By analysing and comparing three waves of contentious collective action employed by the pioneering generation of Chinese state workers at one particular state-owned enterprise from the 1960s to the present, this study aims to explain its varying forms and to analyse its effectiveness in different historical periods. I argue that the changing political opportunity structure in various historical contexts has greatly conditioned workers’ “repertoire of contention” at each moment and, hence, significantly affected the processes, strategies, and outcomes of workers’ contentious collective action. This article highlights the paradoxical role of the socialist social contract as a potential but crucial component of “the repertoire of contention”, by arguing that different interpretations of the contract, as conditioned by a certain political opportunity structure in different historical periods, could either empower or disempower workers. Both archival and oral history research are used in this study.

The introductory article to this volume offers an analytical framework for the capacities in which states have historically affected labour relations. The framework captures the full range of possible manifestations of state power, including early states, empires, regional authorities, and city states. It distinguishes between the state as a direct actor or participant, carrying out tasks deemed essential for its functioning, and the state as an arbiter, redistributor, or regulator. As conquerors or employers, states are confronted with a basic dilemma: how to extract and allocate the labour resources required to accomplish state tasks. Borrowing from Charles Tilly, the two broad categories of capital and coercion are used as a heuristic device to bring order to the ways in which states have solved this dilemma. Contrary to Tilly’s trajectories of state formation, states’ reliance on capital or coercion is subject to a great degree of flexibility, both over time and across space. In their capacities as mediators and regulators, modern states came to have an even more profound impact on labour relations, as state building moved away from the single focus on organizing the extraction of resources to a wider mission of fostering welfare, economic development, and human capital formation.

This article introduces the present Special Theme on the global reception and appropriation of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). It aims to interrogate Thompson’s legacy and potential vitality at a moment of renewed social and intellectual upheavals. It emphasizes the need for an interdisciplinary and global reflection on Thompson’s work and impact for understanding how class, nation, and “the people” as subjects of historical inquiry have been repeatedly recast since the 1960s. Examining the course of Thompson’s ideas in Japan and West Germany, South Africa and Argentina, as well as Czechoslovakia and Poland, each of the following five articles in the Special Theme is situated in specific and different locations in the global historiographical matrix. Read as a whole, they show how national historiographies have been products of local processes of state and class formation on the one hand, and transnational transfers of intellectual and historiographical ideas, on the other. They highlight the remarkable ability of Thompsonian social history to inspire new lives in varying national contexts shaped by different formations of race, class, and state.

This article analyses the Algerian inquiries of Pierre Bourdieu. It begins by retracing the most pervasive, medium- and long-term interventions of French colonial power in Algerian society: the introduction of capitalism and the internment of civilians in the centres de regroupement. Next, it outlines the social subjects studied by the young agrégé of philosophy and his representation of labour. Subsequent sections deal with shifts in the public stance of Bourdieu regarding the revolutionary propensity of these people. On this tricky testing ground, Bourdieu engaged with and critically confronted the ideas of Germaine Tillion and Frantz Fanon. His position is reviewed from a historical-philological approach in order to set the texts in their temporal and spatial contexts, establish parallels and/or divergences, and verify the effects such comparisons produced. The conclusions emphasize the richness and originality of Bourdieu’s inquiries given the era in which they were made and highlight, in light of the recent global reorientation of labour history, some of the vital viewpoints expressed on the origins of capitalism in the colony.

Based on the author’s experience as one of the German translators of The Making, this article lays out its protracted and contradictory reception in Germany. When E.P. Thompson’s magnum opus was published fifty years ago, German scholars on both sides of the Iron Curtain failed to take note of it for several years. The relatively muted reception in West Germany during the 1970s was marked by its dismissal as theory-lacking and “subjectivist”. Examining the contrasting contexts of postwar Britain, with its popular anti-fascist experience, and post-fascist West Germany helps to understand why Thompson’s “empirical idiom” of class history failed to strike a chord at the time with leading representatives of the new generation of “progressive” social historians in Germany and a broader reading public. It was only with the arrival of Alltagsgeschichte, feminist history, and, more generally, the cultural turn in humanities that The Making and its German translation became a canonical point of reference both in working-class history and the wider humanities. A brief epilogue discusses its lasting potential for a historical understanding of today’s processes of post-Cold War class formation and human rights struggles.

