The change in the social background of university students in nineteenth-century Russia, and in particular the “arrival of the raznochinets”, to use Mikhailovskii's celebrated term, have long been considered a major turning-point in Russian social history and a watershed in the development of the revolutionary movement. Historians have often attributed to it the chief role in producing the evolution of ideological attitudes between the “Fathers” of the 1840's and the “Sons” of the 1860's and the upsurge in radical agitation in the universities on the eve of the Emancipation of the Serfs.

For nearly one hundred years miners and nationalisation have been synonymous. The miners supported a nationalisation resolution at the 1892 Trades Union Congress, and in 1893 Keir Hardie presented a brief bill to the House of Commons. This abortive excercise was repeated in 1907 and 1913. The 1914–18 war marks the demise of that form of nationalisation which sought to place the mines under a Government Department. The pre-1914 industrial unrest and the experience of the war radicalised the miners' conception of nationalisation. The ideas of The Miners' Next Step, of the debates within the Miners' Federation of Great Britain after 1906 and of Guild Socialism permeated official MFGB thinking on nationalisation. By 1919 and the Sankey Commission the MFGB was committed to a model of nationalisation which placed considerable emphasis upon workers' control. This model had two aims: first, to emancipate the coal industry from the wasteful exploitation of the coal-owners; and second, to emancipate the miner as a worker from his bondage. The present paper seeks to answer the question: why was this model of nationalisation abandoned by the MFGB in favour of the technocratic model of nationalisation formulated by Herbert Morrison?

„Mein Freund, Joh. Phil. Becker zu Biel, steht im Begriff gleich mir, ein Bürgerrecht im Kanton Bern nachzusuchen. Könnten Sie ihm dabei behilflich sein, so bitte ich Sie, es zu thun. Ich kenne keinen tüchtigeren Mann, an ihm wird der Kanton einen thätigen, kräftigen und hochherzigen Bürger gewinnen. Nach meiner Überzeugung wiegen alle Deutsche, die seit 3 Jahren Bürger in Bern geworden, diesen einen nicht auf.”

Studies of indigenous workers’ resistance focus largely on rural workers. In contrast, this article examines indigenous workers’ dissent in an industrialized and largely urbanized setting – that of Māori meat processing workers in Aotearoa New Zealand. I argue that far from being passive victims of colonization and capitalism, Māori meatworkers played an often vital role in the generally extensive informal and formal labour unrest that occurred in the meat industry during the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. However, Māori meatworkers’ resistance and solidarity was not universal, but instead varied significantly, both spatially and temporally. The dissent and solidarity that occurred were often a product of the multi-ethnic informal work groups that existed in many slaughterhouses. These workplace-whānau, in which Māori played a pivotal role, functioned similar to extended family networks on the killing floor. Workplace-whānau represented a significant intertwining of indigeneity and class. Nevertheless, as they were often based on masculine bonds, they frequently excluded female workers (including Māori women).

By analysing the first great railway strike in São Paulo (Brazil), this article aims to understand the role of the Companhia Paulista railway workers’ movement and its impact on labour relations in the São Paulo state. To that end, I have examined selected newspapers, the minutes of workers’ meetings, police investigations into the strike, and the reports of the Companhia Paulista's directors. Differing from the views of other historians who have tended to see the 1906 railway strike as a relatively inconsequential conflict about wages, I interpret it both as rooted in deeper grievances about labour conditions and as a starting point for a period of heightened militancy and changing labour-management relations.

The history of working-class politics in Britain during the last hundred years might be written in terms of changing attitudes towards Liberalism; a Liberalism which was continuously redefining itself as its social composition altered and political circumstances changed. Successive generations of working-class leaders attempted both to identify themselves with Liberalism and to disengage themselves from it. Those who saw the political future of labour in terms of full incorporation within the Liberal party were never left unchallenged; those who believed in political independence rarely thought of that independence as involving a complete break with Liberal values. From the eighteen-sixties onwards the conflict between the desire to be assimilated and the urge to independence was continuously present within individuals as well as within movements.

Jusqu'en 1924, du point de vue de sa structure interne – la structure fédérale traditionnelle –, le Parti communiste français, bien que déjà section française de l'Internationale communiste, ressemblait, tel un fils à son père, au Parti socialiste unifié d'avant la scission. A son 3ème congrès national de Lyon (20–23 janvier 1924), tous les termes anciens sont encore en usage: à l'échelon local, la section rassemble les adhérents d'un même village ou d'une même ville (à Paris, d'un même arrondissement); la fédération englobe toutes les sections d'un même département; enfin, à l'échelon national, les délégués des 90 fédérations départementales, réunis annuellement en congrès, élisent un Comité directeur qui, s'appuyant sur des sous-commissions, a la responsabilité de la vie du Parti entre deux congrès.

