This paper examines how class conflict affected US imperial expansion between 1898 and 1906. It focuses on West-Coast-based white merchant sailors and relies on union publications, legislative records, and congressional testimony to reveal how domestic class conflict shaped the boundaries, both internally and externally, of the emerging US empire. The struggle of the sailors’ unions over these imperial boundaries illustrates the real-life consequences they held for working people. These were not just abstractions. These lines often determined the type of labor systems under which workers would toil. Specifically, this article centers on the American Federation of Labor's successful effort to apply the Chinese Exclusion Act to the United States’ empire on the Pacific in 1902 as well as the Sailor's Union of the Pacific's unsuccessful attempt to apply exclusion to US-flagged merchant vessels. With that in mind, I argue that the line between domestic and foreign or nation and empire was a contested space of racially inflected class conflict. For white working people, the most pertinent question in the aftermath of the Spanish American War was not, does the constitution follow the flag? But rather, does exclusion follow the flag?

Widespread belief in economic liberalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, combined with the development of safer, faster, and cheaper transportation, paved the way for huge migration to occur. Between 1850 and 1914, 55 million people departed Europe, with the vast majority heading to the Americas during what Hatton and Williamson term “the age of mass migration”. According to McKeown, something similar in scale and duration took place at approximately the same time – albeit enduring for slightly longer – involving Indians and southern Chinese moving to Southeast Asia and people from north-eastern Asia and Russia to North Asia. However, “the booming of the guns of August 1914 brought to a sudden close the era during which foreigners were relatively free to traverse borders”, according to John Torpey. States in Europe and North America, in particular, reintroduced passport controls with vigour during World War I and instead of lifting these bellicose measures at the end of the conflict, they generally reinforced them. The United States led the way in introducing such restrictions. Following on from the imposition of the 1917 Literacy Act came the 1921 and 1924 US Immigration Acts, which limited arrivals by introducing quotas for countries. The development in much of Europe of the modern welfare state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century simultaneously gave rise to more restrictive immigration policies in Europe, thereby leading to an even greater distinction between citizens and non-citizens.

Washerwomen in the Georgian period belonged, for the most part, to the small army of part-time and casual workers who found employment when and where they could. As handlers of one of the most coveted (as well as necessary) commodities of the period they were a focus of interest to a wide range of society and were growing in number as many householders came to rely less on resident domestic servants. Washerwomen were prime players in the ‘economy of makeshifts’, relying on a miscellany of supplementary activities to ‘get by’ and in which they showed both enterprise and agency.

Over the last decades social scientists have alleged that violence has decreased in Europe since late medieval times. They consider homicide rates a valid indicator for this claim. Thorough source criticism, however, raises serious doubts about the decline thesis having any substantial empirical foundation. Forms and contents of the sources are immensely heterogeneous and a closer look at the alleged richness of the data uncovers remarkable gaps. Furthermore, medieval and early modern population estimates are highly unreliable. Thus, we argue that historical research on violence should return to focus on specific historical constellations, accept the need for painstaking source criticism and pay careful attention to the contexts of violence.

This article charts the long-term development of seigneurial governance within the principality of Guelders in the Low Countries. Proceeding from four quantitative cross-sections (c. 1325, 1475, 1540, 1570) of seigneurial lordships, the conclusion is that seigneurial governance remained stable in late medieval Guelders. The central argument is that this persistence of seigneurial governance was an effect of active collaboration between princely administrations, lords, and local communities. Together, the princely government and seigneuries of Guelders formed an integrated, yet polycentric, state. The article thereby challenges the narrative of progressive state centralisation that predominates in the historiography of pre-modern state formation.

In this article, I compare women's work opportunities in Bilbao, in northern Castile, and Antwerp, in the Low Countries, from 1400 to 1560. I argue that the different organisation of work in the two towns had a great influence on women's economic opportunities. Whereas women in Antwerp often worked alongside other members of their household because of the town's dominant craft guilds, Bilbao's informal trades were open to women on their own, independent of their husband or another male relative. As a result, women in Bilbao are more visible in the sources and were able to exert more influence on the town council.

Residential migration is one of the most problematic demographic variables. In Britain there are no sources that routinely record all moves, and the motives behind relocation are rarely recorded. In this paper I argue that the use of life histories can add important depth and clarity to the study of residential moves. The paper focuses on two themes: the ways in which internal and international migration may be linked together over the life course, and the complex mix of reasons why a move may take place. Used sensitively, life histories and life writing can enhance the study of migration history.