Coalmining in Brazil began in the mid-nineteenth century in the municipality of São Jerônimo, Rio Grande do Sul, the country’s southernmost state. European workers were brought in and joined Brazilian workers, mostly local peasants with no experience in mining. This article discusses the role played by the immigrants in the making of a working class in the coalfields of southern Brazil. The research on which this article is based draws on numerous sources, including lawsuits and the application forms used to request professional licences. It focuses on ethnic and racial ambiguity, and on political strategies. The identity of the miners in the region is commonly represented as an amalgam of all ethnic groups, but this article shows that this self-propagated solidarity and cohesion among workers had its limits.

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.

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 analyses and compares the careers of a group of socialist militants who were active in several regions of Brazil in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. It underscores their similarities and differences with a view to understanding the various ways of being a socialist in that context. This includes examining their wide-ranging activities, the main ideas they upheld, and their role in the development of Brazilian labour laws in the 1930s and 1940s.1

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.

Wissenschaft von der Politik kann so wenig an die Stelle von Politik treten wie Literaturwissenschaft an die Stelle von Literatur. Aber, wie sich im Laufe der Zeit die Reflexion über Probleme der Literatur von dieser loslöste, so mußte auf einer bestimmten Stufe der Entwicklung des gesellschaftlichen und politischen Lebens auch die Reflexion über das Gemeinwesen und über politisches Handeln ein selbständiger Gegenstand der Forschung werden. Was vermag wissenschaftliche Besinnung über politische Probleme zu leisten? Vor allem kann sie – wie Wissenschaft überhaupt – dazu beitragen, die Elemente der uns umgebenden Wirklichkeit nüchtern und rational zu sehen und unsere politischen Urteile aus der Sphäre vorschneller, unbegründeter Meinungsbildung und gefühlsmässiger Voreingenommenheiten auf eine Ebene vernünftiger Erwägungen und begründbarer Erwartungen heben. Sie kann das politische Urteil klären und schärfen und damit die Voraussetzungen für politische Entscheidungen verbessern, diese selbst jedoch vermag sie weder zu ersetzen, noch zu bewirken. Zu einer solchen klärenden Besinnung sollen auch die vorstehenden Überlegungen über Marxismus und Bürokratie beitragen.

This paper investigates two New Kingdom Egyptian texts pertaining to labour regulation: the Karnak Decree of Horemheb and the Nauri Decree of Seti I. They focus on combating the unauthorized diverting of manpower and represent the oldest Egyptian texts (fourteenth–thirteenth century BCE) explicitly concerned with the legal dimension of managing the workforce. After a brief historical overview, the paper outlines each text's key content and stylistic features. It shows that while some of these are likely native to Egypt, others may have been imported from Mesopotamia. More specifically, it appears that the sentence structure is native Egyptian, but the sanctions deployed are likely of foreign origin, aligning more closely to the contemporary punitive tradition of Mesopotamia. This is probably no coincidence, given the close contact between Egypt and the broader Near East at that time. This uptake of foreign ideas may have achieved more efficient labour regulation by enforcing stricter rules for non-compliance while simultaneously maintaining a veneer of Egyptian authenticity in line with official state ideology.

By the early years of the twentieth century, the two major socialist parties in Russia, the Social Democrats and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, had taken shape. But these two parties did not win the adherence of all of Russia's revolutionary activists. There existed in addition a series of small extremist groups that formed what might be called the “militant fringe” of the revolutionary movement. These groups differed among themselves on programs, methods and ultimate objectives, but they all rejected the leading parties as insufficiently committed to revolution or too slow-moving in their tactics to achieve it. Although they never attained the numerical or organizational strength of the SD's and SR's, they remained a significant element in the revolutionary movement and left their mark on Russia's political life. The three main components of the militant fringe were the anarchists, the SR Maximalists, and the Makhaevists. Of these the Makhaevists are almost unknown today, although they formed organizations in several cities and rivalled the Maximalists and anarchists for the allegiance of the revolutionary extremists. An account of their program and activities will help to shed light on a segment of the Russian political spectrum whose insight into Russia's social and political condition has been underestimated, and on the revolutionary role of its smallest but in many ways most original element.