In its long history Iran has experienced many eventful moments. The past century was far from exceptional in this respect: the country was ravaged by three major wars (1914–1918, 1941–1945, 1980–1988) in which hundreds of thousands of people died; two coups (1921, 1953) transformed power relations within the political and military elite; and two revolutions (1905–1911, 1978–1979) led to radical changes in social, cultural, and political relationships. The country's appearance has changed completely since the end of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a large proportion of the population lived in tribal communities; by the end of the century the central state was omnipresent. The capital, Tehran, expanded from a city of around 100,000 inhabitants in 1890 to a metropolis of over ten million.

In 1924 and 1925 the Comintern introduced its policy of Bolshevization. A goal of Bolshevization was the creation of mass-based communist parties. In settler societies this meant that the local communist party should aim to be demographically representative of the entire population. This article traces the efforts of the communist parties in Algeria and South Africa to indigenize, seeking to explain why their efforts had such diverse outcomes. It examines four variables: the patterns of working-class formation; the socialist tradition of each country; the relationship between the Comintern and the two communist parties; and the level of repression against communists in both societies. The cumulative weight of the variables in the Algerian case helps to explain why communist activity in the 1920s – including the communist party's ability to indigenize – was far more difficult in Algeria than South Africa.

This paper examines the role of kin networks in intergenerational mobility in rural Liaoning, China, 1789–1909. Classic studies of social mobility in historical China based on the records of imperial examination candidates suggest that society was relatively fluid. It has been claimed, however, that associations between fathers' and sons' outcomes overestimate the fluidity of historical Chinese society because many men who achieved prominence had been helped by senior kin other than their fathers. We test these claims by applying event-history techniques to longitudinal, nominative household register data, measuring the effects of characteristics of kin on the chances of obtaining an official title. Even though distant kin influenced the chances of obtaining a title, kin networks did not monopolize opportunities. There was substantial downward mobility among the sons of prominent families, and high proportions of titleholders were new, in the sense of not having any senior kin who held titles.

The last few decades of the twentieth century witnessed a rapid development in information and communication technologies (ICT), which has contributed to such drastic economic, social, and cultural changes that they are commonly referred to as the “Information Revolution”. This Information Revolution is believed by many to be so influential and comprehensive that it is bringing about an epochal rupture in global economic, social, cultural, and political history comparable to the previous major historical shifts of the Agrarian Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Naturally, a development so pervasive has been analysed by a great number of scholars from various disciplines, among whom social theorists, in all their diversity, have been the most numerous. Here is not the place for even a concise overview of the rich variety of theorizing and analysis of the Information Revolution and the resulting Information Society, but much of the theorization of the relationship between work and the most recent information revolution can still be traced to the initial statements about “postindustrial society”, “de-industrialization” and “globalization”.

This article examines the main characteristics of the reform of the Soviet social security system in the 1920s and the early years of Stalinism. It uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine the development of the system from many angles: the beneficiaries, the political debates, and the methods used to finance it. The reforms introduced during this period show that the Soviet welfare system depended almost entirely on economic progress; in 1927, the only state-funded provision was for disabled war veterans. Hence, the welfare system was quite specific: it was used as a tool to promote the industrialization of the country, favouring the workers at the expense of the disabled and unemployed, who were forced to fall back on various self-help strategies, some legal, some illegal. The disabled and unemployed constituted the main social problem of the 1920s. Social legislation between 1931 and 1932, under the shadow of the impact which the Great Depression was having on Soviet society, progressively excluded the disabled and unemployed from the welfare system. Thus the USSR attempted to solve the unemployment problem by means of social exclusion.

This article looks at the experiences of foreigners in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, focusing on the divide between the public and the private. For Party members it was assumed that nothing could remain private or personal. In sessions of “criticism and self-criticism”, even intimate questions had to be put into the public domain, since a Party member's private life had to be exemplary. From a gender perspective, it is interesting to note that the leading justification for the public handling of private affairs in Party forums was the equality postulated between women and men, or more precisely between female and male Party members. In that sense, these discussions can be interpreted as potential tools in the hands of women to stigmatize “noncommunist” male behaviour, that is behaviour that degraded women. But the official attention given to private matters also served other means. For the Party leadership, these discussions proved instrumental in disciplining Party members, and in a particularly effective way, inasmuch as the persons concerned participated in the process. Despite the assumed gender equality, however, Soviet notions of private and public were not only constantly changing but also highly gendered. During the Terror, women and men became victims in different ways, thereby also highlighting their different social positions and functions.

