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”.

This article challenges the view that the English East India Company was unable effectively to dominate society in the colonial metropolis of Madras before the end of the eighteenth century. Instead it is argued that colonial interventions, even into the social organization of labour, were persistent in goals and methods and acquired institutional forms in the latter half of the century. Hence an early colonial labour policy is clearly discernible. The ruling block's strategies concerning the regulation of labour were not based on laissez-faire ideas but rather on a paternalistic brand of contemporary English social theory. This ideological disposition found practical expression in interventions into the city's labour relations by means of various “police committees”. Moreover, British legal techniques were used to regulate labour relations in Madras. On the whole, early colonial labour policy was distinguished from contemporary practices in Britain by a far higher level of coercion.

Exploring issues of the family wage, this paper examines labour markets, family employment patterns and political conflict in France. Up to now, the debate over the family wage has centred mainly on analysing British trade unions and the development of an ideal of domesticity among the British working classes, more or less taking for granted the declining women's labour force participation rate and the configuration of state/trade union relations prevailing in Great Britain. Shifting the debate across the Channel, scholars such as Laura Frader and Susan Pedersen have suggested that different attitudes to the family wage prevailed. In France, demands for the exclusion of women from industry were extremely rare because women's participation in industry was taken for granted. But a gendered division of labour and ideals of domesticity remained and made themselves felt in both workforce and labour movement.

International migration has flowed and ebbed in two long waves over the last two hundred years. The major determinants of international migration have been the economy and the state. The economic forces impinging on migration are demography, technology, the level of wages, and geographical proximity, transportation, and communications. The state is the confluence of social and political forces within countries which define, encourage or curtail, and regulate movement across borders. The lesson of the nineteenth-century migration system is that states created it or allowed it to happen. They also always had the power to end it, and they eventually did. The huge break in the history of migration which accompanied the era of the world wars points to the decisive power of the state to control migration and, by extension, the direction of economic development itself. The present article reviews the major phases of the history of modern migration in order to put the present crossroads in perspective.

One of the aspects of the information revolution that has had negative implications for many workers is the erosion of the workplace as a basis for long-term security and collective solidarity. The dramatic pace of technological change, complex restructuring of firms, and continual competitive pressures for rapid innovation that are a central component of the information economy are contributing to fundamental transformations in work and employment. As part of this transformation, the trend towards the centralization of production in large enterprises that was the dominant feature of the industrial era is being superseded by production organized around smaller workplaces connected together in complex, constantly shifting networks operating at multiple spatial scales, from the local to the global. For many workers, one result is greater insecurity, as they increasingly have to update their skills, change jobs and even change careers more frequently. Some analysts have gone so far as to characterize the typical information age worker as a “free-floating individual, connected on-line to a variety of task-performing organizations, ever-competing for resources and personal support, and assuming limited responsibilities towards limited people for a limited time”.

Two directions in the historiography of humour can be diagnosed: on the one hand humour is understood as a form of resistance, on the other hand it is taken as a means of political agitation. This dichotomy has been applied especially to describe humour in National Socialism and in other totalitarian regimes. This article argues that both forms were marginal in National Socialism. The prevalence of the “whispered jokes”, allegedly the form of resistance, has been exaggerated. The satire, allegedly the official and dominant form of humour, was not well-received by the National Socialistic public. This article will reconstruct the rise of a third form, the “German humour”, and discuss the reasons for its success by looking at why satire failed.

Samir Amin (1972) divided the African continent into three “macro-regions of colonial influence” with distinct socio-economic systems and labour practices: Africa of the colonial trade or peasant economy, Africa of the concession-owning companies, and Africa of the labour reserves. We argue that Mozambique encompassed all three different “macro-regions” in a single colony. We reconstruct government revenue (direct/indirect taxes) raised at a district level between 1930 and 1973 and find persisting differences in the “tax capacity” of the three regions throughout the colonial period. The tax systems, we claim, developed in response to existing local geographic and economic conditions, particularly to labour practices. Portuguese colonial rule adapted to and promoted labour practices such as migration and forced labour to maximize revenue. The extent to which the lack of integration played a role in the post-colonial state and fiscal failure should be studied further.

