The living standards of the working classes during industrialization continue to be the subject of debate in European historiography. However, other factors closely related to the institutional setting, such as the role played by social economy and the institutions for collective action, are seldom considered. This study focuses on these factors, and attempts to quantify the social impact of consumer cooperatives. We argue that these institutions substantially improved the lot of the working classes from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, helping them to increase their incomes, and access food and services, such as education and social services, which the state did not provide in sufficient measure. To demonstrate this point, we analyse thirty-five consumer cooperatives in Barcelona, an industrial centre in which these organizations were more popular than anywhere else in Spain. Our main conclusion is that consumer cooperatives increased the well-being of their members, helping them to meet their substantial calorific needs, although their diets were unbalanced and low-cost; members improved their income between five and ten per cent, by simply shopping at the institution, and gained access to basic welfare services.

This article examines whether and how the figure of Adolf Hitler in particular, and National Socialism more generally, operate as moral exemplars in today’s Germany. In conversation with similar studies about Mosely in England, Franco in Spain, and Mussolini in Italy, it seeks to advance our comparative understanding of neofascism in Europe and beyond. In Germany, legal and discursive constraints limit what can be said about the Third Reich period, while even far-right nationalists often condemn Hitler, for either the Holocaust or his military failure. Here I revise the concept of moral exemplarity as elaborated by Caroline Humphry to argue that Hitler and National Socialism do nevertheless work as contemporary exemplars, in at least three fashions: negativity, substitution, and extension. First, they stand as the most extreme markers of negative exemplarity for broad publics that understand them as illustrations of absolute moral depravity. Second, while Hitler himself is widely unpopular, Führer-substitutes such as Rudolf Hess provide alternative figures that German nationalists admire and seek to emulate. Finally, by extension to the realm of the ordinary, National Socialism introduces a cast of exemplars in the figures of loving grandfathers or anonymous fallen soldiers. The moral values for which they stand, I show, appear to be particularly significant for young nationalists. An extended, more open-ended notion of exemplarity, I conclude, can offer important insights about the lingering afterlife of fascist figures in the moral life of European nationalists today.

Based on long-term ethnographic research on contemporary exhumations of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), as well as analysis of the exhumation of Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen, this paper looks at the ways in which the dictator’s moral exemplarity has evolved over time since his military victory in 1939. During the early years of his dictatorship, Franco’s propaganda machine built the legend of a historical character touched by divine providence who sacrificed himself to save Spain from communism. His moral charisma was enriched by associating his historical mission with a constellation of moral exemplars drawn from medieval and imperial Spain. After his death, his moral exemplarity dwindled as democratic Spain embraced a political discourse of national reconciliation. Yet, since 2000, a new negative exemplarity of Franco as a war criminal has come into sharp focus, in connection with the exhumation of the mass graves of tens of thousands of Republican civilians executed by his army and paramilitary. In recent years, Franco has reemerged as a fascist exemplar alongside a rise of the extreme right. To understand the revival of his fascist exemplarity, I focus on two processes: the rise of the political party Vox, which claims undisguised admiration for Franco’s legacy (a process I call “neo-exemplarity”), and the dismantling in October 2019 of Franco’s honorable burial and the debate over the treatment that his mortal remains deserve (a process I call “necro-exemplarity”).

This paper examines the ways in which “ordinariness” can come to be exemplified as a virtue. It does so by comparing the status of ordinariness in historical and present-day Predappio, the town in which Mussolini was born and is buried. It describes the ways in which Predappio was mobilized by the Fascist regime as an exemplar of an ordinary Italian town, rendered extraordinary by its wholesale reconstruction as a jewel in the crown of Fascist urban planning. In similar fashion, Mussolini’s ordinary rural upbringing was mobilized in the service of propagandizing his extraordinary and exemplary leadership. In contemporary Predappio, by contrast, ordinariness is what locals reach for to contest understandings of their home as irrevocably associated with the extraordinary Fascist heritage they have inherited. One of the ways in which they do so is to celebrate a local exemplar of this ordinariness, Giuseppe Ferlini, the town’s first postwar mayor. In contrast to Mussolini, Ferlini’s ordinariness is not a backdrop to future greatness, but exactly the quality for which he is celebrated. I assert that these cases demonstrate the need for vigilance in analytic usage of the category of “the ordinary,” which sometimes tacitly assumes the existence of “the ordinary” as a scale in itself, independent of human action. I argue instead that “the ordinary” may be the object of ethical labor, rather than its site, and that exemplification may be a form of such labor, in both our accounts and the lives of those we study.

