The historical development of employers' associations and the role these organisations played in strikebreaking has been considerably neglected in industrial-relations history. With a few notable recent exceptions, research has tended to concentrate on the development and struggles of the organisations of men, rather than the masters. This is partly the result of the secrecy and anonymity of employers' associations and their reluctance to allow access to their records or to attract media interest, and partly because the defensive and conservative attitudes and policies of employers' organisations have proved less attractive to historians than the more militant political and social theories that lie at the foundation of trade-union policy. In particular, the strikebreaking activities of employers and their organisations were not widely publicised. As a result, this whole emotive area is shrouded in exaggeration, sensationalism, distortion and the propagation of myths by both workers and employers. The object of this paper is to analyse the parameters of employers' coercive strikebreaking tactics from the 1880's to 1914 and to shed some light on the role employers' associations played during industrial stoppages. The first section briefly outlines the main developments in employers' organisation, solidarity and labour-relations policy before 1914. Following this is a discussion of the various strikebreaking tactics utilised by employers in this period, broken down into sections on labour replacement, victimisation and legal action, strike compensation and internal solidarity, and, finally, the lock-out.

In the past decade a prominent theme in the historiography of nineteenth-century Britain has been the imposition of middle-class habits and attitudes upon the populace by means of new or re-invigorated mechanisms of “social control”. To the apparatus of law enforcement and to the disciplines of the factory and wage labour, historians have added the less overt instruments of social welfare, education, religion, leisure and moral reform. Philanthropists, educators, clergymen and moralizers have all become soldiers in a campaign to uproot the “anti-social” characteristics of the poor and to cement the hegemony of the elite.

The creation of the World Federation of Trade Unions in October 1945 was intended as a major step towards international trade-union unity. Less than four years later, in January 1949, the secession of its British, American and Dutch affiliates, soon to be followed by the bulk of Western trade union centres, left the international labour movement more divided than ever. Narrative accounts of the WFTU's brief life as a united body and of the developments leading to the schism have long been available and are not matters of contention. As to the cause of the split, however, there is less agreement. The ostensible reason for the secession was the failure of the WFTU to reach agreement with the International Trade Secretariats (ITSs) on their relationship with one another. Those who split away always contended that disagreements over trade-union matters led to the rupture. In recent years, however, with the opening up of national archives, attention has turned to the influence of governments in the field of international trade unionism. In particular the interventionist role of the US State Department acting through the American Federation of Labour has been chronicled. However, as yet no full account of the activities of the British Foreign Office in this area is available. Given the fact that the British Trades Union Congress was the instigator of the schism and the single most influential union centre to leave the WFTU, an examination of Foreign Office relations with it would seem to be warranted. Equally the relationships between the Foreign Office and the State Department and between the TUC and the American Congress of Industrial Organisations, the two principal Western centres in the WFTU, are matters of considerable interest.

One of the memorable days in the French revolution of 1848 occurred on May 15. Several extraordinary events happened on that date. The first was the overrunning of the legislative chamber by an unruly crowd. Next, and most important, a person named Aloysius Huber, after several hours had elapsed, unilaterally declared the National Assembly dissolved. In the resultant confusion, the legislators and the crowd dispersed. Third, shortly afterwards, an attempt took place at the City Hall to set up a new revolutionary government. It failed completely. As the result of these happenings, a number of people thought to be, or actually, implicated in them were imprisoned on charges of sedition.

Die folgende Skizze des Lebens des dänischen Sozialisten Niels Lorents Petersen ist das vorläufige Ergebnis von mehrjährigen häufig unterbrochenen und wiederaufgenommenen Recherchen in europäischen Bibliotheken und Archiven. Als Zusammenfassung des bisher Erreichten erhebt die Skizze keinen Anspruch darauf, das Leben des Niels Lorents Petersen in der Arbeiterbewegung in allen Aspekten zu beleuchten. Das Ziel ist eher eine Würdigung. Der Entschluss, die Ergebnisse der bisherigen Nachforschungen zusammenzufassen, steht in Zusammenhang damit, dass es mir nach jahrelangen Bemiihungen gelungen ist, die Tagebücher des Dänen zu finden. Diese Tagebüucher, auf deren Existenz erstmals 1894 hingewiesen wurde, sind in Fachkreisen lange gesucht worden und galten zeitweilig als verschollen. Sie sind inzwischen am Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus in Moskau aufgetaucht, eine Kopie befmdet sich im Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus in Berlin. Das Berliner Institut war so freundlich, mir die Einsicht in diese Kopie zu gestatten. Obwohl dieses — bis auf wenige Eintragungen in deutscher Sprache geführte — Tagebuch nur Erinnerungsfetzen an die Arbeiterbewegung enthält, und in der Hauptsache Altersreflexionen wiedergibt (der Autor begann die Niederschrift erst an seinem 70.

