encounter with this transport mode was brief and largely revolved around a failed rickshaw business in Manila in 1902. The venture quickly fizzled out, but not without controversy, deeply rooted in the colliding socio-political forces in the city at that time: the reliance on a non-motorized transport system; the consolidation of American colonial rule against the backdrop of an ongoing revolution; the birth of the first Filipino labor federation; and the implementation of a law banning the employment of Chinese workers from unskilled trades. The controversy turned the rickshaw into a disputed symbol. On the one hand, the rickshaw enterprise was criticized by Filipino carriage drivers and nationalist labor leaders, who viewed the vehicle as an essentially foreign apparatus that would enslave Filipinos. On the other hand, the Americans used the Filipinos’ opposition to the rickshaw to prove the supposed un-modernity of the lazy native workers, who failed to grasp the idea of the dignity of labor. These disputes were inextricably linked to the clash of discourses between Filipino nationalism and colonial modernity, two competing perspectives both influenced by a comparative transnational frame.