In 1907, the Second International adopted a resolution on migration that rejected restrictions on the free movement of workers. In this article, we contend that, despite this official stance, the issue of migration was a highly controversial one for the international socialist community. We present a multi-level analysis, in which we detail the migration debate as it took place on the platforms of the Second International (roughly between 1903 and 1907) and the way in which this debate played out domestically for the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands and the Socialist Party of America – two parties that openly rooted for restrictions at the international level. We discern three ideal-typical stances on immigration – internationalism, on the one hand, and protectionist nativism and xenophobic nativism, on the other – and argue that it was the incompatibility of the internationalist and nativist positions that caused internal divisions to arise during the debates. Apart from speaking to the classic historiography on the Second International, which deals with the incompatibility of internationalism and nationalism, this article traces the influence of additional racist and culturalist ideologies on the debate and further historicizes it within the broader context of the modern international migration system that was taking shape at the time.

This article investigates the international genre of “retro” and how it is used in Hungary to re-matter the nation’s modern past, repositioning the country within a twentieth-century European history where it was never cut off by an “Iron Curtain” from the modern West. It does this by selecting for modern consumer goods and popular culture from both East and West that fit international criteria for retro. For both young and old, retro “matters” the past in a way that affirms contemporary market sensibilities, infusing it with value through assertions of market equivalence in the past and new value as commodities in the present. If Hungarian Retro works as a form of nostalgia for some, it is for an era of perceived national prestige, value, and economic sovereignty relative to the demoralized present. While distinct from right-wing nationalist politics, Hungarian Retro nonetheless shares in the project of erasing a stigmatized state socialism from national history. This article builds on scholarship on the role of the material in producing the nation in everyday life. It contributes a perspective that brings together: (a) the domestication of international commercial and popular trends; (b) the global hierarchy of prestige based on national exports and imports; and (c) the constitution of value in citizens via the qualities of consumer goods both produced and consumed.

In the early twentieth century, the Bata company became one of the largest shoe manufacturers in the world, and an emblematic icon of family capitalism. This paper presents an overview of the social welfare system developed by the firm, first in its hometown of Zlín (Moravia) and then in more than thirty company towns founded in Czechoslovakia, Europe, and other continents from the 1920s to the 1950s. It shows how the initial model provided by the city of Zlín took different forms after being exported to other settlements, and aims to identify the causes of this divergence. Following a transnational perspective, this research contributes to a better understanding of how policies, models, and practices transferred around the world by multinational companies can be reshaped according to national and local contexts.

For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality recasts American feminism as a global story and reclaims the fight for economic justice and social democracy as a majority tradition of women's politics. This rejoinder by the author of For the Many is the concluding essay in a review dossier on the book. Cobble discusses the book's origins and its contributions to global history, women's history, and political history. She engages with comments and queries from dossier reviewers, a diverse group of historians of Latin America, South Asia, Africa, and Europe. Topics include, among others, the unfinished struggle to revalue care and social reproduction, the influence of India on US feminism, Black internationalism and full-rights feminism, varieties of socialism, rethinking Cold War frameworks, and feminist perspectives on eugenics, race, and sexuality.

Dorothy Cobble's magnificent, sweeping saga of the 100 plus year struggle for “full rights feminism” introduces us to myriad activists who sought common ground in the expansion of civil, political, economic and social rights as the key for raising the standard for working women, and by extension for all of humanity. However, as Cobble notes, some full-rights activists did not measure up to the potential of this feminism. The juxtaposition of the activism of Black full-rights feminists helps expose this fault line of unexamined deep-seated racism, ethnocentrism, and stereotypical thinking that undermined the potential of full-rights feminism. Questions of economic and political democracy shaped the organizing efforts of Black full-rights feminists against disfranchisement, lynching, discrimination in housing, education and employment, and exclusion and segregation from public accommodations. In their transnational work, they supported policies and practices structured by Cold War imperatives, American racism and imperialism, and tensions between democracy and incipient autocracy in the emerging African nations. Cobble's book demonstrates the crucial ways that Black activists working together and with white allies pushed for the expansive promise of full-rights feminism, encompassing both political and economic rights and race and gender justice.

