This introduction presents the main topics and analytical concerns of the contributions to this Special Issue about ethnicity and migration in coalfield history in a global perspective. From the nineteenth century the development of industrial and transport technologies required the supply of coal-based energy in every part of the world. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century globalization, including colonialism, would not have been possible without coal. Coalmining operations were launched in all world regions, and to enable exploitation mine operators had to find, mobilize, and direct workers to the mining sites. This quest for labour triggered a series of migration processes (both from nearby and far away) and resulted in a broad array of labour relations (both free and unfree). This introduction points to the variety of constellations analysed in the different contributions to this Special Issue. These cover cases from Africa (Nigeria, Zimbabwe), Asia (China, Japan), the Americas (USA, Brazil), Turkey, the Soviet Union, and western Europe (France, Germany), and a broad range of topics, from segregation, forced labour, and subcontracting to labour struggles, discrimination, ethnic paternalism, and sport.

Pour la France, la Commune est un grand moment socialiste. Pour l'Amérique latine, c'est un des points-clé du développement d'une société moderne. Il ne s'agit pas de rendre ici un hommage purement sentimental à ces hommes qui montèrent à «l'assaut du ciel»; il ne nous importe guère non plus de faire le compte des informations, ou des calomnies qu'on répandit sur la Commune dans le Nouveau Monde. Il nous semble en revanche qu'il vaut la peine de dire ce que fut l'impact politique et social de la Commune, et quelles orientations les Communards proscrits ont imprimées à notre histoire. Cet impact fait partie de tout un processus idéologique – l'introduction du socialisme, de l'anarchisme, du marxisme et de l'internationalisme – qui a donné son élan et ses doctrines au mouvement politique et à la lutte des classes en Amérique latine.

L'Institut international d'histoire sociale d'Amsterdam conserve dans le fonds Kautsky soixante-douze lettres d'Otto Bauer. Malheu-reusement les rponses de Karl Kautsky n'ont pas t retrouves et sont considres comme perdues. Aprs l'chec de l'insurrection ou-vrire du 12 fVrier 1934, en Autriche, Otto Bauer dut se rfugier Brno, en Tchcoslovaquie; la police de Dollfuss fouilla son apparte-ment et emporta tous les papiers. Plus tard, en 1938, quand Otto Bauer eut migre Paris, les bureaux de Brno furent ferms et on brǔla encore des documents parmi lesquels des lettres dont on assure qu'elles taient sans importance. Toujours est-il que les lettres de Bauer Kautsky constituent l'essentiel de ce qui a t sauv de sa correspondance.

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

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.

Until the late 1920s, anarchism was still a significant presence in Chinese radical thinking and activity, and till the middle of the decade, gave serious competition to the Communists. The essay discusses the nature of the anarchist movement in China, anarchist criticism of Bolshevik Marxism, and anarchist revolutionary strategy and activity during 1921–1927. It argues that while anarchists were quite innovative with regard to revolutionary strategy, their repudiation of organized power deprived them of the ability to coordinate revolutionary activity on a national scale, and what success they achieved remained local and short-lived. Indeed, the Communists were able to make better use of anarchist tactics than were the anarchists themselves. Anarchist critique of power rested on a denial of a center to society (and history). While this undercut the anarchists' ability to organize the revolutionary movement, it is also revealing of a basic problem of socialist revolution: the problem of democracy. In ignoring the anarchist critique of power, the successful revolutionaries deprived themselves of a critical perspective on the problem of socialist revolution, and were left at the mercy of the new structures of power that they brought into existence. Hence the importance of recalling anarchism.

It is frequently asserted by students of the history of the Third French Republic that the years before 1914, and especially from 1911 to 1914, were a period of nationalist revival, a somewhat exceptional period when politics were dominated by a novel concern for national unity, prestige, and power; by calls for order, tradition, and discipline; and by catchwords connected with all these things. I propose to inquire first into the social aspect of this apparent change in the ruling ideology of the Republic, and then into the background and nature of the Nationalist movement.

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 starting point of this article is the observation that thousands of enslaved people escaped bondage and managed to find refuge in the city of Baltimore between 1800 and 1860. There, they integrated into a large free black community. Given the use of the term “urban marronage” to categorize slave flight to cities in some historical literature, this chapter discusses the concept of marronage and its applicability to the urban context of antebellum Baltimore. It examines individual escapees from slavery, the communities they joined, and the broader slaveholding society to emphasize that the interplay and mutual relations of all three should be considered when assessing the applicability of this concept. Discussing the historiography around marronage and the arguments that speak both in favour of and against applying the concept of urban maroons to Baltimore's runaway slaves, this article ultimately dismisses its suitability for this case. In the process, this examination reveals the core of the concept, which, above all, concerns the aspect of resistance. In this context, it will be argued that resistance in the sense of rejecting the control of the dominant society should be included in the general definition of marronage.

This article recovers the history of the transnational women's movement that arose during Portugal's colonial wars (1961–1974). This movement connected women in Portugal and its colonies and operated independently of the PCP, MPLA, PAIGC, and FRELIMO. Most research on women's activism in Portugal, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, and Mozambique begins with their relationships to the male-dominated organizations that operated within national frameworks. In contrast, by examining the international connections of these women's groups, this article illuminates their political activities outside national organizations led by men. It shows that women created transnational solidarity networks struggling against the Portuguese Estado Novo and the colonial wars and, in doing so, promoted their own emancipation.

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.

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.