The processes of control and collection are prominent themes throughout pharaonic history. However, the extent that the central regime attempted to administer agricultural fields to collect revenues directly from the farmer who actually worked the land is unclear during the pharaonic period (c.2686–1069). Relations between those involved in agricultural cultivation and local headships of extended families and wider kinship groups were deeply embedded within a broad range of interpersonal discourses, behaviours, and practices. Village headmen and officials at all levels of an impersonalized “state” hierarchy were themselves landholders who drew income from the land and were held responsible for collecting revenues from their fields. It is therefore necessary to define, with a focus on the imperatives of a subsistence economy, who was working the land and what the relationship was between them, the headmen, and those from within outside power structures (in the context of direct intervention against specific groups of the population). To address these points, I will focus on revenue extraction as a “state” process, how it was connected to the role of punishment, and its impact on local hierarchies (the targets of revenue extraction).

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.

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.

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.

G. D. H. Cole has drawn attention to the militancy of the unions outside of the craftsmen's trades in the 1860's. The “class cleavage” which he ascribed to the engineering, shipbuilding and the building trades enabled the skilled men to use their “New Model Unions” as exclusive barriers against dilution by the semi-skilled and labouring classes. In consequence, the Amalgamated Unions had pacific tendencies which were only partially offset by their adoption of a centralised organisation, through which policy making and finance were mainly controlled. Although Cole described the Ironworkers' Union as one of the provincially based Amalgamated Unions, the three main unions which were formed by the ironworkers in the years 1862–3 never really succeeded in amalgamating along the lines described. When they did come together in 1868, after a period of disastrous defeats, the form of amalgamation they adopted resulted in a very weak union. The executive committee insisted upon making all decisions on the use of the strike tactic, but allowed the branches almost complete control over union finances.

This paper considers aspects of the local geographies of Australian emigration created in south-west Ulster by the New South Wales government-sponsored remittance emigration scheme between 1858 and 1884. The scheme mobilized the financial resources of settlers in New South Wales to part-fund the passage of friends and relatives from Britain and Ireland. The paper utilizes the comprehensive socio-economic and demographic archive generated by the scheme, to explore the response of rural communities in thirteen civil parishes in Counties Cavan and Fermanagh to this opportunity to emigrate. It concludes that although the emigrant sample's demographic profile accorded with conventional models of Irish assisted emigration, it was also marked by pronounced over-representation of Protestants and under-representation of Catholics. Possible explanations for this are considered in terms of the positionality and human capital of the three major denominations and the efficiency of their social networks in negotiating the bureaucratic process in Australia.

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.”

The 27th of January 1941 was a memorable day in the bizarre history of the Amsterdam International Institute of Social History during the German occupation. Within the scope of activity of his “Office for the Occupied Territories”, NSDAP Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg placed the Lieutenant-Commander and Nazi publisher Eberhard Kautter “in charge” of the IISH: “It is your duty to be responsible for the organizational supervision and the deployment of those staff members who qualify for the utilization of the institute. Your mission is to be carried out in agreement with the head of the Netherlands work group of the task force from my office, Oberbereichsleiter Schirmer.” On the same day, the bustling chief of the self-named Einsatzstab (task force), in his function as “Commissioner of the Führer for the Supervision of all Mental and Ideological Training and Education”, approached Robert Ley, the Reichsorganisationsleiter of the NSDAP and head of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF – German Labor Front). He had a letter sent to him that Eberhard Kautter had drafted already in early January and had obviously withheld until Kautter had been named to the post of IISH administrator. Rosenberg reminded Ley that, in a decree from 29 January 1940, Hitler had entrusted him with all of the preparations for the establishment of a Hohe Schule (Supreme School), that was to be the “central site of National Socialist research, instruction and education”. Thus, he was “setting up a number of branch institutes of the Supreme School”. Among these was an “academy”, the task of which would be to work out the close connection between the “National Socialist Weltanschauung” and the “practical way of structuring life” both for the present and the future. Now he was contacting him, since Ley was also interested in “the relationship between Weltanschauung and social structuring” in his function as Reichsleiter of the DAF and had certainly run up against similar problems within the scope of the extensive “economic-statistical work” of his office.

In 1905, dockworkers in Rotterdam harbour organized a great strike against the introduction of machines for the transhipment of grain. The initial success of this strike was a profound shock to the leaders of political parties and national labour organizations, who, in spite of many differences of opinion, shared a positive attitude towards mechanization and regarded strikes against machinery as reactionary. The conflict in Rotterdam provoked a national debate about the implications of mechanization, which clearly exposed the strains and contradictions in this “dominant ideology of technology”. The article shows how several local labour leaders questioned the legitimacy of this ideology and why they failed in the end to persuade their superiors.

This article interrogates the social impact of one aspect of structural adjustment in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan: privatization. In the mid-2000s, King Abdullah II privatized Jordan's minerals industry as part of the regime's accelerated neoliberal project. While many of these privatizations elicited responses ranging from general approval to ambivalence, the opaque and seemingly corrupt sale of the Jordan Phosphate Mines Company (JPMC) in 2006 was understood differently, as an illegitimate appropriation of Jordan's national resources and, by extension, an abrogation of the state's (re-) distributive obligations. Based on interviews with activists, I argue that a diverse cross-section of social movement constituencies – spanning labour and non-labour movements (and factions within and across those movements) – perceived such illegitimate privatizations as a moral violation, which, in turn, informed transgressive activist practices and discourses targeting the neoliberal state. This moral violation shaped the rise and interaction of labour and non-labour social movements in Jordan's “Arab uprisings”, peaking in 2011–2013. While Jordan's uprisings were largely demobilized after 2013, protests in 2018 and 2019 demonstrate the continued relevance of this discourse. In this way, the 2011–2013 wave of protests – and their current reverberations – differ qualitatively from Jordan's earlier wave of “food riots” in 1989 (and throughout the 1990s), which I characterize as primarily restorative in nature.

The social history of work and workers is currently in the paradoxical position of having defined the subject of study in all its rich complexity as never before – a fact borne out by some excellent works – yet fewer and fewer social historians are working on the subject.