This article seeks to enhance our understanding of the nature of socialist internationalism, in particular by considering the place of the nation in its functioning and essence. For this purpose, the concept of inter-nationalism is used to study the particular case of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) during Spain's Second Republic. In the first section, we focus on the meeting of the executive of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) in Madrid in 1931, and the subsequent May Day celebrations in the city. In the second, we analyse the use of internationalism by the PSOE in the debates on the decentralization of the Republican state. This article will argue that the PSOE made use of internationalist events to further the internal and external consolidation of the Republic, and its own position in government. Furthermore, internationalism served to uphold the unity and unique qualities of Spanish politics and culture. These considerations enable us to point to both the political and cultural dimensions of the PSOE's identification with Spanish nationalism, and to assert both the nation's importance in socialist internationalism and its role in socialist political culture during the interwar period.

In an interview in the early 1980s, Michel Foucault predicated that, from the eighteenth century on, modern government rationality has essentially been a form of urban planning. This article challenges this argument. It discusses the formation of rural social engineering, that is, the state-led efforts to design new men and new social orders outside the cities through plans, during decolonisation in Asia. Based on the comparative study of India after Partition (1947) and British Malaya during the counter-insurgency war (1948–60), the argument is that we can understand rural social engineering particularly in the 1950s less as a consequence of colonial inheritance or international change but as the result of how decolonisation unfolded including its patterns of violence, social conflict, and migration. As such, rural social engineering constituted a central element in the postcolonial ‘art of the government of man’.

Who chooses new technology? And how? In this article, we explore the diffusion of agricultural science and technology in Galicia (Spain), and the ways in which farmers adopted innovations in the period of 1880–1940 within the Atlantic Iberian agricultural context of small farms. To answer these questions, we adopt a socio-institutional approach and also an environmental one, changes in breeding techniques and the creation of the Galician Blond cow, as well as the widespread use of threshing machines, which were two closely related innovations in the context of mixed farming agriculture. These two examples illustrate the fusion of science-based and practice-based agriculture, and how technology did not threaten community or family equilibrium; instead, it empowered processes that were already operative in affirming small-scale farming.

This article examines the entangled logics of corporal and carceral punishments of mercenary soldiers in eighteenth-century Denmark. Beginning with the story of a single man and his unfortunate trajectory through a sequence of punitive measures before his death as a prison workhouse inmate, the article looks at how punishments of soldiers communicated in multiple ways and were used to a variety of ends that were both typical and atypical within eighteenth-century society. It argues that soldiers experienced a breadth of both corporal and carceral punishments that were, in many cases, designed to limit otherness while communicating exemplarity along a fine-tuned spectrum of pain. The clearest example of this was running the gauntlet; a harrowing physical ordeal meted out by the offender's fellow soldiers. Turning to the carceral experiences often initiated by this ritual, it then examines how former mercenaries experienced convict labour differently from other occupational groups based on several factors. Their gender and occupational belonging meant they were funnelled towards specific penal institutions. Yet, their status as migrants and potential military labour meant they would often exit these institutions in specific ways. Whereas civilians often endured dishonouring punishments, ex-military convicts experienced punishments designed to inflict great pain without rendering them unfit for later military labour.

This article deals with a paradox. Evidence for the punishment of workers during the early Middle Ages is richer in the earlier period (sixth and seventh centuries), when rural workers are generally thought to have been the least oppressed; by contrast, direct discussion of the subject largely drops out of the record in the Carolingian era (eighth to tenth centuries), despite clear evidence for renewed intensification of economic exploitation by both lay and religious lordships over the same period. Whereas the punishment of slaves had once provided a richly productive metaphor for thinking through issues of moral authority and legitimate leadership, Carolingian moralists and commentators no longer took the punishment of workers as a meaningful model for other, more morally or religiously motivated practices of punishment. Despite interest in punishment in other, non-exploitative contexts, lords’ practices of punishment of their workers were no longer taken as productive of meaning, whether positive or negative. The relationship of lords with their lowest-ranking dependents no longer defined or illustrated their power in the way that it had for the earlier Roman and late antique paterfamilias. One reason for this was the increasing tension perceived between profit-seeking and the correct, justified exercise of punishment: the two were kept at arms’ length by Carolingian writers to a surprising extent.

The processes of control and collection are prominent themes throughout pharaonic history. However, the extent that the central regime attempted to administer agricultural fields to collect revenues directly from the farmer who actually worked the land is unclear during the pharaonic period (c.2686–1069). Relations between those involved in agricultural cultivation and local headships of extended families and wider kinship groups were deeply embedded within a broad range of interpersonal discourses, behaviours, and practices. Village headmen and officials at all levels of an impersonalized “state” hierarchy were themselves landholders who drew income from the land and were held responsible for collecting revenues from their fields. It is therefore necessary to define, with a focus on the imperatives of a subsistence economy, who was working the land and what the relationship was between them, the headmen, and those from within outside power structures (in the context of direct intervention against specific groups of the population). To address these points, I will focus on revenue extraction as a “state” process, how it was connected to the role of punishment, and its impact on local hierarchies (the targets of revenue extraction).

