The article deals with an outstanding example of transnational trade union cooperation in the transport industry. It analyses the attempts of trade unions organized in the International Transportworkers' Federation (ITF) to establish a system of multinational industrial relations and collective bargaining in the flags-of-convenience shipping, which integrated national trade unions and their politics in international problematic interdependencies. Although based on egoistic national special interests and without formal restrictions on national sovereignty the cooperation leads to an international regime. It regulates the rights to organize and represent crews on ships of convenience in industrial relations, it lays down minimum standards for working conditions and incomes, and procedures for the multinational decision-making process and management of conflicts. The trade unions succeeded in regulating about 29 per cent of flags-of-convenience shipping and in establishing a multinational control of national collective bargaining, which is integrated in a system of international governance in the trade union sphere of activities. It is based on an imbalance of power between trade union organizations of industrialized and developing countries within the ITF and on specific conditions in transport industry, and therefore not transferable to other industries.

The present essay links the social, institutional and cultural approaches of guilds and guildsmen with their daily economic practice. Using as the point of departure a case study of the Antwerp and Ghent garment trades during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, a preliminary model is presented, stressing the interrelatedness between divergent strategies, behavioural practices and specific market segments. It is argued that the choice of artisans for a certain market segment implied path dependency and, hence, influenced their investment patterns, their labour relations, their attitude towards the guild, and their personal representation in daily life.

This article investigates the relationship between social mobility and status in guilds and the political situation in sixteenth-century Ghent. First, it argues that Ghent guilds showed neither a static picture of upward mobility nor a rectilinear and one-way evolution. It demonstrates that the opportunities for social promotion within the guild system were, to a great extent, determined by the successive political regimes of the city. Second, the article proves that the guild boards in the sixteenth century had neither a typically oligarchic nor a typically democratic character. Third, the investigation of the houses in which master craftsmen lived shows that guild masters should not be depicted as a monolithic social bloc, but that significant differences in status and wealth existed. The article concludes that there was no linear positive connection between the duration of a master craftsman's career and his wealth and social position.

For most of the nineteenth and twentieth century, universal conscription has been by far the predominant system of military recruitment, but the phenomenon has received surprisingly little attention from social historians. This lack of attention is all the more surprising if one considers the interesting position occupied by conscription at the crossroads of wage and non-wage labour and free and unfree labour.

The following articles by Khaled Fahmy, Erik Jan Zürcher and Stephanie Cronin deal with the spread of the conscription system in one specific area (the Middle East) where it has been the most prominent feature of the establishment of increased and centralized state control over societies which, until relatively recent times, consisted of largely self-sufficient agrarian communities with very little contact with the outside world. The introduction of universal conscription confronted both states and populations with entirely new demands and problems.

Our focus here is on time-series regression as a formal analytic tool in social historical inquiry. We have three interrelated purposes. First, we argue that conventional time-series regression is typically ill–suited for social historical inquiry because ahistorical assumptions and conventions regarding time undermine the historical character of social “process–as–analyzed”. Second, we present a modified time-series approach – temporally recursive regression – that takes time seriously and provides a more adequate analytic vehicle for social historical inquiry. Finally, we illustrate the promise of temporally recursive regression by using it to analyze how workplace militancy in post–war America was fueled by massive insurgency waves during successive phases of the civil rights movement.

“Could a Nation, in any true sense of the word, really be born without war?” Such was the question raised by Michael Howard, the eminent Oxford military historian in a public lecture delivered on the topic of “War and the Nation State”. Looking generally at European history in the past two centuries he argued that war was indeed central for the appearance of the modern nation-state and that modern armies are somehow intimately linked to the rise of nationalism. During the first half of the nineteenth century this argument could very well be applied to Egypt. Having been incorporated in the Ottoman Empire for more than two and a half centuries, Egypt, by the beginning the nineteenth century and mostly through an unprecedented war effort that was concurrent and often synonymous with state-building, had come to play an increasingly independent role on the international plane.

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.

Octave Mirbeau was a committed supporter of right-wing politics in the 1870s, and a committed opponent of the right wing during the Dreyfus Affair. This paper examines the reasons for his political change of heart, and discusses his changing analyses of right-wing political culture. Mirbeau's ideas are compared with those of some of his contemporaries, such as Blum, Peguy and Sorel.

Historians and social scientists often investigate the conditions that influence the occurrence of particular events. For instance, a researcher might be concerned with the causes of revolutionary action in some countries or the forces that unleash racial rioting in major cities. Or perhaps the researcher wishes to examine why industrial workers decide to strike or what prompts policy-makers to pass new legislation. In each of these examples, a qualitative shift occurs, from a circumstance without racial rioting in a particular city, for instance, to one with racial rioting. Event history analysis can aid researchers in uncovering the conditions that lead to such a shift.

