In the past few decades, caregivers, such as nursing assistants and home health aides, have come to compose the fastest-growing segment of the paid workforce in the United States. At the same time, corporate caretakers of workers’ savings, such as pension funds and mutual funds, have become the nation's largest investors, bound by fiduciary duties of trust. And unprecedented numbers of elder employees and retirees have become the biggest supposed beneficiaries of both care labor and trust capital, depending on health workers and asset managers in their daily lives. At the center of this emerging structure of work, wealth, and welfare lies the pension system, a telling crucible of class relations in our time. Several recent books across different disciplines examine the shifting politics of pensions in the United States and around the world. The spate of new studies presents an opportunity to explore the remarkable role of retirement funds in reorganizing labor and finance over the past fifty years. Rather than offering a historiographical critique of current work, this expository essay surveys the main findings of a larger and longer body of scholarship on organized labor and investment related to pensions. Though focused on the United States, it places the American story in a comparative context. The survey points to a fertile field for further study: as retirees have increasingly relied on professional asset managers and caregivers, the finance and health sectors have undergone converging crises over fiduciary duty and elder care, posing parallel challenges for organized labor.

The respective Jewish policies of Tsarist ministers Witte and Plehve are re-examined through the perspective of their opposing socio-economic policies. The two ministers' rivalry over Jewish policy is considered not to be a reflection of “antisemitic” or “pro-Jewish” sympathies, as that would leave major elements of these policies unexplained; rather, analysis shows it to be a means in their struggle to gain supremacy for their own respective policies regarding the nature and pace of Russia's industrialization. The Russian policy-makers perceived the Jews not only as a religious group; they saw them as a non-monolithic economic entity, and differentiated among the various strata of Jewish society in accordance with the respective influence of each stratum's economic activities on Russian society and economy. Accordingly, the two ministers formulated opposing differential Jewish policies to fit their respective all-Russian socio-economic policies.

The purpose of this article is to question the notion of US labour's “exceptionalism” – of its “conservatism” and “closure” and difference from “class-conscious” and “socialist” British and European labour – with specific reference to the politics of the American Federation of Labour during the 1890s and 1900s. An approach rooted in the assumption of “norms” and “exceptions” is rejected in favour of one exploring differences and similarities. In terms of similarities, the article demonstrates the ways in which the AF of L consciously sought to model its “independent” (i.e. nonpartisan–party) politics upon the practice of the late-Victorian British TUC. With respect to differences, the article then proceeds to chart the challenges posed to the AF of L by the growing identification within British labour of political independence with independent partyism, as manifested especially in the TUC's official endorsement of the Labour Representation Committee (1900) and the Labour Party (1906). Resistant to the adoption of the new “British road”, the AF of L nevertheless defended its “traditional” form of political independence far more in terms of experiential US “peculiarities” than “exceptionalist” structural determinations.

This paper examines the working class in the United States and Britain in order to find a new perspective on the origins and break-up of the World Federation of Trade Unions. While most previous works have focused on the roles of institutions and leaders, this research uncovers the important role played by the thoughts, actions, and inactions of average workers in international affairs. American and British workers, as key constituents of two of the most important organizations making up the WFTU, were not passive observers of world events. Rather, they were critical not only of how the world union movement functioned, but also of the process which came to be termed the Cold War.

As a persistent critic of the German Revolution of November 9, 1918, and of the Weimar Republic, the Conservative publicist Arthur Moeller van den Bruck frequently denounced what he called the “republic without republicans”. “The Republic in which we are living”, he wrote, “is a joyless republic. Is it really a republic? Is it not still a monarchy that has merely been deprived of its emblems? Is not this thing which has no symbol on which one can fasten belief, is it not monarchy in its deepest humiliation?” The questions that Moeller van den Bruck was asking for Conservatives were being asked, in their own way, by men through the spectrum of intellectual and political life: by men on the Left who wanted a Communist or Socialist republic, by men of the Right who wanted a popular constitutional monarchy, by the few who wanted the status quo, and by the many who wanted some kind of progressive change in public life. Not least among the questioners was Gustav Stresemann, the young leader of the new German People's Party.

This study investigates child factory labour in Victoria, the most populous and industrialized colony in Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century. Three sources of primary data are analysed: Royal Commission reports, texts of bills and statutes, and parliamentary and public debates. The findings inform current academic debates by enhancing understanding of the role played by child workers during industrialization. They show that children were low-cost substitutes for adult males and that child labour was central to ongoing industrialization. A wide range of industries and jobs is identified in which children were employed in harsh conditions, in some instances in greater proportions than adults. Following the reports of the Royal Commission, the parliament of Victoria recognized a child labour problem serious enough to warrant regulation. While noting that circumstances were not as severe as in Britain, it passed legislation in 1885 with provisions that offered more protection to children than those in the British factory act of 1878. The legislation also offered more protection than factory laws in other industrializing colonies and countries. The findings throw light on the character of colonial liberal reformers in a wealthy colony who sought to create a better life for white settlers by adopting policies of state intervention.