The US Constitution preserves the right of the people to petition the government for redress of grievances. This right allows individuals to request private legislation from Congress and, as such, private bill petitions involve individual claims or pleas for relief for a specified person, or persons. Private petitions to Congress fall into two principal categories: claims against the US government (e.g., claims stemming from automobile accidents with government vehicles) and relief from immigration and naturalization laws. Although private laws concerning immigration and naturalization have influenced later public legislation by highlighting areas in need of reform, the private laws have limited application. Other than serving as precedent for subsequent private legislation for similarly situated individuals making requests for enactment of private laws, the laws do not benefit anyone other than the named beneficiaries of the bills.

By studying the guilds of the seven maritime cargo handling trades of Barcelona, this paper aims to contribute to the relatively limited, but growing scholarship of port labour during the late artisan phase, and of service-sector guilds in general. It examines the relationship between occupational and organizational cultures, the types and means of inculcating human and social capital, and the formal and informal determination of qualification in view of the different guild responses to liberalization and abolition. Unlike guilds in the secondary sector, these corporations were organized horizontally among masters and had neither journeymen, nor apprentices in their respective trades. Some of them provided services individually while others worked collectively. They generally prohibited internal and external employment schemes, and many of them used a turn system or another to level work opportunities. One of these guilds transitioned directly into a trade union; others became owner associations or dissolved into unorganized competitors. The period studied covers the flexibilization of the labour market through progressively advancing liberal reforms of monopolistic guild privileges and the formal abolition of Spanish guilds in 1836. Comparisons with other European ports further highlight the multiplicity of considerations for understanding occupational and organizational cultures and the trajectories of guilds in the service sector.

Im Paragraphen 2 der Misère de la philosophie führt Marx in der Polemik gegen Proudhon drei Titel von englischen „Sozialisten” an, in denen längst vor Proudhon „die egalitäre Anwendung der Ricardoschen Theorie” vorgeschlagen worden sei:

Nous pourrions citer à M. Proudhon: l'Économie politique de Hopkins, 1822; William Thompson: An Inquiry into the Principles of the distribution of wealth, most conducive to human happiness, 1824; T. R. Edmonds: Practical, moral and political Economy, 1828; etc., etc., et quatre pages d'etc.

Of all the political and ideological debates which confronted the French Socialist movement between the Paris Commune and the Great War, the problem of anticlericalism was one of the most complex. The concept of anticlericalism gives rise to a certain degree of confusion, partly because of the fact that it was a war-horse ridden jointly by the radical republicans and by the Socialists. The simplest definition of anticlericalism is that offered by the dictionary of Robert: “opposition à toute immixtion du clergé dans la politique”.

This article briefly considers how the integration of the biophysical world into our analyses of the past can enhance our understanding of the socio-economic inequalities of the modern world. Taking Ulbe Bosma's The Making of Periphery as its central reference point, it argues that the process of “peripheralization” – generally treated as an economic or social phenomenon – can also be usefully approached as an interaction between human and non-human forces. It uses the example of Southeast Asian rubber production to show how the different arrangements of people, plants, soil and water on European estates and indigenous smallholdings gave the latter distinct ecological advantages that boosted their oft-cited economic competitiveness, and that consequently forced plantations to extract even more value from cheap labour. In this sense, the environmental history of Southeast Asian rubber offers further evidence for Bosma's core theses about the heterogeneity of peripheralization processes and the importance of demography and labour relations in shaping them.