The study builds on a representative sample of more than 2,500 court cases against vagrants in the Duchy of Brabant between 1767 and 1776. Individual evidence on social background and whereabouts has been quantitatively processed to provide qualitative insight into the “why” and “how” of their movements. Transcending the judicial framework and historical and historiographical biases, these “vagrants” are shown to have displayed various patterns of mobility that fit intelligibly within the wider framework of migration history and theory. By exposing the varied scope of the concept of “vagrancy” in meaning and policy practice, the article argues against its continued ubiquitous (and often dismissive) use in historiography as if it refers meaningfully to a distinct marginal social category, which not only often reiterates the biases of a distorted elite view, but also obstructs a more unified and insightful understanding of patterns of migration in history.

Though in recent years there has been a growth of interest in the subject of riot and disorder in eighteenth century England, little attention has been paid to anti-recruiting riots. These were, however, one of the most common forms of riot and disturbance in some areas; and in this study of the London riots of 1794 I hope to illustrate some of their features, particularly in the London context.

This article provides a general background to the case studies in this Special Issue by highlighting some general themes in the history of migration to coalfields worldwide. All over the world, mining companies have struggled with labour shortages and had to find ways to recruit sufficient numbers of mineworkers. The solutions adopted ranged from the involvement of part-time peasant miners, organized mediation by labour contractors, and systems of forced labour, to state regulation of national and international migration. The importance of these kinds of “intervening institution” in mobilizing labour for the coalmines is illustrated by examples from different parts of the world. Efforts to find new workers for the mines often resulted in the recruitment of ethnic groups of a lower social status, not only because they were rural and unskilled, but also because they were considered inferior from a cultural or ethnic viewpoint. In this respect there was a huge difference from the migration and settlement of skilled miners, like those from Britain and other countries. Ethnic differences were often closely related to differences in skill and social status. Although there are many instances of inter-ethnic solidarity and cooperation, depending on the time-frame and circumstances, these differences could have a profound effect on social relations in mining communities.

The record of strike activity on Clydeside is used to explore the interaction between workplace organisation and political attitudes in working-class communities, focussing in particular upon the shipyard labour force in the years immediately preceding the 1919 General Strike. The findings are used to question research by Iain McLean which minimised the political significance of industrial militancy during the period of the Red Clyde and that by Alastair Reid, which argued that the main consequences of wartime industrial experience were to strengthen social democratic perspectives. It is suggested that a limited but significant radicalisation did occur and that this was related to the specific labour relations practices of employers in the west of Scotland and the structural weakness of Clydeside's economy.

The potato blight which in the 1840s became so destructive in Ireland as to cause wide-spread distress and much loss of life also brought the Netherlands to the verge of famine. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the extent of the damage to the Dutch potato crops in the “hungry forties” and to consider some of its consequences: the rise of the food prices, the spread of pauperism, social unrest, the attitudes of the population and the measures taken by the Government.

This article argues that the literature on social movements and globalization has not paid sufficient attention to the way in which political actors who act globally try to overcome the social, cultural, and political distances that separate them. It introduces the concept of global framing to give focus to the discursive processes central to such “distance bridging”. In particular, it emphasizes how symbols and emotions are crucial in the framing of distance. Empirically, it discusses how the considerable global resonance created by the Zapatistas in Mexico is facilitated by a framing strategy, carried out mainly by the movement's spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, in which humour, imperfection, and symbols play a decisive role.

Few men have shaken the world like Karl Marx. His death, almost unnoticed, was followed by echoes of fame in such a short period of time that few comparisons could be found in history. His name was soon on the lips of the workers of Detroit and Chicago, as on those of the first Indian socialists in Calcutta. His image formed the background of the congress of the Bolsheviks in Moscow after the revolution. His thought inspired the programmes and statutes of all the political and union organizations of the workers' movement, from Europe to Shanghai.

This article examines the evolving significance of formal marriage and of partner selection in nineteenth-century Santiago do Iguape Brazil. Across social divides, racial and class endogamy were the norm for marriage partners, but consensual unions were far more likely to unite couples of different races. The information about enslaved couples was more sporadic, but I found that most slaves married partners who shared their country of origin, and that there was a higher slave-marriage rate on larger plantations. My research suggests that free and enslaved people constantly violated the borders separating them within a stratified plantation society, but that formal marriage retained a special significance and was reserved for unions between social equals.

