Interest in the history of consumer cooperation has grown in recent years, but the transnational dimensions of the movement, including the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), remain under-researched. This paper examines the debates about the meanings of cooperation during the period 1918–1939, focusing on the Nordic countries as a case study within the ICA. The paper considers how cooperators drew on the legacy of the Rochdale Pioneers as the basis for a programmatic statement for the ICA, before turning to explore the implications of this for the ordinary members who shopped in the cooperative stores. Examination of these debates within the cooperative movement can, it is argued, illuminate our understandings of both the transnational politics of consumption, and the ambitions, limits, and practices of internationalism during the interwar years. Lastly, some attention is given to the role of cooperation in the emergence of a distinctive Nordic region.

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.

This paper deals with the making of vagrancy in the context of early state welfare policy. Vagrancy is neither understood as an anachronism nor as deviance or marginality. Rather, it raises central questions concerning social policy and the history of labour. Starting from the problems of definition in the context of contemporary transnational debates, I will then focus on the practical implementation of distinctions in Austria from the late nineteenth century to the Anschluss in 1938. Different practices of varying efficacy will be accounted for, starting with the first attempts to formalize unemployment emerging in the late nineteenth century, when, based on a new understanding of unemployment as an effect of the labour market, new forms of supporting and regulating those wayfarers in search of employment were established. Such practices also aimed at outlawing vagrancy, with consistent penalties under the law. In addition, vagrancy will be discussed with respect to changing political regimes. Focusing on the 1920s and 1930s, the paper analyses crime statistics and crime records, and last but not least, the perspective of those who were “on the tramp”.

The period 1500–1650 was characterized by huge global transformations. These had a major impact on a wide range of societal forms and cultures. As a result, different work ethics clashed and formed hybrid combinations, and new work ethics came into being during many-sided confrontations. The question of how the labouring poor in different parts of the world experienced these changes in the context of their work is an extremely difficult one. The present essay attempts to define a number of key concepts (“work”, “attitude”); it evaluates critically the various sources which might give us an insight into attitudes to work; and it reflects on interpretative difficulties. The essay concludes by presenting a few substantive hypotheses.

This article explores the similarities and differences of the discourse used by the main figures from the labour unrest of Liège in 1886 and Seville in 1901 to articulate their experiences and protests. The comparison, focused on the analysis of the interpretative frameworks, that is, on the “construction of arguments”, highlights the role of the discourse as one of the cultural ingredients which encouraged and shaped both instances of collective action.

One of the main features of slavery in Brazil was that slaves had a better chance of achieving freedom than was the case in other slave societies. However difficult freedom may have been to obtain, significant rates of manumission resulted in a high percentage of free and freed people of color in the population of the country throughout the nineteenth century. This article analyzes facets of the structural precariousness of freedom in nineteenth-century Brazil. It deals with such themes as the constitutional restrictions on the political rights of freed persons; the masters’ interdiction of their slaves’ learning how to read and write; the practice of granting conditional manumissions; the masters’ right to revoke liberties; the illegal enslavement of free people of color; and police profiling of free and freed blacks under the allegation that they were suspected of being slaves. The idea is to highlight situations which often blurred the distinction between slavery and freedom, therefore rendering insecure the condition of free and freed people of African descent.

The ideology of domesticity that identified women with a domestic role became more articulated in north-western Europe throughout the early modern period. At the same time, perceptions of work changed and a new appraisal of labour emerged. These seemingly contradictory tendencies prompt the question how women fitted in with the ideology of work. This article discusses common notions of the economic role of women as they emerged from the debates on women, gender relations, and work; how these notions were translated into practical advice in conduct literature; and with what norms women were confronted in everyday life. It appears that work was valued positively for both women and men. Women's involvement in remunerated work was not considered problematic. There was a dividing line, however, and that was drawn between work within the home, which was deemed women's work, and work outside the home, which was deemed men's work. In practice, a differentiation was made between social groups; women who lacked income from capital were supposed to earn their living from work.

The main aim of this paper is to analyse the singularity of the Spanish position with regard to coverage of the risk of sickness within the context of the different welfare models described in international literature. This analysis enables us to verify that in Spain, as in other countries, there were initially different forms of sickness coverage which coexisted, created by the market, by workers themselves and, gradually, by the state. Within this so-called mixed economy of welfare, the most extensive health coverage for the Spanish population was a result of the self-organization of workers, and this continued until the Civil War (1936–1939), not so much due to its efficacy and viability, as to the slow development of private insurance companies and the inability of the state to implement compulsory sickness insurance. The installation of the Franco dictatorship meant that the introduction of compulsory sickness insurance was further delayed, and when it was eventually passed, it offered only limited coverage, was enacted more for political than for social ends, and was to result in the virtual disappearance of friendly societies.

