Inequality has increased in most Western countries since the early 1980s. In a recent report, the international non-governmental organization Oxfam noted that the twenty-six richest people in the world own as much wealth as the poorest fifty per cent of the world's population. Discontent with the growing disparities in wealth and income has soared in recent years, especially in the wake of the 2007/2008 financial crisis and the “Great Recession” that followed. The Occupy movement protested against the greed of the “one per cent”, referring to the highly skewed income distribution in the US. Former US president Barack Obama proclaimed the growth of within-country economic inequality as “the defining challenge of our time”. Yet, he enacted few policies that reduced inequality during his two terms in office; the Gini coefficient in the US actually increased slightly between 2007 and 2016. His successor, whose election has often been explained as a consequence of these high levels of inequality, has slashed taxes for the wealthy, probably causing further rises in inequality in the future. In this essay, I will review two recent economic history books that examine the historical roots of within-country inequality on a global scale: Branko Milanovic's Global Inequality (2016) and Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler (2017). Formerly a lead economist at the World Bank, Milanovic is a well-known scholar working in the field of economic inequality, while Scheidel has a background as a specialist in the economic, social, and demographic history of antiquity.

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 grass-roots activities of the Independent Labour Party have been the subject of increased scrutiny from historians over the past few years, especially in the pages of this journal. Consequently we can now be a little surer about the contribution of the party to the development of an independent labour movement in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, though with every fresh case-study a different local strategy seems to come to light. The one outstanding profile in this field is the closely observed account of the ILP in Bradford by J. Reynolds and K. Laybourn, who identify several key features in the party's growth in that city, notably the reformist nature of ILP socialism and the close associations with local trade unionism. “From the outset”, they tell us, “Bradford trade unionism and the Bradford ILP were seen as two aspects of a single homogeneous labour movement aimed at the emancipation of the working class from poverty and exploitation.”

In the translation of Trotsky's letter to Krupskaya the sentence “But they have not denied us this request” (previous issue, p. 118, line 15) should read:

But they have denied us this request.

The engineers' lock-out of 1852 is just one of those historical events which, while receiving extensive coverage and being long pondered over, remain to this day a bone of contention. In terms of scale and in the sophistication of the tactics employed, it “was the first of a new class of strikes or lock-outs”. It aroused more sustained interest than any previous industrial dispute. It stimulated “a discussion of the strike by the press, so comprehensive and exhaustive that a reproduction of the newspaper articles would fill volumes”. At this time, the only other trade unions of any appreciable size were still less than half the strength of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. Some earlier combinations had been larger, but they had been formed solely in relation to specific strikes and, as such, were ephemeral in character. The mass movements of 1830–34 generally rested upon the precarious financial foundations of irregular levies. The Webbs concluded that a “trade society which […] could count on a regular income of £500 a week was without precedent.”

Von den verschiedenen Auslandsorganisationen sozialdemokratischer deutscher Arbeiter und Handwerker im neunzehnten Jahrhundert sind die drei Kopenhagener, der Deutsche social-demokratische Arbeiterverein (1875–77), die Deutsche Lesegesellschaft (1887–91) und der Deutsche Arbeiterverein Vorwärts (1894–1914) bislang von der historischen Forschung unbeachtet geblieben. Dies erscheint unberechtigt, denn, mag es auch zutreffen, dass die drei Vereine zu den weniger bedeutenden Auslandsorganisationen deutscher Sozialdemokraten gehörten, für die dänische Arbeiterbewegung war der älteste der drei Vereine von grosser Bedeutung. In der Mitte der siebziger Jahre des vorigen Jahrhunderts war er nicht nur das einzige Bindeglied der dänischen Arbeiterbewegung zwar weniger zur organisierten deutschen Sozialdemokratie als zur Ideenwelt deutscher Arbeiter und Handwerker, sondern zeitweilig auch das einzige Milieu innerhalb der dänischen Arbeiterbewegung, in dem theoretische Fragen diskutiert wurden. Die Aufgabe, diesen Verein darzustellen, erschien deshalb lohnend; dabei erwies es sich als notwendig, ihn in die Geschichte der dänischen Arbeiterbewegung, in die er voll integriert war, einzubetten.

This article introduces the present Special Theme on the global reception and appropriation of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). It aims to interrogate Thompson’s legacy and potential vitality at a moment of renewed social and intellectual upheavals. It emphasizes the need for an interdisciplinary and global reflection on Thompson’s work and impact for understanding how class, nation, and “the people” as subjects of historical inquiry have been repeatedly recast since the 1960s. Examining the course of Thompson’s ideas in Japan and West Germany, South Africa and Argentina, as well as Czechoslovakia and Poland, each of the following five articles in the Special Theme is situated in specific and different locations in the global historiographical matrix. Read as a whole, they show how national historiographies have been products of local processes of state and class formation on the one hand, and transnational transfers of intellectual and historiographical ideas, on the other. They highlight the remarkable ability of Thompsonian social history to inspire new lives in varying national contexts shaped by different formations of race, class, and state.

This paper aims to explain the different political trajectories and identities of two sets of industrial workers in the city of Lyon, France during the years immediately preceding the first World War. Silk workers supported reformist socialist parties while metalworkers were pillars of the revolutionary syndicalist current that dominated the prewar CGT. Unlike base and superstructure models or political autonomy explanations, it is argued that the particular industrial structures and social relations within each industry interacted with local and national political opportunity structures in ways that rendered some strategies and forms of collective action more efficacious than others. The programs and strategies proposed by revolutionary syndicalism matched the conditions of metalworkers and attracted their support, while reformist socialism struck a similar chord with silk workers resulting in similar results.