“The organization and the establishment of democracy in Christendom”, de Tocqueville wrote in 1835, “is the great political problem of the time.” Nowhere was the problem more urgent than in England, whose industrial towns were soon to be torn by intense class conflict. Yet England resolved the tensions of the 1830's and 1840's, and went on to build a tough and supple political democracy in a massively undemocratic society.

This article investigates the entangled histories of radicals in Detroit and Turin who challenged capitalism in ways that departed from “orthodox” Marxism. Starting from the 1950s, small but influential groups of labour radicals, such as Correspondence in Detroit and Quaderni Rossi in Turin, circulated ideas that questioned the Fordist system in a drastic way. These radicals saw the car factories as laboratories for a possible “autonomist” working-class activity that could take over industrial production and overhaul the societal system. They criticized the usefulness of the unions and urged workers to develop their own forms of collective organization. These links were rekindled during the intense working-class mobilization of the late 1960s, when younger radicals would also engage in a dialogue across national boundaries that influenced each other's interpretation of the local context. These transnational connections, well-known to contemporaries but ignored by historians, show how American events and debates were influenced by, and impinged on, distant countries, and how local activists imagined their political identity as encompassing struggles occurring elsewhere.

Seit seiner Entstehung hatte sich der vor allem aus dem linken Flügel der Vorkriegssozialdemokratie hervorgegangene deutsche Kommunismus scharf von der SPD distanziert, deren „Ersatz-Marxismus”, wie Rosa Luxemburg auf dem Gründungsparteitag der KPD am 31. Dezember 1918 meinte, die sozialistische Bewegung „zu einem Dahinsiechen im Rahmen und auf dem Boden der kapitalistischen Gesellschaft verurteilte, ohne jedes ernste Bestreben, die Gesellschaft zu erschüttern und aus den Fugen zu bringen”. Trotz all ihrer Differenzen in wichtigen Fragen waren sich Lenin und Luxemburg einig in ihrem Haß gegen die „Sozialverräter”, wie Lenin die Sozialdemokraten verächtlich nannte. Und Rosa Luxemburg sagte von ihnen und den deutschen Gewerkschaftsführern, sie seien die „infamsten und größten Halunken, die in der Welt gelebt haben”; ihre „sogenannte sozialistische Regierung” sei in Wirklichkeit eine „Regierung der bürgerlichen Konterrevolution”. Die Frontstellung gegen die Sozialdemokratie bestimmte also bereits die Politik der jungen KPD und der im März 1919 gegründeten Kommunistischen Internationale, ehe am 23. März 1919 auf der Piazza San Sepolcro in Mailand von dem ehemaligen Sozialisten Mussolini die „Fasci di Combattimento” ins Leben gerufen wurden und Hitler im September desselben Jahres in die winzige „Deutsche Arbeiterpartei” eintrat, die einige Monate später den Namen „NSDAP” erhielt. Der Kampf gegen diese beiden politischen Gruppierungen, die Sozialdemokratie und den „Faschismus”, bestimmte in der Periode der Weimarer Republik in nicht geringem Maße die Politik der KPD. Wir wollen die Entwicklung des kommunistischen Verhältnisses zur Sozialdemokratie sowie vor allem die Geschichte des Begriffs „Sozialfaschismus” in Deutschland in einem kurzen Überblick betrachten.

This 1999 Supplement of the International Review of Social History focuses on complicating central concepts in the understanding of economic and social history: class, gender, race and ethnicity. In concentrating on industrial workers, their politics, and institutions, labor and working-class history had tended to ignore gender, race, and ethnicity as discursive and material forces. It discussed the woman or black or immigrant worker as a subset of worker, assumed to be male, white, and of the dominant national or ethnic group. Only during recent years have historians began to ask how gender, race, and ethnicity as categories of analysis change narratives of class formation and working-class experience. This question has become particularly salient as the European Union and the United States seek to grapple with the human consequences of colonial and imperialist legacies both within and beyond national boundaries in an increasingly global economy.