This article analyses Fred Zinnemann's 1948 film, The Search, setting in the context of displaced persons in post-1945 Europe. We concentrate on Zinnemann's treatment of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), arguing that this is central to the film. We also consider the film's references to Americanism, Zionism, gender equality, and children's wartime experiences.

This article aims to identify migration systems in north-western nineteenth-century Portugal to contribute to the understanding of the puzzle that is Portuguese migration dynamics. Through the analysis of the passport and parish registers from the concelho of Vila do Conde, it was possible to determine three systems, the Atlantic, the Lisbon, and the local. The occurrence and characteristics of the systems varied according to socio-economic contexts, both in the sending and receiving areas, and also according to the emigrants’ life cycles.

Small communist strongholds were commonly nicknamed “Little Moscow”, both in Britain and in Europe. Small-place communism has been widespread since the interwar period, often in distinctly hostile surroundings. In this article, based on research into a number of cases in western Europe, I try to identify common characteristics which might explain their receptiveness to communist policies and ideas. My aim is to present a taxonomy for further research. Most of the places that I researched were isolated, recently developed, and mono-industrial. They were populated by a wave of migrants who had formed mono-occupational, pioneer societies. Second-generation migrants turned to communism and built “occupational communities” based on trade unions and other associational activities. Often they continued militant traditions of earlier socialism, anarchism, or syndicalism; others had a tradition of irreligiousness or religious indifference.

There have been few attempts systematically to study the ethics of work in the early modern age on the basis of contemporary sources. Such a study should start with case studies of individual thinkers, as stepping stones to a more comprehensive study of the ethics of work. This article provides such a case study, of the seventeenth-century Dutch artisan Pieter Plockhoy (c.1620–1664). As will be shown, work was a central component of Plockhoy's philosophy of true, practical Christianity, and on the basis of his tracts a more or less coherent ethics of work can be reconstructed. Although this article concentrates on Plockhoy's philosophy of labour, his thought fits into a broader context of related contemporary thinkers, many of whom shared his concerns. Thus the article shows that for scholars wishing to study the ethics of work there is still a whole field which, though yielding a potentially rich harvest, lies fallow.

Over the past forty years, the social struggles of the “long 1960s” have been continuously reinterpreted, each interpretation allocating a new mix of relevance and irrelevance to the brief global uprising. This article is a contribution to one such interpretation: the small but growing body of literature on the central importance of experiments with democracy within movements of the 1960s. Rather than examining the transformative effect of 1960s movements on institutional politics or popular culture, this article examines the lasting transformation 1960s movements had on social-movement praxis. Based on seven years of ethnography within contemporary global movement networks, I argue that when viewed from within social-movement networks, we see that the political legacy of the 1960s lies in the lasting significance of movement experiments with democracy as part of a prefigurative strategy for social change that is still relevant today because it is still in practice today.

By the late nineteenth century, the hungry increasingly found themselves constructed as objects of compassion. However, there were real limits to the “humanitarian discovery of hunger”. Not every famished body was understood as deserving of sympathy. Compassionate citizens were particularly troubled by the mass distress that often accompanied lengthy strikes. How should they respond to such hunger? A study of newspaper representations of strike-induced hunger reveals that a gendered discourse evolved which repeatedly concentrated attention on the starving “innocents”: the wives and children of male strikers. The discourse was apparently apolitical but, in truth, it was nothing of the sort. It adjudged the “innocents” worthy recipients of food aid, whilst frequently ignoring the hunger of the striking male and denying him support. Labour leaders had to choose their words carefully if they were to get his suffering recognized.

This article compares two highly successful treatises written in the second half of the fifteenth century: Tomaso Garzoni's La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo [The Universal Workplace of All the Professions in the World], and Leonardo Fioravanti's Dello specchio di scientia universale [On the Mirror of Universal Knowledge]. It examines how each of these books presented and considered commercial activities such as the manufacture and trading of silk and wool – which were of great importance to the Italian economy of the day – and other more humble occupations. This is an interesting comparison since Garzoni and Fioravanti personified two very different spirits of the Renaissance. The former was a learned man, anxious to construct a moralistic-literary monument, complete in every detail, while the latter was a great observer, intent on making full use of every kind of knowledge, even that which seemed lowly and contemptible.

The image of the crowd as an irrational, spontaneous multitude is commonly related to the works of a first generation of social psychologists writing in the early twentieth century, yet its basic features can be found in conceptual innovations developed as early as the Enlightenment. This article focuses on a particular protest in eighteenth-century Spain in order to reflect on the transformation in the meaning of essential terms which occurred in the semantic field of disorder. The so-called motín de Esquilache of 1766 forced the authorities to renew their discourse in order to deprive the movement of legitimacy, fostering semantic innovation. The redefinition of riot implied a process of conceptualization that not only stressed the protagonism of the disenfranchized but also altered a long-established tradition that linked riots to conspiracies and devised a new anthropology depicting the populace as a subject unable to produce ideas on its own.