The Social Democratic Federation is usually regarded by historians as of only marginal importance to the working-class movement of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To support this view reference is often made to its naive and mechanistic interpretations of Marxist theory, its small membership and sectarian nature, and the futility of its concentration upon political activity amongst the unemployed at the expense of support for the industrial action of trade unionists and the Parliamentary representation of labour. The stereotype of a narrow, doctrinaire sect with incompetent leadership contains more than a grain of truth, but like most stereotypes conveys only a partial verity. Too often it is used as an excuse for neglecting the SDF on the precept that it was irrelevant and “misguided” in its conception of the right path for the working-class movement. The comparative failure of the SDF, however, owed at least as much to the deeply engrained reformist and trade-unionist tradition amongst the English working class as it did to the inadequacies of the SDF itself.

Anzuzeigen ist ein umfangreicher Quellenbestand der Manuscript Division der New York Public Library über Wilhelm Weitling (1808–71). Dessen Nachlaß galt in der deutschsprachigen Literatur bisher als verschollen; Hinweisen auf die Existenz dieses Nachlasses, die in der Biographie von Carl Wittke seit 1950 vorlagen, ist die Forschung bisher nicht nachgegangen. Die Bedeutung dieser neuen Dokumente für die Sozialismusforschung, die Historiographie zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, für die politische Theorie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte ergibt sich aus Weitlings historischer Stellung als Arbeiterkommunist und erster Theoretiker und Organisator der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung. Als Zeitgenosse von Karl Marx markiert Weitling einen Schnittpunkt in den Entwicklungslinien von „utopischem” und „wissenschaftlichem” Sozialismus.

This paper is derived from a study of work and trade unionism in the British pottery industry in the first three decades of the twentieth century. It is an attempt to open up the history of pottery management's labour strategies for debate, given the relatively slight attention the subject has received in general or with regard to this important period. Ceramic historians, in common with labour and social history, have neglected the detailed study of management, while contemporary writers on the Potteries often lapsed into a “demonology” when dealing with pottery manufacturers. In contrast to the more famous volumes on social conditions in the Potteries by Shaw or Owen and Warburton's examination of trade unions, the early-twentieth-century pottery-owners have not been the subject of sustained analysis. Yet an orthodoxy of sorts has developed, which sees the industry's management as typically crude and unchanging in technique. Economists such as B. R. Williams or geographers like Yeaman have been unchallenged in their assertions that owners could almost dispense with labour-control strategies in the light of the workforce's passivity and the tranquility of industrial relations in the industry.

Am Ende des Ancien Régime lebte die Mehrzahl der deutschen Familien an der Grenze des Existenzminimums. Verstärkt durch den wechselhaften Witterungsverlauf schwankte die Lebenshaltung dieser Zugehörigen zu den ländlichen und nichtbürgerlichen Unterschichten wegen des ungleichmäßigen Angebots an Lebensmitteln zwischen Unterversorgung mit den lebensnotwendigen Bedürfnissen bei Minderernten (und relativ hohem Preisniveau) und damit abwechselnden Zeiten ausreichender Bedarfsdeckung in wohlfeilen Jahren. In den beiden ersten Jahrzehnten und in der Mitte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts stieg der Anteil dieser urn die physische Existenz ihrer Familie ringenden Bevölkerungsgruppen erheblich an. Engels und Marx haben dieses Phänomen der Massenarmut (oder das Elend des Proletariats) auf die Industrialisierung und den übermächtigen Einfluß des Kapitals, das zunehmend in alle Lebensbereiche eindrang, zurückgeführt. Durch Abzug von Kapital aus dem Produktionsprozeß und Akkumulierung zu großen Vermögen würden den in der großbetrieblichen Produktion beschäftigten Arbeitern nur noch Löhne ausgezahlt, die lediglich für die Bestreitung der physischen Existenz ausreichen wiirden. Mit zunehmender Industrialisierung und Konzentration der Produktion in Fabriken hätte schließlich eine ständig wachsende Zahl von kleingewerblichen Produzenten ihren Besitz verloren und sei in die Klasse des Proletariats (Expropriation) abgesunken. Knapp hat für Deutschland noch eine Sonderentwicklung aufgezeigt, indem er als wesentliche Ursache für die Entstehung eines freien Arbeiterstandes die Bauernbefreiung herausstellte.

The numerical determination of the relationship between the sanitary conditions in which people live, and the risks to health and life this may involve is a relatively new method of understanding infectious disease. It came to be known as “sanitary statistics” in the early nineteenth century, when this kind of investigation reached the climax of its social importance. But its roots go back to the late seventeenth century, when England was again visited by the plague, shattering a country that had hardly recovered from two decades of civil unrest. The two basic motives of sanitary statistics, which later made it so potent a reformist tool, were already present then in a first outline, namely the attempt to rationalize the frightful phenomenon of the epidemic and the conviction that its causes were somehow bound up with the social organization of urban life. As long as people had seen in the great epidemics God's punishing hand, the flagellants' reaction made sense. Man could only bow to Him; the arm of flesh might at most seek to avoid His punishment by punishing itself in advance. But when in 1854 the Presbytery of Edinburgh suggested to the Home Secretary, Lord Palmerston, to call for a national fast against cholera, they received the cold reply that “the weal or woe of mankind depends on the observance or neglect of those laws” which sanitary statistics had recently discovered. Divine reference was replaced by statistical reference, and the correlations thus revealed pointed to action by the “arm of flesh”.