This article examines legal relations between estate owners and their servants and workers on Danish estates in the nineteenth century. From the end of the eighteenth century onwards, the traditional privileged role of Danish estate owners was changing, and their special legal status as “heads of household” over the entire population on their estates was slowly being undermined. The article investigates the relationship between estate owners and their servants and workers in legislation and court cases during these times of change. It examines the Danish servant acts from 1791 and 1854 and identifies the asymmetric order of subordination and superiority in this legislation. The core of the relationship was still a “contractual submission” that, to some extent, was private and unregulated by law, and estate owners were entitled to impose sanctions and physical punishment on their servants and workers according to their own judgement. When the Servant Law of 1854 abolished estate owners’ right to punish adult servants physically, it was a significant break from the old legal order. However, a central element in the legislation, before and after 1854, was that servants’ and workers’ disobedience towards estate owners was illegal. By analysing court cases, the article examines the borderlands of the legal definition of disobedience. The elasticity in the legal system was substantial – and frequently favoured the owners. In the legal system, the notion of disobedience served to protect the last remnants of the traditional legal order of submission and superiority.

This article traces corporal and collective punishment in relation to the labour control of slaves and other dependent persons during the Ur III period (c.2100–2000 BCE). Slaves and other dependent persons often worked in related contexts with some overlap in treatment. Persons of different statuses could be detained and forced to work. Persons of various statuses also received rations and other benefits, but the evidence suggests that the most extreme forms of corporal punishment were reserved for slaves. This article, however, contextualizes these threats of mutilation and the death penalty, demonstrating that such punishments should be considered the exception and not the norm.

What is the historical role of punishment in the management of labour? This is the central question of this Special Issue of the International Review of Social History (IRSH), “Punishing Workers, Managing Labour”. Through a close reading of the diverse range of articles included in this Special Issue and by addressing the relatively extensive but highly fragmented scholarship on the subject, this introduction argues that the key to labour management lay in the interplay of differentiated forms of punishment with distinct labour relations, rather than in the imposition of one punitive regime onto an undifferentiated workforce. In other words, the effective management of labour required the systematic differentiation of the workforce; to that end, the imposition of diversified forms of punishment did not merely reflect existing labour distinctions, but also contributed to creating them. This point leads us to address broader methodological and theoretical issues about how we can analyse such complex interactions: how we can compare the role of punishment in the management of labour across space and time, and how our findings can be used to explain short- and long-term historical changes.

This article examines the experience of minors at the intersection of guardianship, domestic servitude (free and unfree labour), and punitive violence in Charcas (Bolivia) in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The author proposes that the study of the role of punishment in the lives of working children and adolescents allows us to question how practices that occurred under the legal cloak of guardianship – in which many members of colonial society participated – were used as a hidden practice of domination that sought to reproduce servitude based on certain origins from an early age. In this context, punitive violence exercised by masters and lords would have been at the core of prevailing prejudices about ethnic and racial difference.

This article analyzes slave resistance, capital crimes, and state violence in the Mississippi Valley and the Paraíba Valley – two of the most dynamic plantation economies of the nineteenth century. The research focused on the intersection between slavery and criminal law in Brazil and the United States. The analysis of capital crimes committed by enslaved people in Natchez and Vassouras revealed changing patterns of resistance and judicial punishment through the decades. This investigation demonstrated that local experiences of violence on plantations and in courtrooms were connected to the dynamics of national politics and the world economy. Moreover, this comparative study illuminated differences between these racialized slave societies and their political systems and revealed the essence of distinct regimes of racial violence in the Americas.

This article explores blacklisting practices following the massive 1886 Southwest strike staged by the Knights of Labor (KOL) against Jay Gould's railroad empire. It focuses mostly on strike leader Martin Irons and blacklisting advocate and newspaperman J. West Goodwin. The strike, which started in Sedalia, Missouri, before spreading to other states, was a disaster for the KOL. The union declined in its aftermath chiefly because of the repression unleashed by public and private forces, including businessmen-led Law and Order Leagues. After the strike, employers blacklisted many, including strike leader and Sedalia resident Martin Irons. Irons, constantly on the move, suffered from joblessness, underemployment, arrests, and broken health before he died in central Texas in 1900. Few blacklisting advocates wanted Irons to suffer more than J. West Goodwin. The Law and Order League leader and newspaperman repeatedly wrote about what he considered Martin Irons's moral lapses and shortsightedness. By focusing on Goodwin's promotion of blacklisting and Irons's post-strike struggles, this essay helps us better appreciate the underexplored dimensions of this form of punishment.

This article studies the changes in ownership of real estate, livestock and objects belonging to agricultural workers in the region of Girona, north-eastern Catalonia, through the analysis of a sample of nearly one thousand postmortem inventories dated between 1725 and 1807. It shows that a sizable number of agricultural workers gained greater access to property rights in land and other means of production, as well as undeniable improvements in their consumption levels during that period. Regarding the latter point, comparisons with inventories of the lower classes in Great Britain and other areas of north-western Europe show that the differences are not nearly as radical as suggested by the stereotype often applied to Mediterranean areas. The article thus discusses the apriorisms that have led many researchers to reject the idea that an industrious revolution was possible in southern Europe, and vindicates the need to strengthen dialogue between historiographies.

The aim of this article is to investigate how the characteristics of the different types of human settlements explain their demographic dynamics and, therefore, which of these have been affected to a greater extent by depopulation processes. For this purpose, we analyse the evolution of the population of Aragón (north-east Spain) in the period 1900–2001, according to the different types of population settlements that exist. Our results show that access to public services has played an essential role, especially when the construction of the welfare state made the rural population feel that there was a penalty for residing in settlements with problems to access them. The main settlements, headquarters of the municipal administration, have had advantages over the secondary settlements. Finally, the scattered population was the most affected and, therefore, emigrated to a greater extent, until this form of residence practically disappeared.