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?

This article analyses the role coerced intermediaries had on colonial power and authority in the prisons of British India. Coerced intermediaries in this context were convicts placed in positions of control by the colonial prison administration as warders, overseers, and night watchmen and night watchwomen, summarized here under the term “convict officers”. These convict officers were employed by the colonial authorities to maintain a coercive order and became essential to the exercise of colonial authority and control in the prisons of British India. The article argues that with their employment, the colonial administration created a third group within its prisons, situated between the colonial administration and the inmates. This contradictory practice blurred the lines of colonial control and authority and raises larger questions about intermediation by unfree and coerced people in unfree and coerced colonial contexts. The focus here is not so much on what intermediation is but on what it does. At the same time, the article relates the system of convict officers as intermediaries to the theoretical concepts used by Foucault and Goffman and questions the binarity used in most of their theories.

More than 800,000 people were exiled to Siberia during the nineteenth century. Exile was a complex administrative arrangement that involved differentiated flows of exiles and, in the view of the central authorities, contributed to the colonization of Siberia. This article adopts the “perspective from the colonies” and analyses the local dimension of exile to Siberia. First, it underscores the conflicted nature of the practice by highlighting the agency of the local administrators and the multitude of tensions and negotiations that the maintenance of exile involved. Secondly, by focusing on the example of the penal site of Tobolsk, where exile and imprisonment overlapped, I will elucidate the uneasy relationship between those two penal practices during Russian prison reform. In doing so, I will re-evaluate the position of exile in relation to both penal and governance practice in Imperial Russia.

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.

“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.

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.

Die beiden nachstehend mitgeteilten Briefe fand ich, kurz nach der Herausgabe der Hess'schen Korrespondenz, in der “Heine-Sammlung” der Landes- und Stadtbibliothek Düsseldorf, derem Leiter, Herrn Dr. Eberhard Galley, ich für die Genehmigung der Veröffentlichung und mehrere nützliche Hinweise zu Dank verpflichtet bin. Der Inhalt des Briefes vom 19. Oktober 1837 zeigt deutlich, dass er der erste ist, den Hess an Heine richtete. Dieser Brief, in dem Hess ein ungeschminktes Bild seiner eigenen Persönlichkeit entwirft, ist psychologisch einer der interessantesten, die er je geschrieben hat.

This essay compares and contrasts two British organizations, the Workers' Travel Association (1921–1966) and the British Workers' Sports Association (1930–1957). It considers their motives, their relationships with the labour movement domestically and internationally, and how far they were able to maintain the international activities to which they aspired.

The prevalence and persistence of labor contractors in China’s mining industry during the first half of the twentieth century is frequently attributed to foreign management’s avoidance of directly managing Chinese laborers. However, in Japanese-controlled Fushun Coalmine, Japanese management’s reliance on labor contractors over four decades (1907−1945) represented an expansion in management’s reach in labor management. In this article, I examine the period of Japanese control (1907−1932), during which Japanese mine managers resorted to bureaucratic means to control labor contractors. Using labor process theorists, particularly Richard Edwards, to read company archival documents, I argue that salient features of the Chinese labor market, namely Chinese migrant labor’s mobility and international competition for Chinese labor, compelled Japanese managers to extend control over labor contractors.

From 1834 to 1850, Latin America's first penitentiary, the Casa de Correção in Rio de Janeiro, was a construction site where slaves, “liberated Africans”, convicts, and unfree workers interacted daily, forged identities, and deployed resistance strategies against the pressures of confinement and the demands of Brazil's eclectic labor regimes. This article examines the utilization of this motley crew of workers, the interactions among “liberated Africans”, slaves, and convict laborers, and the government's intervention between 1848 and 1850 to restrict slave labor at the prison in favor of free waged workers. It asserts that the abolition of the slave trade in 1850 and the subsequent inauguration of the penitentiary augured profound changes in Rio's labor landscape, from a predominantly unfree to a free wage labor force.

This article explores the juncture between historical time and space in the context of socialist feminism, primarily through the memoir of an Indian woman activist who spent four years in East Berlin as the Asian Secretary at the Women's International Democratic Federation. This primary source material is drawn from a longer history of Indian leftist women's participation in political mobilizations and organizational work, the literary tradition of travel writing, found especially in Bengal, and academic histories of socialist feminism.

To date, research on work in the mines in Greece has ignored the significance of gender in the workplace, since mining is associated exclusively with male labour. As such, it is considered, indirectly, not subject to gender relations. The article examines the influence of family and gender relations on labour in the Greek mines in the period 1860–1940 by highlighting migration trajectories, paternalistic practices, and the division of labour in mining communities.

Sources include: official publications of the Mines Inspectorate and the Mines and Industrial Censuses, the Greek Miners’ Fund Archive, British and French consular reports, various economic and technical reports by experts, literature and narratives, the local press from mining regions, and the Archive of the Seriphos Mines.

Über Briefe Luxemburgs im Internationalen Institut für Sozialge-schichte teilt Nettl mit: “Der größte Teil der Briefsammlung im IISG ist jetzt veröffentlicht […]. Einige unveröffentlichte Briefe befinden sich noch in verschiedenen Sammlungen des IISG, zum Beispiel im Guesde-Nachlaß.”

Außer den dort ausdrücklich erwähnten Veröffentlichungen Blumen-bergs seien hier auch jene älteren Editionen genannt, zu denen sich die Vorlagen heute ganz oder teilweise im Besitz des Instituts befinden: neben den beiden von Luise Kautsky zusammengestellten Briefsamm-lungen sind dies Luxemburgs Briefe an P. B. Aksel'rod und diejenigen an H. Roland Holst. Einzelne, diese Veröffentlichung ergänzede Stücke, die Briefe an Guesde und einige Neuerwerbungen werden hier zusammengefaß und damit die noch unveröffentlichten Briefe Luxemburgs in den Beständen des IISG vorgelegt.