This introduction presents the main topics and analytical concerns of the contributions to this Special Issue about ethnicity and migration in coalfield history in a global perspective. From the nineteenth century the development of industrial and transport technologies required the supply of coal-based energy in every part of the world. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century globalization, including colonialism, would not have been possible without coal. Coalmining operations were launched in all world regions, and to enable exploitation mine operators had to find, mobilize, and direct workers to the mining sites. This quest for labour triggered a series of migration processes (both from nearby and far away) and resulted in a broad array of labour relations (both free and unfree). This introduction points to the variety of constellations analysed in the different contributions to this Special Issue. These cover cases from Africa (Nigeria, Zimbabwe), Asia (China, Japan), the Americas (USA, Brazil), Turkey, the Soviet Union, and western Europe (France, Germany), and a broad range of topics, from segregation, forced labour, and subcontracting to labour struggles, discrimination, ethnic paternalism, and sport.

Sport, and football in particular, is described in socio-political discourse as an effective way to integrate immigrants. This thesis will be tested by means of a case study examining Polish migration to the mining areas of the Ruhr from the 1870s. It will be shown that, up until World War I, the sport participated in by Polish miners served, in contrast, as a means of nationalization, ethnicizing, and as an aid to furthering Polish ethnic identity. Only during the Weimar Republic were football clubs in the Ruhr actually used as a vehicle for integration and assimilation for males among the Polish minority. After World War II, memories of these footballers from among the Polish minority were either repressed or reduced to folklore. Based on this historical case study, sport appears in principle to be ambivalent between its ability to form “we” groups and the building of bridges between nationalities.

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.

Colonial law as an arena for cultural contestation and hegemonic process has displaced an older view of law as a tool of imperial domination. Rich studies based on archival work in local judicial and notarial archives in Africa and the Americas, complemented by a wide range of sources from colonial and metropolitan archives, emphasize the role of indigenous peoples in shaping legal institutions, practices, bodies of law, and ideas about justice. We now understand that colonial legal culture was forged in diverse configurations of conflict and alliance that played out in remote village tribunals and metropolitan courts of appeal. However, the tyranny of the archives persists in that the written evidence favors—in descending order—the perspective of European legal thinkers and reformers, the functionaries of intermediate institutions like the magistrates and lawyers who operated in district courts, and litigants who included European settlers and native people. In colonial courts, the voices of native litigants and witnesses tend to be highly mediated through translation and transcription.

Football is often thought to have helped erase differences between natives and migrants in mining communities and to have helped in building a homogeneous class identity. Others have described this idea as a myth. Under closer scrutiny, however, relations between migrants and football are more complex than commonly thought. This article will elaborate on these complex relations by analysing the case of the coalfield in the French region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais during the twentieth century. Migrant workers were employed there from an early date: first, from the 1920s, Poles; later on other migrants, especially of Moroccan and Algerian descent. Migrants played an important role in the development of football in this region. This article looks at the influence of football on relations between migrants and other miners. More generally, it aims to show how sport was incorporated into the industrial mining world, both in employers’ policies and in the mining community.

This paper addresses the rising suicide rate in Greece since the economic crisis began in 2008. By 2011, Greek and international media were reporting the Greek suicide rate as the fastest rising in Europe; dozens of “spectacular” public suicides were taken as symptoms of an “epidemic.” In this paper, I explore different accounts of this “epidemic”: statistical studies and press reports on suicide since the crisis; notes written by people who committed or attempted suicide in public during the crisis; and narratives of suicidality from psychiatric patients before the crisis, in dialogue with local psychiatric epidemiologies. These accounts summon three axes of comparison around suicide in Greece: historical difference, defined by the economic crisis and the time before; locale, contrasting the public sphere of media coverage and consumption with a particular region distinguished by its “suicidogenic” features; and evidence, moving from the public discourse on suicide to clinical ethnographic research that I conducted in northeastern Greece a decade ago. I show that each way of accounting for suicide challenges the epistemologies and evidence at work in the others; the tensions and the interactions among them are signs of indeterminacy in suicide itself, taken as an object of inquiry. In the public discourse on the Greek crisis, the many meanings of suicide have been condensed and fixed as a politics of protest. Yet, I argue, comparison among epistemologies of suicide and recognition of its indeterminacy generate a space for thinking about suicide beyond the publicity of the crisis.