This article examines some aspects of the labour involved in generating, recording and transmitting information in eighteenth-century Europe. It centres on the study of a particular occupational group: the men involved in the day-to-day operations of the schemes for the marketing of life-contingent pensions which would develop into modern life insurance, a form of enterprise whose growth was deeply implicated in the emerging “information society”. The bulk of the work these men did was what we would now call clerical work: keeping and processing records and accounts, managing correspondence, preparing reports for publication. It was in the nature of the information regimes within which they worked and the kind of information they were handling, though, that the responsibilities and demands placed on them went beyond those associated with the mechanical function of recording and reproducing. This made for an occupational profile which was relatively fluid, and only gradually came to be distinguishable from other contemporary forms of middle-class employment, in terms of the disciplines peculiar to it and the hazards it incurred. Among the hazards were forms of mental and physical strain that accompanied rapid increases in the volume of data that had to be handled and in the speed of its circulation, as a direct consequence of its character as “information”. While the account focuses on the study of a particular kind of enterprise in a particular place, northwest Germany, it draws on comparative data for officers and staff in analogous forms of commercial and administrative employment in Britain. The article concludes with a consideration of how their occupational profile might fit into an extended account of the historical development of information work.

After the discovery of oil in Masjed-Soleyman by employees of the D'Arcy Concession in 1908, the Anglo Persian Oil Company (APOC) was incorporated in London. The oil cities of Abadan, Masjed-Soleyman, and at least seven other sister towns designed and constructed by the APOC in the first quarter of the twentieth century in Khuzestan, were the first modern and industrial towns in Iran and the Middle East. This essay studies Abadan and Masjed-Soleyman – company towns with, on the one hand, a modern and authoritarian structure and organization, and on the other hand, thanks to the heterogeneity and energy of their population, as well as the forbidding scale the cities had reached despite the company's wishes, a conditional modernity. The result of these contradictions were cities and urban cultures that were energetic and dynamic, but also eclectic and hybrid.

The present essay studies the Iranian migrants residing on the margins of the Tsarist empire. The article deals with the social forces causing migration; the formation of the Iranian subaltern community in the Caucasus; the community's social structure (gender, ethnicity and age); the migrants' working and living conditions; and their political culture.

On impulse one afternoon during the early stages of my research into the Dirty War in Argentina and the political past of the former Minister of Agriculture, Jorge Zorreguieta, I sent an e-mail to an Argentinian friend and colleague asking for suggestions about recent literature.

The telegraph strike of 1908 occurred at many nodes of the telegraph system in British India and Burma, paralysing governance and business. In this paper, I suggest that the strike was a symptom of the systemic crisis in world telegraphy faced with technological change and competition. I introduce the category of transregional economic general strike as a tool to analyse strikes in the communication sectors. The strike demonstrated the ability of one of the earliest virtual communities in India to combine and organize worker protest. This multistage strike momentarily transcended the specific, and usually rigid, distinctions of race, class, and ethnicity through the production of community-at-a-distance. The strike occurred simultaneously among different sections of workers in Rangoon, Moulmein, Calcutta, Allahabad, Agra, Bombay, Madras, Lahore, and Karachi, to name just a few of the places involved. Both telegraph signallers as well as the subordinate staff went on strike. By concentrating on the relationship between technological change and labour, the paper demonstrates how workers across this part of the British Empire were capable of charting a general agenda in the first decade of the twentieth century, using technology to combine and combat technological rationalization.

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 history of urban labor in modern China is deeply entangled in questions of the communist revolution, and so are the interpretations of that history. If we leave out two important accounts of labor in Chinese written by organizers before the 1960s, studies of labor in modern China only have a four-decade history.