Histories of feminism in the past three decades have focused on the debate between equal rights and separate spheres, but have been less attentive to the many strands of socialist feminisms, which sought to build bridges between the women's movement and other social movements for freedom, equality and justice. Dorothy Sue Cobble addresses this gap, exploring the lives and works of social democratic women activists in relation to the equal rights versus separate rights debate. Reflecting the “global turn”, Cobble explores many transnational connections. Picking up on these two themes – socialist feminism and global networks – I focus on the South Asian case.

This introduction to the review dossier on Dorothy Sue Cobble, For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality, introduces the major themes of the work in light of Cobble's earlier interventions in gendering labor history and focus on laborite activist women here called “full rights feminists”. It asks the contributors to expand on and decenter the transnational and global influence of Cobble's feminists and their views on capitalism and democracy in light of their own research. Among questions considered are: what do we gain from attention to the ideas and activism of low-income and immigrant women in our various histories? How do questions of race/white privilege, citizenship, empire, colonialism, and imperialism complicate understandings of equality and democracy? What is revealed by considering class in women's history?

This review essay engages with Dorothy Sue Cobble's For The Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality from the perspective of European histories of socialist feminism during the Cold War. The essay suggests three themes that might lead to further discussion. These concern first of all the role of left-Catholic as well as Social Democratic women within the networks that Cobble describes in For the Many; second, the influence of nationalist or other exclusionary discourses on debates about the rights of immigrant workers, and third, the role of social democratic actors in shaping debates about working women's rights in other international organizations - particularly regional organizations such as the EEC/EU. The essay concludes that For the Many is a major contribution to our understanding of transatlantic socialist feminisms in the Cold War world.

Cobble's study of American social democratic feminism is a fascinating narrative of the lives of women who crossed the boundaries of class, race and nation-states to build a better world. Her chronological account of the careers and activism of these women is not only a major contribution to the history of feminism but also a significant addition to the study of social democracy worldwide.

In 2018, the International Labour Organization published a study about the critical role of paid and unpaid care work for the health of society, the economy, and the planet and about the ways that care work is sustained through the super-exploitation of women, particularly migrant women and racially and ethnically marginalized women. Dorothy Sue Cobble's sweeping, carefully researched, and beautifully written study of full-rights feminists gives us a much-needed history of how the ILO came to attend to questions of care work and social reproduction and how hard-fought this recognition has been.

Tracing developments in British town and country planning during the 1960s and 1970s, this article describes the sudden upsurge of landscape evaluation method-development among landscape architects and planners, and the disputes that made such efforts come to an end in the late 1970s. In this burst of activity, here referred to as the UK landscape evaluation movement, we can observe competing definitions of visual amenity and landscape quality take form. It is described how practitioners invented or adopted numerical measurement and preference methods as means to gain a supposedly unbiased understanding of how different landscape areas are valued by communities. Struggling to make themselves heard in a planning sector that was dominated by more powerful stakeholders and quantitative approaches (for example, cost-benefit analysis), in the landscape evaluation movement we can also witness how pioneering practitioners adopt advanced statistical techniques and computer mapping to communicate qualitative values of landscape more effectively to each other, communities and decision-makers. These were deliberate attempts by the practitioners to occupy a more active and influential role in landscape and country planning during the period. As this article shows, their success in this regard was limited due to the lack of general agreement with respect to the reliability, validity and generalisability of both assessment methods and produced findings.

Loudon’s 1825 Encyclopedia of Agriculture set out why and how ‘comfortable’ family cottages should be built for the farm labouring workforce. Over the next quarter-century, published ‘prize essays’ on cottage-design appeared alongside articles advocating ‘high farming’. Low labourer wages and insecure farm tenancies handicapped investment in both, though a parliamentary inquiry showed improvement projects could enhance labourer employment. The 1834 ‘new’ Poor Law – an ‘administrative’ law – restricted ‘poor relief’, but left many ‘settlement’ issues to continue as perceived obstacles to building cottages (the occupants might become a burden on the poor rates). This paper illustrates ideal contemporary cottage designs – relative to contrasting exposures of poor people’s home lives. Landowners, patchily, promoted some cottage-building, but labouring families mostly remained poorly housed. Along with recent scholarship on families’ work, income, possessions (often very few) and survival strategies, this work augments ideas of real housing conditions in rural areas.