Leicestershire is one of the East Midland's smaller coalfields, though it was growing faster than any other coalfield in the two decades before the First World War, and its output, and number of persons employed, unlike those of many far larger coalfields, were greater in 1925 than they had been in 1913. Annual average earnings per shift were also among the highest in the country and the level of unemployment among the miners was relatively low by coal-mining standards. The Leicestershire Miners' Association had 7,428 members at the end of 1925, which represented about three-quarters of the coal-miners employed in the coalfield, and relations with the coal-owners were by tradition peaceful with the owners agreeing to assist the LMA's “closed shop” policy and allowing union business to be conducted on colliery premises. The Leicestershire coalfield was one of that select band of inland coalfields that enjoyed relative prosperity in the early 1920's, and this state of affairs was reflected in the fact that the owners did not lock their men out to enforce either reduced wages or increased hours in May 1926, but rather the miners struck in support of the policies of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain, to which they had been affiliated since its inception in 1889.

Although there is some truth in the comment made by Canon Barnett, rector of St Jude's, Whitechapel, and founder of Toynbee Hall, that the issue in 1909 of the Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws “may mark the beginning of a new epoch in our social life”, the precise reasons for the appointment of the Commission on December 4th, 1905, are not yet known. The Conservative government, which made the appointment almost on the eve of its defeat, had been in power for ten years, first under the prime ministership of Lord Salisbury and then, until his resignation in December 1905, of A. J. Balfour. During that time the cost of the Poor Law had risen steadily, and yet, until the end of 1904, either through social myopia or a preoccupation with the greater drama of events abroad, the government displayed little interest in the problem of the Poor Law or, indeed, in any of the wider questions of social reform.

Almost all studies of industrial unrest in Britain before the First World War neglect the Belfast dock strike of 1907. Yet throughout the summer of 1907 that city was convulsed by a bitter and protracted strike involving dock labourers, carters and coal carters. At its height the dispute was estimated to have involved 10,000 on strike or locked out as a consequence of the strike, and threatened to involve a further 50,000 workers employed in the flax-spinning industry. In addition the strains which it imposed on the Belfast Royal Irish Constabulary precipitated a mutiny within that force, which induced the Liberal Government to sanction the despatch of some 6,000 regular soldiers to Belfast to maintain order.

From the formation of the Socialist League on December 30, 1884, until an anarchist take-over forced William Morris from the Common-weal editorship on May 25, 1890, the Council of the League gave a special importance to its pamphlet and leaflet publication. In Common-weal their significance was made quite explicit:

“The Manifesto of the League, the pamphlets in the ‘Socialist Platform’ series, the leaflets issued by the Council of the League, and articles definitely so stated in the 'Weal, are the only authoritative expositions of the League's creed and policy.”

After May 25, 1890, notions of “creed and policy” lost force, and – as some late publications show - it rapidly became impossible to identify any corporate responsibility.

For the city of Bombay the establishment of British rule over Maharashtra (1818) inaugurated a period of extensive growth in trade, industry and banking. In search of wealth and power merchant communities and trading castes, mainly from the Northern province of Gujarat, settled in Bombay to exploit the economic opportunities that arose under the British raj. In the mid nineteenth century Indian entrepreneurs started a textile industry, which proved to be a new way to invest capital and to make profit. The management functions in their Bombay mills were filled by Europeans or Indians with an educated, middle-class background. The social and linguistic position of these people prevented their easy communication with the local labour-force of marathi-speaking peasant origin. Therefore, from the creation of the industry, mill-owners and management cadres delegated the task of labour recruitment to a special class of men, called jobbers.

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”.

In his study of the effect of technological change on families working in the Lancashire cotton industry in the first half of the nineteenth century, Smelser has argued that the family as a work unit was disrupted by the introduction of larger mules, which required more child assistants in the spinning mill than one family alone could provide. The result was the disruption of the family work unit, hitherto preserved in the earlier cotton mills, and the decline of the old apprentice-ship system based on kinship.1 It should be instructive, therefore, to attempt a comparative investigation of conditions in the family work unit in Black Country nailing in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the trade faced increasing competition from factory-made nails and died a lingering death similar in some ways to that of handloom weaving.2 For the purposes of this article, the family work team of the nailers of Stourbridge and district will be examined in the light of the quantitative evidence of the 1851 census returns, and then the decline and disintegration of the work unit will be discussed, with particular reference to changes in familial roles. Here of course it will be impossible to separate work roles from social roles within the family, since so much time was spent by all members within the nailshop, and the distinctive life-style of nailers was strongly conditioned by their mode of work. Lastly, some suggestions will be made as to the causes of decline, and the general significance of the changes which took place in the family.

The twin processes of industrialisation and urbanisation lie at the heart of the evolution of modern British society, in North-East England as in other areas of large scale industrial development. Despite the cardinal importance of the interaction between these two processes the relationship is only very imperfectly understood; this weakness is in part due to the limited amount of investigation which has taken place, in part to serious deficiencies in the surviving evidence, and in part to the inherent complexity of the subject. As yet, for example, we have no adequate studies of the major industries of the region, including coal-mining and shipbuilding, while our knowledge of the development of urban communities is very far from complete. In addition much of the archaeological evidence for the older parts of the industrial communities has disappeared, or is disappearing, often without adequate study or record. In these circumstances an essay on the relationship between industrialisation and urbanisation in North-East England must be tentative and limited, and should be seen as an attempt to bring together some of the available material rather than one which offers an explanatory model.

