Most of the contributions to this volume have been drawn, in revised form, from papers originally presented at an international colloquium in comparative labor history held in Paris in June 1982, under the sponsorship of the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, and from the discussions to which these contributions gave rise. The major object of the participants in this colloquium was to discuss, in a comparative perspective, the patterns of continuity and change in industrial labor conflicts in major industrialized countries before, during, and in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, and to explore the similarities and differences in these patterns of labor unrest and their underlying dynamics, with particular emphasis on the application for this purpose of quantitative methods. The participants included specialists in labor history and in the application of quantitative techniques to the analysis of industrial labor conflicts from seven countries: Austria, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the United States, and the USSR. (Their involvement was supported, in most cases, by research institutions and learned societies of their countries of origin.)

At the conclusion of this colloquium, most of the participants expressed the desire to pursue jointly certain of the major substantive and analytic problems addressed in its proceedings, and in particular to explore further the possibilities of analyzing them in a comparative perspective through the application of quantitative methods. An international working group was created for this purpose, and assigned the task of designing and launching a cooperative project to further these objectives.