Anthropology, the relativizing countercurrent to Enlightenment notions of civilization and progress, has long challenged notions of backwardness. By contrast, Marxist-Leninist regimes had no doubts about the world-historical backwardness of the largely agrarian societies in which they came to power, which they sought to transform through rapid industrialization. According to some indicators, this socialist civilizing mission was rather successful. Yet memories are mixed, and complicated by the reappearance of typical features of backwardness in the postsocialist era. This article explores changing political economies and the spatiotemporal imaginaries of elites and villagers in Hungary. Historical and theoretical insight is drawn from Ferenc Erdei (1910–1971), a left-leaning populist whose analysis of rural Hungary has more general relevance. Case materials are presented from a region of the Great Plain that in the longue durée exemplifies the “development of underdevelopment” on the margins of Western capitalism. Civilizational transformations were instigated from the east in the socialist decades, but their vehicle was a collectivist ideology that remained alien. The politics and economics of time now render villagers susceptible to populist imaginaries entirely different from those of Erdei.

This essay explores Greek responses to the debt crisis, particularly middle-class Greeks and their current experiences of Greece's putative subordination to Germany in particular, and IMF and EU monitoring generally. I focus on the sphere of materiality and embodiment, while also exploring the role of desire and pleasure in Greeks’ responses to their growing sense of subordination. Graffiti, popular protests, hip-hop expressive culture, and sexual joking are lenses through which I examine these themes. I also scrutinize my own positionality as a way of understanding the bitterness and ambiguity entailed in Greek reactions to the crisis. The essay illuminates how Greeks experience subjugation and respond to it through explosive resort to historical comparisons, sexual metaphors, and ill-mannered jokes.

Foucauldian analyses and studies in the sociology of knowledge have provided vibrant accounts of the effects and lives of knowledge practices, yet they have been less attuned to their unexpected consequences upon reception in disparate settings. This article examines the employment of survey methodology as a means to enact modernization theory in non-Western areas during the early phases of the Cold War. An examination of the original questionnaires employed in sociologist Daniel Lerner's seminal text, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, reveals an alignment between the ideal subject of modernization theory and the expectations placed upon the respondent. These expectations included familiarity with the conditions of the survey setting, impersonal relationships, the promise of anonymity, and the capacity for having and voicing opinions regarding otherwise improbable situations. Lerner's work and the studies it spawned did not merely measure and describe the attitudes of peasants, students, and administrators; they were intended to be performative: the interviews were designed to occasion the forms of subjectivity and interpersonal relations articulated and idealized by modernization theory. However, the researchers’ interest in the very activity of survey-taking as a modernizing edifice was undercut by skeptical respondents, disorderly interviewer behavior, and the relentless remaking of coding procedures. In this reading, the questionnaires and their specific stipulations surface as artifacts of knowledge practices that nonetheless overflow the intentions of their coders, sponsors, and creators.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the history of the Palestine mandate and its power relations were not determined solely by a series of legal measures, beginning with the 1917 Balfour Declaration and ending with the UNGA partition resolution of 1947. Rather, the emergence of modern Palestine was a process significantly guided by global technocapitalism. Palestine was constituted on the basis of a successful Zionist pitch for the area as an economically viable territory—as an area of production and consumption and crucially also as an entity locatable in the global circulation of capital and commodities. A central vehicle for this technocapitalist vision in Palestine—proposed by the Zionists, and enthusiastically adopted by the British—was a hydroelectrical megasystem in the Jordan Valley. Significant portions of the mandate's borders were mapped onto the station's technical blueprint, and conceiving of and building the powerhouse created not just borders, but also “Palestine,” a bounded entity with a distinct political and economic character. While the electrification, like Zionism in general, was justified in a language of egalitarian universalism, the power system and the “free-market” capitalist system it helped create in Palestine generated familiar kinds of political and economic inequality. Specifically, it conjured a political-economic order based on a Jewish national scale in which the Arabs were expected to supply the menial labor power in return for the economic development that was to lift all boats.