This article discusses the working and living conditions of unskilled labourers in South Tehran, and pays particular attention to the workers of the brick-kiln factories of Khatunabad. The brick-kiln workers, mostly transient rural workers, were among the poorest of the Iranian labour class. At the same time, in terms of sheer numbers they represented 5 per cent of the population of Tehran in 1960. They lived and worked under appalling conditions but, nevertheless, they only seldom went on strike. The brickworkers' main concern was not so much their working conditions, but rather to get and hold a job. This was difficult, because (1) they were seasonal labour; (2) they had no representative workers' organization to speak for them; (3) the way their industry was organized left them with little power; and (4) there was strong competition from other unskilled and unemployed labourers. Finally, the six known strikes by the brick-kiln workers will be highlighted, and used to discuss the context in which all Iranian workers had to operate.

Placing Thomas Edison at the beginning of a history on electric power transmission hardly needs justification. Thomas Edison's abundant supply of pictures of himself as an inventive genius – and America's pressing demand for a myth of an ingenious inventor – combined to bestow a “Eureka” moment upon Edison's pioneering Pearl Street (New York) Station electric lighting network. But the history of the laborious computations that took place at Menlo Park and the division-of-computing labor of which Edison took advantage suggests a different view of inventive genius. The story of the computational pyramid formed by the labors of Francis R. Upton, Charles L. Clarke, and Samuel D. Mott (1879–1880) can be reconstructed from the existing literature. In his reminiscences from Menlo Park, Edison's employee, Francis Jehl, detailed how Edison thought of constructing a miniaturized network to be used as a computer of the actual network. Knowing that constructing, maintaining, and using the miniature network required a considerable amount of skilled labor, Edison decided to hire an employee for it, Dr Herman Claudius. Edison enthusiastically welcomed Claudius to perform a type of computing work “requiring nerve and super abundance of patience and knowledge”. Jehl remembered that the labor of constructing a miniature network of conductors, “all in proportion, to show Mr Edison what he would have to install in New York City in connection with the Pearl Street Station” was “gigantic”. Following the pattern of the Pearl Street Station electric lighting network, several similar networks were built in the early 1880s. In response, Edison's labor pyramid was enlarged by giving Claudius an assistant, Hermann Lemp, who performed the monotonous task of constructing the new miniature networks, which Edison needed for computation. Inconvenient as it might be for those who assume that technological change is the product of inventive genius, electrification was, from the beginning, laboriously computed; it was not, like Athena, a deity that leapt from a godly head.

The policies pursued by British trade unions, and especially by the white-collar unions in the second half of the twentieth century, remain the subject of vigorous debate. Many writers have contrasted the egalitarian principles of these institutions and the radical rhetoric of their leaders with the narrow sectional interests which they served in practice. This article offers an alternative approach to such accounts in suggesting that rhetoric and practical behaviour were not contradictory, but complementary, features of union recruitment and bargaining in the period 1950–1968. The building of white-collar unions required the officers to think in imaginative ways, deploying a rhetoric and a logic of professional expertise as well as communicating with a diverse and demanding constituency of members. The relationship between the governance of the white-collar union and the politics of the British labour movement was also a subtle and dynamic one in this period of growing state regulation. Clive Jenkins used the resistance to incomes policy as a recruiting sergeant among staff concerned with the erosion of differentials. The most successful white-collar union of the late twentieth century evolved a range of recruiting and bargaining models that were grounded on the hard historical experience of the postwar years, as well as the rhetoric and marketing talents of its charismatic General Secretary.

In Durban, South Africa, stevedoring workers were the most physically powerful workers of all, and were known as onyathi in Zulu, or buffalo, which aptly described the physical and collective nature of their work. Throughout the century, the stevedoring industry was especially labour-intensive, necessitating teams of workers. As in most industries in South Africa, African workers built and maintained the docks. These buffalo developed the linkage that made Durban a thriving city and sustained the apartheid economy. Yet today the buffalo are all but gone, replaced by onboard warehouses known as containers. Machines have replaced the men once so integral to the survival of the city.

Keep on Knocking: A History of the Labour Movement in Zimbabwe, 1900–97. Ed. by Brian Raftopoulos and Ian Phimister. Baobab Books on behalf of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Harare 1997. xx, 164 pp.

Striding Back: The Labour Movement and the Post-Colonial State in Zimbabwe 1980–2000. Ed. by Brian Raftopoulos and Lloyd Sachikonye. Weaver Press, Harare 2001. xxvii, 316 pp., £14.95; $24.95.