Wir wollen es keinem Leser verargen, wenn er befürchtet, daß ihn in diesem Aufsatz ein Kehraus der Kulturgeschichte erwartet. Hat die Disziplin nicht längst ihren Offenbarungseid geleistet und, was irgend an Werten greifbar war, an ihre Hauptgläubiger, z. B. an die Diszi-plinen Volkskunde und Geistesgeschichte abgetreten? Man wird es aber auch uns nicht verargen, wenn wir uns dagegen verwahren, das Thema einer Marotte halber gewählt zu haben und bei einer Art der Geschichtsbetrachtung und Geschichtsschreibung stehen geblieben zu sein, von der es schon zur Zeit Wilhelm Giesebrechts sarkastisch hieß, sie sei „eine Olla podrida von tausend Wunderlichkeiten”, und von der wir selbst behaupten, sie sei nicht erst durch eine wissenschaftliche Entwicklung überholt worden, sondern ihrem Wesen nach von Anfang an überholungsbedürftig gewesen. Obwohl wir diese Art Kulturgeschichte nicht im Sinn haben, wollen wir das Problem der Kulturgeschichte nicht ganz auf sich beruhen lassen. Denn da sie nun einmal schon zur Zeit Giesebrechts „ein so vieldeutiger und viel mißdeuteter Name” war, kann man sich nicht einfach dadurch sicherstellen, daß man darauf verweist, daß in der Epoche des Imperialismus die Kulturgeschichte, die sich in der baürgerlichen Gesellschaft vieler Anhänger erfreute, die aber vom Staat allenfalls gleichgültig betrachtet wurde und kaum über Lehrstühle verfügte, von der Politischen Geschichte, die nach der Gründung des Deutschen Reiches von der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft aufgewertet wurde, dem jungen nationalen Machtstaat vonnoten war und über zahlreiche Lehrstühle verfügte, in einem sehr ungleichen Kampf aus dem Felde geschlagen wurde. Genügte es, hierauf zu verweisen, so ließe sich nach dem Spruch: nomen est omen auf das allgemeine Los der Besiegten kommen und behaupten, die Kritik an der Kulturgeschichte sei bloße Kritik am Namen Kulturgeschichte, Kritik an einer ohnmächtigen und verdrängten Disziplin, Kritik, die Auswüchse statt der Sache selbst zur Zielscheibe nahm und fälschlich „eine Olla podrida von tausend Wunderlichkeiten” dem Gespött von Zunft, Verwaltung und Öffentlichkeit preisgab, während beispielsweise einem Lamprecht doch nur etliche Schludrigkeiten und Irrtümer nachzusagen waren. Ist aber nicht Dietrich Schäfer, der Herold der triumphierenden Politischen Geschichtsschreibung, in-zwischen mit seinem ganzen System, aller Stichhaltigkeit des Détails ungeachtet, hinfällig und anrüchig geworden?

“Direct action” emerged as a central concept in labour-movement politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article traces and explains that process of invention. In doing so, it seeks to settle three currently unresolved historical problems: the problem of the meaning of direct action; the problem of its relative novelty; and the problem of its relationship to nation. The article draws upon pamphlets and newspapers published on four continents in English, French, Spanish, and German. It argues that the concept of direct action was used in several analytically distinguishable ways: categorical; performative; and strategic. While aspects of direct action were evident in many nations over several decades, French activists played a decisive and catalytic role in the development of the concept. They welded the categorical, performative, and strategic together. They assembled key performances into an agreed repertoire. And they underlined the revolutionary significance of this combination. This new assemblage was then widely taken up across the global labour movement.

At the very beginning of the investigation, it is necessary to find a word to describe the European masses before the coming of the twin revolutions, the French and Industrial, that have contributed so much to the making of the modern world. “Proletariat” is clearly anachronistic; “wage-earners” is inadequate in a society where cash wages were far from being the most common form of payment for labor. “Working class” is too much identified with nineteenth century developments and, what is worse, conjures up an image of a homogeneous group that does not conform to eighteenth century realities. “Laboring poor” is by far the best, for it emphasizes two primary facts about the people with whom we are concerned: first, that, to one extent or another, they earned their living by doing manual labor, and, second, that they were being continuously impoverished, as Professor Labrousse has shown. The category has several virtues as a tool of historical analysis. It is large enough to take account of the complexities of eighteenth century social conditions, stressing the mobility and social intercourse that existed, albeit on a diminishing scale, between the master artisans and shopkeepers, their apprentices and journeymen on the one hand, and the domestics, beggars, criminals and floating elements in the population, on the other. Classes laborieuses and classes dangereuses lived side by side and recruited their personnel from one another. They did in fact form a whole, whom contemporaries called “les classes inférieures”. If we look toward the future, we see that the French Revolution Was to bring about a temporary split in their ranks by politicizing those among them who became the sans-culottes, and that the Industrial Revolution was to complete this division on other bases by allowing some of the laboring poor to become petty capitalists, While forcing the majority to become proletarians or to fall further still into the nether world of the lumpen-proletariat. In sum, the use of the concept of the laboring poor enables us to come close to the reality of eighteenth century paris and to watch the disagregation of that reality with the passage of time.