This essay examines the counterfeiting and uttering of British Imperial coinage in interwar Nigeria, and the response of the colonial state. In particular, it establishes a connection between criminality and resistance to European colonialism in Africa. In this regard, it contextualizes the preponderant involvement in the counterfeiting saga of the Ijebu, a subgroup of the Yoruba nationality in southwestern Nigeria. Though other considerations were involved, the preponderance of the Ijebu in making what was called “Ijebu money” illustrates how self-help criminality was both a means of accumulation and a veritable form of resistance to colonial rule. Following their military defeat in 1892 and their subsequent alienation from British rule, this criminal activity represented resistance by other means. The point must be stressed, however, that not all Ijebu were counterfeiters, and all counterfeiters were not Ijebu, and that the counterfeiters were no “heroic criminals”, who shared their loot with the poor.

The present article analyzes the crucial impact that artisan forms of organizing work had in the production of early cotton factories. By examining the case of the Sirés factory in Barcelona, this article argues that dividing work by gender and age and working with relatives, all traditional practices in an artisan shop, allowed eighteenth-century factory owners to face the challenges that production posed. The example of the Sirés factory also offers a picture of early industrialization that challenges the long-standing argument that artisan and factory forms of production were antagonistic. Factory owners organized their production and work in ways that replicated the way artisans had long produced and worked in their shops. Moreover, in shops and factories alike, production depended not just on the work of individuals, but also on that of their relatives. Parents and children, husbands and wives – all brought the flexibility of traditional artisan forms of organizing work to the new factories.

This article applies a systems approach to the analysis of multiple circuits of labor migration that emerged in the Algarve, southern Portugal, from the late eighteenth century to the mid 1900s, and their connections. Over time Algarvian migrants participated in three main systems of migration: internal migration and migration to southern Spain and Gibraltar, transatlantic migration to the Americas and Africa – especially to Argentina – and migration to northern Europe. Rather than an abrupt break with a sedentary past, the article shows how the beginnings of transatlantic migration at the turn of the century were the result of modification and adaptation of existing strategies of labor migration.

In early modern Europe, as in developing countries today, much of the population had to struggle to survive. Estimates for many parts of pre-industrial Europe, as for several countries in the so-called Third World, suggest that the majority of the inhabitants owned so little property that their livelihood was highly insecure. Basically, all those who lived by the work of their hands were at risk, and the reasons for their vulnerability were manifold. Economic cycles and seasonal fluctuations jeopardized the livelihood of the rural and urban masses. Warfare, taxation, and other decisions by the ruling elites sometimes had far-reaching direct and indirect repercussions on the lives of the poor. This is also true of natural factors, both catastrophes and the usual weather fluctuations, which were a major factor affecting harvest yields. Equal in importance were the risks and uncertainties inherent in life and family cycles: disease, old age, widowhood, or having many young children.

The purpose of this article is to question the notion of US labour's “exceptionalism” – of its “conservatism” and “closure” and difference from “class-conscious” and “socialist” British and European labour – with specific reference to the politics of the American Federation of Labour during the 1890s and 1900s. An approach rooted in the assumption of “norms” and “exceptions” is rejected in favour of one exploring differences and similarities. In terms of similarities, the article demonstrates the ways in which the AF of L consciously sought to model its “independent” (i.e. nonpartisan–party) politics upon the practice of the late-Victorian British TUC. With respect to differences, the article then proceeds to chart the challenges posed to the AF of L by the growing identification within British labour of political independence with independent partyism, as manifested especially in the TUC's official endorsement of the Labour Representation Committee (1900) and the Labour Party (1906). Resistant to the adoption of the new “British road”, the AF of L nevertheless defended its “traditional” form of political independence far more in terms of experiential US “peculiarities” than “exceptionalist” structural determinations.

