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.

This article traces the genealogy of a Jewish-owned botánica located in East Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. Botánicas are understood to manifest an intricate, transatlantic religious, spiritual, and healing world, offering herbal products, sacramental goods, ritual implements, and counseling to Italian, Latinx, Black, and Caribbean practitioners of folk Catholicism, herbalism, hoodoo, Vodou, Santería, Espiritismo, Curanderismo, Òrìṣà worship and other ethnomedical and spiritual systems. Yet this botánica was owned by an Eastern Mediterranean Jew from the Ottoman/Italian island of Rhodes, and it integrated Sephardic and Mediterranean histories and sources of inspiration. Extraordinarily, this history stands for a greater whole. Jews were pioneering spiritual merchants in the United States. Restoring their history requires journeying globally, beginning with Ottomans’ fidelity to herbalism; tracing émigré Sephardic Jews’ uneven dialogue with Black African men and women in colonial Central and Southern Africa; and delving into the commercial, spiritual, and racial interplay furthered by Jewish-owned pharmacies and botánicas in New York City, Baltimore, Atlanta, Memphis, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles and by Jewish spiritual merchants and their Caribbean, Latinx, and Black patrons. All this introduces an unexpected Jewish and Mediterranean history to the botánica, and an unexpectedly multifarious spiritual, mercantile, and racial dimension to Jewish history.

Drawing on the Romanian case, this article argues against looking at state socialist regimes through the lens of exceptionalism, and assesses the merits of analysing them from the perspective of primitive accumulation. Integrating socialist projects into a longer history of modernization, capital formation, and struggles over labour and land allows me to develop a four-step argument about primitive socialist accumulation in Romania. First, I argue that, in Romania, peasant dispossession had underpinned capital formation for roughly 150 years before the communist takeover. Second, these mechanisms of primitive accumulation constituted crucial matrices for class formation that were irreducible to ideal-typical processes of proletarianization. Third, the articulation between peasant dispossession and strategies of keeping labour cheap was state-led, mandated, or protected, and stood at the core of all modernization projects for the whole period under discussion. And fourth, seen through these lenses, the communist collectivization and nationalization in the 1950s appears as one instance, among others, in a longue-durée history of primitive accumulation in the region.

This paper investigates the development of social Darwinism in China from the mid-1890s to 1930 vis-à-vis its ties with social Darwinism in the West, employing a comparative analysis of Spencer, Huxley, and Yan Fu. A form of evolutionism that envisioned a cosmological order based upon strength was transformed into a component of power politics in Republican China, despite unsuccessful political endeavors that illustrated both the triumphs and social malfunctions of evolutionary ideas. From the late 1910s, a new variety of social Darwinism arose alongside the scientific one, reflecting the influence of Kropotkin and de Vries, as Chinese thinkers incorporated non-Anglophone texts. The theories that emerged made sense of the changing Chinese adaptations of evolutionary thinking by contextualizing and modifying them within the intellectual and political dynamics inside China and also in China’s evolving relationship with capitalism and imperialism.

We analyse the evolution of birth-baptism intervals between 1830 and 1949 among children born into 815 Spanish families and relate the changes observed to developments in childhood mortality. Our results show that birth-baptism intervals in our study area increased rapidly after 1890, three decades after childhood mortality began to decline and a decade before fertility began to fall. We confirm that the families increasing the intervals between their children's births and baptisms after 1890 were those whose previous children had high rates of survival. We conclude that, in the last years of the nineteenth century, families were aware of the decline in child mortality and adjusted their behaviour in response.

Common land rights are nowadays identified as a pivotal action terrain for building sustainable development and climate resilience. This often leads to an idealisation of these common land systems and the people that manage them. This article presents a research strategy that elaborates on the notion of frontiers to unpack peasant resilience and common land rights as the outcome of a long history of peasant adaptation, resistance and self-reinvention within a globalising world. It presents an empirical comparative analysis of common land rights in European and Andean peasant communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This paper aims to show the relevance that institutions governing common-pool resources (CPRs) play in peasant resilience. It outlines nine variables for resilience taken from socio-economic and ecological anthropological theories focusing on subsistence and minimax strategies and used for the comparative historical analysis of African case studies. These include drylands (Morocco, Ghana), semi-arid areas (Sierra Leone, Malawi, Tanzania) and wetlands (Cameroon, Kenya, Zambia). The variables could be found under pre-colonial common property but were no longer operating during colonial and postcolonial institutional change from common to state property and privatisation via land grabbing, leading to commons and resilience grabbing.

The introduction of rewards for the conviction of serious criminals fundamentally transformed English criminal justice. The prospect of rewards totalling up to £140 encouraged additional prosecutions, more full (as opposed to partial) guilty verdicts, and more death sentences. In the process, in a series of largely unintended consequences, two fundamental pillars of early-modern justice were undermined: reliance on the public to prosecute, and the death penalty to deter crime. Policing agents began to play a much more important role in apprehending criminals, while the high level of executions contributed to growing doubts about the efficacy of capital punishment.

In this article we analyse the root causes of the high level of resilience of one particular peasant society: the Campine area. While peasant societies have often been deemed one of the most vulnerable societies in the face of crises and disasters, because of their lack of capital, technology and power, we show that peasant communities possessed some important weapons of the weak. Thanks to strong property rights, collective action, a diverse economic portfolio and inclusive poor relief institutions the Campine peasants were able to weather both the late medieval crises, harvest failures as well as the threat of sand drifts between the fourteenth and nineteenth century.