This study analyses the shifts in labour relations due to state intervention, first during the conquest of the Ming empire between 1600 and 1644 by its Manchurian contenders, and thereafter until about 1780, as the Manchurian Qing dynasty established itself and drove the Chinese empire to its greatest expansion. The main focus lies on the socio-military formation of the Eight Banners, the institution that, for about 200 years, epitomized the domination of the Chinese empire by a small elite group of about two per cent of the population. These findings will be contextualized in the larger setting of labour relations of the early and mid-Qing, when state intervention occurred in the form of arbitration in labour conflicts, but also, in a much more aggressive manner, in the decimation of the Qing rulers’ Dzungharian rivals. In the framework of Charles Tilly’s paradigm of capital versus coercion, while both are present in the Chinese case, the capital-oriented path seems more distinct.

Decolonization challenged people across the globe to define their place in a new postcolonial order. This challenge was felt in international political and economic affairs, but it also affected daily lives across the globe. The history of fair trade activism as seen from the Netherlands highlights how citizens in the North grappled to position themselves in a postcolonial consumer society. Interventions by fair trade activists connected debates about the morals of their society to the consequences of decolonization. They reacted to the imbalances of the global market in the wake of decolonization, joining critics from the South in demanding more equitable global relations. It was around this issue of “fair trade” that a transnational coalition of moderate and more radical activists emerged after the 1960s. This coalition held widely dissimilar views regarding the politics of the left and the use of consumer activism. The analysis of their interventions demonstrates that during the postwar era attempts at transforming the global market were inextricably interwoven with visions of a postcolonial order.

The article describes and analyses contrasting forms of protest employed by handloom weavers in South India at two key points in time – the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Following Tilly, it examines how changes in the state’s regulatory regime influenced modes of resistance, but extends this analysis to the influence of production structures and social/cultural factors such as caste. It also maps internal structures of solidarity and the changing role of caste and class in shaping them. It tries to show how repertoires of resistance altered with changes, not just in the regulatory regime, but the broader socio-economic context, and foregrounds their adaptability and dynamism. It explores forms of protest and organization shared by weavers with workers from a wide range of occupations (including factory workers). Above all, it questions the notion of the unchanging character of “primordial” identities while seeking to provide a fuller understanding of the emerging dynamic of collective consciousness amongst non-factory workers in modern India.

This article addresses the system of state-organized and state-controlled tributary labour in the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century. On the basis of the taxpayers’ registry of 1795, it focuses on the social groups obliged to perform military service or labour directly for the polity. They included the numerous “service class” of the southern and eastern frontier regions, including Russian, Ukrainian (mainly Cossack), and indigenous (Bashkir and Kalmyk) communities, and the group of pripisnye, peasants “bound” to industries and shipyards to work for their taxes. The rationale behind the use of this type of labour relation was, on the one hand, the need of the state to secure the support of labour in distant and poorly populated regions, and, on the other, that the communes of labourers saw performing work for the state as a strong guarantee of their landowning privileges.

This article clarifies the differences between occupational health and workplace health and reveals how the two overlap. It unravels a multi-layered narrative about cotton textile workers’ understandings and experiences of ill-health at work in America and Britain, utilizing a combination of oral histories, government documents, company and union records, and the trade press. It aims to identify the multiple influences on contemporary debates about health at work. Contrary to current historiography, I argue that gender was only occasionally important to such discussions among workers, and that gender did not significantly influence their responses to unhealthy conditions. Workers’ understandings of, and responses to, workplace hazards were individual and related to knowledge about risk, ill-health and socioeconomic factors. American and British workers’ understandings of and responses to their working environment reveals more convergence than divergence, suggesting a universal human response to the health risks of work that is not significantly influenced by national or industrial constraints, or by gender.

Although the impact of Thompson’s work outside the UK has been recognized and pointed to many times, the ways in which Thompsonian categories and concepts, or Marxist thought from the West more broadly, was received in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc remain rather unclear. Although The Making has never been translated into Polish, Czech, or Slovak, the historians of East-Central European countries were not totally cut off from Western scholarship. Major academic institutes and universities throughout the communist bloc maintained basic contacts with colleagues in the West, and Thompson’s work was known among some local social historians. Marxism from the West in general and Thompson’s work in particular posed challenges that had to be dealt with. This paper traces the ways in which historians of Poland and Czechoslovakia responded to these challenges to the official position of Marxist orthodoxy. Taking The Making as an example, it highlights the reception (or lack thereof) of Western influences on local scholarship, and the dynamics of these encounters – whether they were affirmative or critical – in relation to the changing political landscape of East-Central European countries after World War II.