The introduction of conscription in the Ottoman Empire of course was closely linked to the introduction of a European-style army, but it did not coincide with it.

As is well known, the first attempt to create an army which was trained, equipped and dressed in the contemporary European fashion, was made by Sultan Selim III in 1792. His Nizam-i Cedid (New Order) army by all accounts was quite an impressive achievement in itself. Starting from a strength of about 2,500, the corps had 22,685 men and 1,590 officers in 1806, half of them stationed in the capital, the rest in provincial centres in Anatolia. When pressure against him and his new army on the part of the old army establishment, primarily the Janissaries, mounted, however, the Sultan succumbed without any attempt to use the considerable strength of his new army and disbanded the corps in 1808.

The Nizam troops constituted a professional army. They were not recruited on the basis of universal conscription, but rather in a fashion which is reminiscent of the system introduced by Peter the Great in Russia or the Bunichah system in Persia. Governors and notables in Anatolia (not in the Balkans or the Arab provinces) were required to send contingents of peasant boys to Istanbul for training. Those enrolled in the corps remained under arms for an unspecified period.

The “Guide to the International Archives and Collections at the IISH, Amsterdam” (henceforth cited as GIA), edited by Atie van der Horst and Elly Koen, was first published in 1989. A description of recently acquired archives and collections as well as major accruals to archives received by the IISH will be published annually to keep this survey up to date. From 1994 on a list of microfilms of archives or collections held in other repositories, of which the IISH has received a copy, is added to this survey.

Like the GIA this supplement is subdivided into the categories “persons” and “organizations”, arranged alphabetically. The components of each entry are:

1. Access. Restriction is indicated by *.

2. Name. Names of persons include data of birth and death when known.

3. Period. First and last date of the documents present.

4. Size. In linear metres.

5. Entry. Available finding aids.

6. Condensed biography / history.

7. Summary of the contents.

Reference is given to the pages of the GIA holding the initial description where summaries of a supplement are concerned.

Documentary collections are listed separately with only the name, period, size and available finding aids.

For consultation of the archives a written request in advance, addressed to the information service, stating the character of the study, is necessary. Prior request is particularly important because very recently acquired materials may not yet have been arranged or packed.

For the nationalist regimes of the inter-war Middle East, Riza Shah's Iran, Mustafa Kemal's Turkey and Hashemite Iraq, the construction of a strong national army based on universal military service was an essential element of state-building and nation-formation. Yet although conscription was ardently advocated by the nationalist intelligentsia, wherever it was actually imposed it aroused intense resentment. Nonetheless, although enforced conscription was almost universally unpopular, mass, collective and organized resistance was comparatively rare. In Iran such resistance occurred in three waves in the late 1920s. Uniquely in the Middle East, opposition in Iran was most sustained not in the rural areas but in the towns, in Isfahan and Shiraz in 1927 and in Tabriz in 1928, where it was led by the guilds and the ulama, although violent opposition was also manifested by the tribes in 1929. Riza Shah was irrevocably committed to conscription, which was a central pillar of his programme of modernization and secularization, and although prepared to temporize, was ultimately determined to crush collective resistance. By 1930 he had largely succeeded in so doing. The subsequent implementation of the policy was aided by a deliberate decision to defuse popular anger by tolerating, even encouraging, individual strategies of avoidance, in particular by allowing the manipulation of the exemptions system through bribery. As the 1930s progressed, conscription became established as an indelible feature of the new Iran.

Social historians study social, political, demographic and economic phenomena which take place in geographical space, yet “space” rarely enters historical discourse explicitly as an analytic construct. Given the recent interest among social historians in “localizing” social processes, it is unfortunate that almost all of our efforts have gone toward recognizing the significance of time, to the relative neglect of space. For example, social historians typically assume that events occurring at a given point in time are affected by earlier events. In contrast, it is less widely recognized that events occurring in one location are also affected by similar events in other areas, especially those nearby. In the rare instances in which geographical space has been central, such as in Susan Watkins' treatment of western European fertility decline during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or in the evidence of the diffusion of democracy in post-war Europe that is emerging from the “Spatial and Temporal Diffusion of Democracy” project at the University of Colorado — Boulder, the payoff has been substantial. Such innovative approaches to historical theorizing give reason to believe that thinking of events in the past as parts of a process moving through time and across space will become more commonplace. If so, then social historians will need an effective and accessible method to account for the spatial distributions of their study phenomena.