During the post-Independence period, Buenos Aires province engaged in a republican-authoritarian experiment in which the relations between dominant and subaltern were altered and redefined. The ascent to power of Juan Manuel de Rosas and the federalists meant an increase in the violence meted out by the state against its political and military opponents. On the other hand, the diffusion of a market economy created the basis of contractual relations across a variety of social fields and institutions. This was true with regard to relations between masters and servants in the household, between officers and soldiers within regiments, between rural residents and justices of the peace, between ranchers and peons at the estancia. Though coercion did not disappear, the power to coerce found limits because of the very expansion of market relations. To address these changes, in their complexity and diversity, this article uses the concept “repertoires of coercion”. The concept may be useful to analyze and compare relations of power in multiple social or institutional spaces. In addition, the article addresses the question of the relationship between coercion and market culture, suggesting that in a situation of labor scarcity, and the military mobilization of the subaltern classes, contractualism tends to pervade relations of power, even those previously based upon coercion.

This article discusses four areas of research essential for a measured evaluation of Italian syndicalism before the fascist dictatorship. The first section presents a synoptic historical account. The second section critically summarizes the literature on the sociology of Italian syndicalism. The third section disentangles the ideological influences upon Italian syndicalism. The fourth evaluates the uniqueness or otherwise of Italian syndicalism within prefascist industrial relations. The conclusion explains the marginalization of Italian syndicalism after 1918 using international comparisons. This article provides a detailed critical bibliography of the literature on Italian syndicalism published since the 1960s.

Research undertaken over the last generation has greatly enhanced our understanding of the survival strategies of the labouring poor in early modern Europe. Under economic conditions where poverty was endemic, most families were forced to take to various forms of work and to draw on whatever forms of income were available. Whether among small peasants, proto-industrial producers, landless labourers or casual workers, their mere subsistence depended on the effort of as many family members as possible. Women's and children's work were the norm well into the nineteenth century, and their contribution to the family income greater than previously assumed. There were, nevertheless, many who could not make ends meet. The reasons for which people had to turn to others for help are legion: structural, cyclical or seasonal unemployment and underemployment; insufficient earnings and debts; illness and accidents; death within the family. A lot of assistance was informal and went through networks of kinship, neighbourhood and local community. Friendly societies provided rudimentary forms of collectively-organized support. Some state or municipal agencies supplying poor relief and charitable institutions offered assistance of various types, but most of it was meagre and combined with social control of the clients. It is no wonder, therefore, that many people took to begging, prostitution or petty crime.

Structural, organizational, and technological changes in British industry during the interwar years led to a decline in skilled and physically demanding work, while there was a dramatic expansion in unskilled and semiskilled employment. Previous authors have noted that the new un/semiskilled jobs were generally filled by “fresh” workers recruited from outside the core manufacturing workforce, though there is considerable disagreement regarding the composition of this new workforce. This paper examines labour recruitment patterns and strategies using national data and case studies of eight rapidly expanding industrial centres. The new industrial workforce is shown to have been recruited from a “reserve army” of workers with the common features of relative cheapness, flexibility, and weak unionization. These included women, juveniles, local workers in poorly paid nonindustrial sectors, such as agriculture, and (where these other categories were in short supply) relatively young long-distance internal migrants from declining industrial areas.

The emphasis on ritual, political symbolism and public display at international socialist congresses highlights important cultural dimensions of the Second International that historians have, until now, left unexplored. From 1904 until the International Socialist Congress of Stuttgart in 1907, French and German socialists articulated – in both symbolic and discursive forms – a socialist nationalism within the framework of internationalism. The Stuttgart congress represented a public spectacle that served a cultural function for international socialism. The international performance at Stuttgart was, however, undermined by the inability of the SFIO and the SPD to reconcile their conflicting conceptions of “inter-nationalism”.

Studies of domesticity tend to take a simple view of the state's role. If the state made reforms, it was because some interest group forced it to do so. These studies risk a charge of functionalism by emphasizing that the state necessarily acted to further capitalist or patriarchal interests. In this paper I argue that the state's response to interests was neither as coherent nor as predictable as is suggested by these approaches. The state is a conflicting ensemble of institutions rather than a monolith. Various state agencies act independently, sometimes in conflicting ways, over domesticity. At the same time, overall, the state has relatively independent imperatives of its own too. Historically, domesticity has not been one of its high priorities. We can see that the New Zealand state undermined domesticity before second-wave feminism of the 1970s. But state powers are circumscribed by its democratic context. Just as there were limits to the state's willingness or ability to impose domesticity, so too were there limits to its power to legislate for equality.