The need to study the historical roots of the household is gradually becoming accepted, although as yet methods of approach are still being developed and debated. For the student of the mid-nineteenth century, the census enumerators' books provide basic data for such an enquiry. They give the occupation, marital status, age and birth place for every member of each household in all registration districts throughout the country. In order to exploit this information effectively, a sophisticated methodology is required. One has been suggested by Dr W. A. Armstrong. It involves selecting a sample of households from a district, and translating the information thus gained into numerical form, which can then be placed onto punched cards. By sorting them mechanically it becomes possible to make a whole series of quantitative statements about the households, such as their mean sizes, the numbers headed by widows, etc. This method has attracted some support, but it has not been without its critics. Some have voiced general scepticism about “quantitative” history; others have questioned specific points. In rejoinders Armstrong has backed up his arguments with illustrations from his researches into York as well as with some of my own Nottinghamshire results. However, these discussions have been conducted in something of a vacuum. This is an indication that there is now room

Starting from an incident in the colonial port city of Paramaribo in the autumn of 1750 in which, according to the Dutch governor Mauricius, many of the proper barriers separating rich and poor, men and women, adults and children, white citizens and black slaves were crossed, this article traces some of the complexities of everyday social control in colonial Suriname. As gateways for the trade in commodities and the movement of people, meeting points for free and unfree labourers, and administrative centres for emerging colonial settlements, early modern port cities became focal points for policing interaction across racial and social boundaries. Much of the literature on the relationship between slavery and race focuses on the plantation as “race-making institution” and the planter class as the immediate progenitors of “racial capitalism”. Studies of urban slavery, on the other hand, have emphasized the greater possibilities of social contact between blacks, mestizos, and whites of various social status in the bustling port cities of the Atlantic. This article attempts to understand practices of racialization and control in the port city of Paramaribo not by contrasting the city with its plantation environment, but by underlining the connections between the two social settings that together shaped colonial geography. The article focuses on everyday activities in Paramaribo (dancing, working, drinking, arguing) that reveal the extent of contact between slaves and non-slaves. The imposition of racialized forms of repression that set one group against the other, frequently understood primarily as a means to justify the apparent stasis of the plantation system with its rigid internal divisions, in practice often functioned precisely to fight the pernicious effects of mobility in mixed social contexts.

This article explores the relationships between young European women who worked in the growing entertainment market in Argentine and Brazilian cities, and the many people who from time to time came under suspicion of exploiting them for prostitution. The international travels of young women with contracts to sing or dance in music halls, theatres, and cabarets provide a unique opportunity to reflect on some of the practices of labour intermediation. Fragments of their experiences were recorded by a number of Brazilian police investigations carried out in order to expel “undesirable” foreigners under the Foreigners Expulsion Act of 1907. Such sources shed light on the work arrangements that made it possible for young women to travel overseas. The article discusses how degrees of autonomy, violence, and exploitation in the artists’ work contracts were negotiated between parties at the time, especially by travelling young women whose social experiences shaped morally ambiguous identities as artists, prostitutes, and hired workers.

The first part of this paper establishes the outlines of social policy in the course of the nineteenth century using Great Britain, Germany and France as examples, with particular emphasis on the differences arising from the varying political cultures of these countries. In the second part the paper attempts to establish comparisons for a generalized framework, also covering developments into the twentieth century. ‘Social policy’ in this instance means all state measures to safeguard the physical and social existence of employed workers on the basis of a criterion of fairness which is derived from their citizenship, it is political in other words. Safety ar work is as much a part of this as protection during illness, old age or unemployment. This study as a whole sets out to achieve some standardizations which will be useful in the analysis of the history of social policy and may also be helpful in the discussion of current socio-political problems.

A letter from Dmitrii Blagoev, Bulgarian Social Democrat and later leader of the Communist Party of Bulgaria, has been preserved in the archive of A. N. Potresov at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. In reply to an inquiry fromD. Kol'tsov, who was preparing a Russian edition of Alphonse Thun's well-known history of the Russian revolutionary movement, Blagoev wrote twelve pages describing his activity in 1883–85 as a member of the first significant Social Democratic circle in Russia. Kol'tsov published extracts from the letter in his edition of Thun, including the Social Democratic program which Blagoev had published in Bulgaria subsequent to his expulsion from Russia in 1885. Kol'tsov's pen, however, struck out some of the more interesting biographical passages, and corrected Blagoev's good, if somewhat erratic Russian. It is particularly interesting to note Blagoev's references to the intellectual bases for a socialist Weltanschauung in the middle 1880's: Lassalle, Lavrov and Chernyshevskii appear beside Marx in the posts of honor. No less interesting is the question which Blagoev raised in this letter – whether the lack of clarity of Socialist views in 1885 was connected in any way with the rise of Economism among workers and socialist intellectuals in the Russian capital during the closing years of the last century. Literature on the Blagoev circle is not lacking, but there is a shortage of sound studies on the relationships between Marxism and indigenous Russian political philosophies between 1880 and 1895.