The Schuman Plan to “pool” the coal and steel industries of Western Europe has been widely celebrated as the founding document of today’s European Union. An expansive historiography has developed around the plan but labor and workers are largely absent from existing accounts, even though the sectors targeted for integration, coal and steel, are traditionally understood as centers of working-class militancy and union activity in Europe. Existing literature generally considers the role coal and steel industries played as objects of the Schuman Plan negotiations but this article reverses this approach. It examines instead how labor politics in the French Nord and Pas-de-Calais and the German Ruhr, core industrial regions, influenced the positions adopted by two prominent political parties, the French Socialist and German Social Democratic parties, on the integration of European heavy industry. The empirical material combines archival research in party and national archives with findings from regional histories of the Nord/Pas-de-Calais, the Ruhr, and their local socialist party chapters, as well as from historical and sociological research on miners and industrial workers. The article analyses how intense battles between socialists and communists for the allegiance of coal and steel workers shaped the political culture of these regions after the war and culminated during a mass wave of strikes in 1947–1948. The divergent political outcomes of these battles in the Nord/Pas-de-Calais and the Ruhr, this article contends, strongly contributed to the decisions of the French Socialist Party to support and the German Social Democratic Party to oppose the Schuman Plan in 1950.

This article traces the chequered history of the reception of E.P. Thompson in postwar Japan and tries to assess what kind of impact his thoughts and ideas had on the Japanese intellectual world. In so doing, this article will draw on interviews with several academics in Japan from various generations as well as written documents. The article begins with a survey of postwar left-wing politics in Japan, against which background Thompson was introduced as a New Left thinker. It also considers the National History Movement, whose problematic legacy seemed to condition the reception of The Making of the English Working Class in Japan in the 1960s. After exploring the limited reception of The Making among Japanese historians, we witness the more favourable reception of the concept of “moral economy”. The article demonstrates that the rather awkward history of the reception of E.P. Thompson in Japan cannot be understood without referring to the postwar concerns of Japanese intellectuals, concerns that changed fairly dramatically in the course of time.

This article analyses the changes in the organization of labour during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in colonial Charcas, present-day Bolivia, focusing on the role that different colonial authorities played in this process and its consequences. The Spanish took advantage of the pre-Hispanic organization of labour from the beginning of their conquest. However, in a colonial context, labour relations changed significantly, and the architect of those alterations was Viceroy Francisco de Toledo. We examine the transformations in mine labour carried out by the Spanish colonial polity; these had a significant effect not only on mining, but also on all labour relations in the southern colonial Andes.

The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) had a long tradition of anti-colonial activism since its foundation in 1920 and had been a champion of national liberation within the British Empire. However, the Party also adhered to the idea that Britain’s former colonies, once independent, would want to join a trade relationship with their former coloniser, believing that Britain required these forms of relationship to maintain supplies of food and raw materials. This position was maintained into the 1950s until challenged in 1956–1957 by the Party’s African and Caribbean membership, seizing the opportunity presented by the fallout of the political crises facing the CPGB in 1956. I argue in this article that this challenge was an important turning point for the Communist Party’s view on issues of imperialism and race, and also led to a burst of anti-colonial and anti-racist activism. But this victory by its African and Caribbean members was short-lived, as the political landscape and agenda of the CPGB shifted in the late 1960s.

This article traces the reception of E.P. Thompson’s work in Argentina over the past three decades. It explores the context in which Thompson was read by labor historians as a means to analyse the way in which the country’s labor historiography was shaped over this period. It argues that, in the 1980s and the 1990s, against a context characterized by a crisis of the political left and a downturn in the labor movement, Thompson’s appropriation was focused on his critique of Marxist “determinism”. While this corresponded to similar developments in other countries, Argentinian labor historiography started to show a different path in the early 2000s, when a tremendous social, political, and economic crisis shook the country. The article concludes that recent developments in labor historiography in Argentina show a different pattern to those seen in the “Global North”.

Labour relations in the silver mines of Potosí are almost synonymous with the mita, a system of unfree work that lasted from the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, behind this continuity there were important changes, but also other forms of work, both free and self-employed. The analysis here is focused on how the “polity” contributed to shape labour relations, especially from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. This article scrutinizes the labour policies of the Spanish monarchy on the one hand, which favoured certain economic sectors and regions to ensure revenue, and on the other the initiatives both of mine entrepreneurs and workers – unfree, free, and self-employed – who all contributed to changing the system of labour.