Although research on survival strategies is still at a relatively early stage, there are clearly some areas where there is considerable difference in emphasis placed by historians on the relative importance of particular “expedients” deployed by the poor in extremis There is, for example, uncertainty regarding the amount of support given by neighbours as opposed to relatives. There is some historical contention, too, over the importance to the elderly of care by their children, as opposed to alternative sources of maintenance such as earnings, charity and especially the formal institutions of poor relief. After all, in the early modern period the principle source for a study of the survival strategies of poor people is always likely to be the records of poor relief or charitable agencies and institutions. The obvious danger here is that historians of poor relief consistently overestimate the importance of such relief to the poor. Both Richard Wall and Pat Thane, using evidence from nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, for example, have demonstrated that the elderly received far more support from relatives than has been realized. Professor Thane has argued that this situation is unlikely t o have been new. Other historians, however, are much more sceptical over the value of intergenerational flows of wealth from children to elderly parents.

TOM BRASS. Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour. Case Studies and Debates. [The Library of Peasant Studies, 16.] Frank Cass, London [etc.] 1999. £47.50. (Paper: £20.00).

Free and Unfree Labour. The Debate Continues. Ed. by Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden. [International and Comparative Social History, 5.] Peter Lang, Bern [etc.] 1997. 603 pp. S.fr. 98.00.

The contemporary North Atlantic world has been marked by a waning enthusiasm for and salience of the study of workers. Yet the current ebb “in the traditional capitalist ‘core’ countries” (not to mention eastern Europe), Marcel van der Linden recently suggested, is far from being a “crisis” in the field of labor history as such. Rather, it is best understood as “only a regional phenomenon” since in much of “the so-called Third World, especially in the countries of the industrializing semi-periphery, interest in the history of labor and proletarian protest is growing steadily”. Citing encouraging recent developments in labor history in Asia, he noted how the field has grown in parallel with “the stormy conquest of economic sectors by the world market [which] has led to a rapid expansion of the number of waged workers, and the emergence of new radical trade unions”. Van der Linden's description fits well the study of labor in Latin America and the Caribbean, where the field first gained visibility in the early to mid-1980s and has now won recognition as an established specialization among scholars of many disciplines. After surveying the Latin American boom and its political context, this article offers a Brazilian/North Atlantic example in order to illustrate the intellectual gains, for students of both areas, that come with the transcendence of geographical parochialism.

In the exciting new social history of the 1960s the concept of class struggle tended to underpin much of the work on the working class in general, and on various labour groups in particular. Historians sought to find faces in crowds and to rescue others from “the enormous condescension of posterity”. The police, however, when they appeared in this history, were usually as nameless and faceless as the crowds had been previously. They were also commonly portrayed as oppressors, and even in the more perceptive and ground-breaking attempts to explore the police themselves, they were seen through the refracted lens of their working-class critics as “blue locusts” and as a bourgeois instrument for controlling a new society. Parallel research conducted at roughly the same time by sociologists, social psychologists and others developed theoretical perspectives based on two assumptions: first, that certain kinds of authoritarian personality were attracted to police careers, and second, that policing roles had predictable effects on the behaviour and personality of policemen. Subsequent research has suggested these assumptions to be largely unfounded, yet in this respect also, historical explorations of policemen as workers remain few.

In the last third of the 1700s Barcelona was a city undergoing a major transformation. The regional specialization process that took place in Catalonia, and the intensification of exchange, generated spectacular economic growth and an unprecedented increase in population. The city of Barcelona tripled its population in just over seventy years; in 1787 it already had around 100,000 inhabitants. Immigration, both from the Pyrenean areas and from the proto-industrial areas of central Catalonia, the natural growth of the population, the intense process of urbanization, and the dynamism of the labour market explain the densification of the city and the rise in the price of rents.