This essay discusses several books, ancient and recent, on plagues to ask the question: Can we face death without turning away from it through historical narration? Can we write about death, which only afflicts individuals, without stripping death of its individuality? After briefly addressing these questions, I discuss five books, one from the ancient period (Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War), one from the late medieval period (Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron), one from the early modern period (Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year), and two from the modern period (Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, and Frank Snowden’s Epidemics and Society). These books not only come from different eras but also reflect different written responses to death—ancient history, story/fable, reportage, futuristic novel, and contemporary history. The essay concludes by considering a counterargument to its focus on death, an argument developed by Baruch Spinoza which claims that humans should think nothing less than of death.

Police verification of domestic servants has become standard practice in many cities in contemporary India. However, the regularization of work, which brings domestic servants under protective labour laws, is still a work in progress. Examining a long timespan, this article shows how policing of the servant, through practices of identification and verification, came to be institutionalized. It looks at the history of registration within the larger mechanism of regulation that emerged for domestic servants in the late eighteenth century. However, the establishment of control over servants was not linear in its subsequent development; registration as a tool of control took on different meanings within the changing ecosystem of legal provisions. In the late eighteenth century, it was discussed as being directly embedded in the logic of master–servant regulation, a template that was borrowed from English law. In the late nineteenth century, it was increasingly seen as a proxy for formal means of regulation, although this viewpoint was not universally accepted. Charting this history of changing structures of inclusion and exclusion within the law, the article argues that overt policing of servants is a manifestation of the colonial legacy, in which the identity of the servant is fused with potential criminality.

The gamekeeper was an important but controversial presence in the late Victorian and Edwardian countryside. Admired by some for his skills in woodcraft and deep understanding of nature, for others the keeper was much less benign: a destroyer of wildlife; a barrier against wider public access to the land; and the upholder of fiercely contested laws. At a time when debates about the land and its present and future use formed a major part of contemporary political discourse, and when an urbanising society was investing ever more meaning in its idea of the rural, consideration of the keeper takes us beyond the study of field sports towards broader histories of the English countryside and its attendant ruralist culture. Situating the keeper in a dual setting of material production and recreational service provision, the following examines both what he did and was expected to do, and the ways in which this was represented. Not only were keepers active agents in their own representation, eager to project themselves as skilled professionals, they might also elicit support from unusual quarters. As will be seen, keeper representation was as varied as his many roles.

This article analyses the creation of unions and the evolution of protests (demonstrations, tractor blockades) instigated by farmers in the province of Burgos, in the interior of northern Spain, during the period following the death of the dictator Francisco Franco known as the Transition (1975–80). The study uses press articles, documentation from the Civil Government and information gathered through personal interviews. The aim of the article is to show that the farmers of the interior of northern Spain – an electorally conservative region – also participated in the citizens’ protests that were the driving force behind the democratisation process in the country during the 1970s.

This article attempts to answer the question about the position of women in Polish peasant families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries based on the memoirs of rural women. Contrary to the claim that taking control over the household budget gave women more power on the farm, memoirs of peasant women show that it was rather an additional duty and responsibility. This problem mainly affected low-income families, where income from typically male activities was insufficient, so homemakers supported the family from the female part of the farm: gardening and dairy production. Thus, despite the decisive importance of women’s earnings for the household budget, their power in the family had only a symbolic dimension.

E-commerce in China has developed and expanded rapidly in recent years. Conflicts and confrontations have accumulated in parallel. Using Taobao e-marketplace – one pillar platform of the Alibaba group – as its case, this article aims to analyse the developmental logic and profit-seeking strategies of e-commerce capitalism in China and beyond. It also investigates how small online merchants responded to and resisted the particular rent-extractive and exclusive mechanisms designed by the platform. I attempt to identify the emerging responses from below to both the creative and destructive sides of this newest capitalist development in China. I argue that, despite the militancy and innovation involved in these movements, and despite the use of Maoist rhetoric borrowed from the past, the contentious collective actions (online or offline) organized by these small online merchants lack the solidarity, the shared identity and consciousness, and the powerful ideological language observed among the “traditional” working class in industrial capitalism, and hence they are more improvised, transient, and easily defeated.