Historical accounts of the First, Second and Third Internationals, i.e., those organizations that attempted to realize some sort of supranational working-class solidarity, have traditionally been presented in terms of congresses, programs and personalities. Invariably scholars have focused on the public and private debates at this or that international meeting and/or how Marx, Engels, Lenin or some other leading figure influenced or reacted to some specific development. In short, the history of the International has been looked at almost exclusively from the “top down”. There is not anything wrong with this approach per se, but it might be of some value to consider, occasionally at least, the people whom the various Internationals were supposed to be serving, in other words to examine the International not only from the “top down” but also from the “bottom up”.

Asa Briggs has pointed out that the parliamentary-reform movement of the early 1830's differed considerably in nature and direction between one city and another. In Birmingham, the middle and working classes usually co-operated. Class distinctions were blurred. Steam power and the factory – socially disruptive forces – were lacking. Master and artisan worked together in small workshops, frequently changed places with each other in a socially mobile city, and united in advancing an inflationary paper-money programme appropriate to the Midlands iron interests. These were concerned with the home market and the need for expansionist credit. In Manchester and Leeds, on the other hand, the classes were separated by the factory, and had competing reform movements. Manchester's middle-class reformers were concerned with the needs of the cotton industry's export markets; they wanted a stable metallic currency, and stressed the encouragement to trade that would follow the repeal of the Corn Laws. Often they presented repeal in terms the working class found uncongenial

The waterfront in the nineteenth century was notorious for its complex and fragmented labour market. The stevedores on board ship and the porters on the shore were always quite distinct. In London, there were then further divisions, between quay and warehouse workers, between the export and import trades. And within these broad divisions, workers would concentrate upon a particular commodity. Specialisation was rife: the labour-force was a complex body, lacking cohesion because of the diversity of products and functions, the variety of employers, and a casual system which restricted workers to particular localities and types of work. This clearly created problems when unionisation occurred. Each specialism tended to organise separately, and the result would be a plethora of unions somewhat overlapping and competing. In London, again, there was “an endless proliferation of small societies”.1 And quite apart from the complexity of union organisation amongst the dock workers there were the external relations with on the one side the seamen, and on the other railwaymen and carters. This is all to say that one of the key elements in labour relations on the waterfront before 1914 was inter-union relations.

The effectiveness of the strike weapon in early-nineteenth-century England depended in some measure upon the response of public opinion. Obviously the state of trade and the relative cohesion and determination of masters and men were more significant factors, but the attitude of non-participants could not be discounted. The readiness of civil and military authorities to intervene, the reaction of the general public to requests for contributions to relief funds, the willingness of politicians to contemplate changes in the laws concerning combination: all these were influenced by the state of public opinion. It would be an oversimplification to regard “public opinion” and “newspaper opinion” as synonymous. The platform, the pulpit, the placard and the popular song were other means of public expression, not that they necessarily provided a complete or reliable guide to the public mind. Nevertheless the newspaper, particularly in the nineteenth century, was in an advantageous position to influence the response of the public to current controversies.

The career of Ricardo Flores Magón, the foremost Mexican anarchist of the twentieth century, involves a curious paradox. On the one hand, he must be counted among the leading inspirers and martyrs of the Mexican Revolution. His movement, embodied in the Partido Liberal Mexicano, set in motion the forces that, in May 1911, drove Porfirio Díaz into exile; and his journal, Regeneración, which in the early stages of the Revolution reached a circulation of nearly 30,000, played an important part in rousing Mexican laborers, rural as well as urban, against the Díaz dictatorship and in pushing the Revolution in a more egalitarian direction than it might otherwise have taken. Under the banner of “Land and Liberty”, the Magonista revolt of 1911 in Baja California established short-lived revolutionary communes at Mexicali and Tijuana, having for their theoretical basis Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread, a work which Flores Magón regarded as a kind of anarchist bible and which his followers distributed in thousands of copies. Today the memory of Flores Magón is honored throughout Mexico. His remains rest in the Rotunda of Illustrious Men in Mexico City. In all parts of the country streets and squares bear his name, and Mexicans pay him homage as a great “precursor” of their Revolution, which was one of the major social upheavals of the twentieth century.

What follows is an edition of a Marx manuscript fragment: four pages in a notebook of Marx from 1860–63. The fragment is Marx's précis of Hegel's doctrine on “Being” in the “Minor Logic”, the First Part of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Marx's text is a combination of condensed quotation and paraphrase of the material in Hegel's paragraphs 83–111 of the Encyclopedia. There are no critical comments by Marx on the doctrine he summarizes. It seems that his aim was simply to trace out in a concise way the main line of Hegel's categorial development under the rubric on “Being”. The précis condenses into slightly less than four 18×111/2 cm. page sides material that fills some eighteen pages in the present standard edition of the Encyclopedia, and even more in the edition which Marx himself used: the Werke edition prepared after Hegel's death by Leopold von Henning. That Marx used this edition is evident from the fact that his précis includes material from the Zusätze which were a feature of the edition.

By the time labor unrest in the Lancashire cotton industry had taken the form of the strike, trade-union development was being hindered by the Combination Laws of 1799–1800, which were to outlaw unions of workers (and supposedly employers) until their repeal in 1824–25. Although the cotton operatives resorted to the strike weapon during this period, the movements were indeed dismal failures. While the Lancashire handloom weavers seem to have won partial concessions from their employers in 1808, the raises were only temporary, and the weavers remained in their state of almost habitual poverty until being extinguished as a class of workmen by the power-loom. And the spinners, whose unions were noted for their superior organization, failed entirely in their strikes of 1810 and 1818. Given this set of circumstances, labor historians Sidney and Beatrice Webb have stressed the “ephemeral combinations” of the early cotton workers and their “passionate struggles to maintain a bare subsistence wage”, alternating with “intervals of abject submission”. Similarly, G. D. H. Cole has depicted the textile workers, along with the miners, as “latecomers to trade unionism”.