The article explores the history of the Employees’ State Insurance Act of 1948 (ESI), a law enacted in the first year of Indian independence. Global trends in social policy had influenced debates on a social insurance for Indian workers since the 1920s. Transformations of Indian industry, World War II, the post-war crisis, and the emerging economic policy of the postcolonial State then created conditions for legislation. Just as the international welfare discourse, Indian contributions included, converged on social welfare as a universal citizen right, the regulatory content of the health insurance scheme devised for India diverged from this normative consensus: the ESI Act remained strictly employment-based, contributed to an emerging structure of graded entitlements, and to the hardening of boundaries between what would later be called “formal” and “informal” labour. Simultaneously, it also generated horizons of expectation that continue to inform labour struggles.

Revolutions need people. How do these people connect with each other, and how can the revolutionary message pass from one person to another? This article aims to answer these questions by examining the revolutionaries who participated in the Finnish Civil War on the rebellious Red side in 1918. We have chosen Red women from a particular district in Finland in order to analyse their connections and the networks created by membership of the labour movement, place of residence, and kinship. In order to see the layers of those connections, we utilize historical social network analysis rooted in digital history. This allows us to observe the significance and impact of regional, social networks and improves our understanding of structural factors affecting the intra-group dynamics among these revolutionary women. Our results support the claim that historical network analysis is a suitable tool for exploring interaction patterns and social structures in the past, and to gain new insights into historical phenomena.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the two convict-built European settler colonial projects in Oceania, French New Caledonia and British Australia, were geographically close yet ideologically distant. Observers in the Australian colonies regularly characterized French colonization as backward, inhumane, and uncivilized, often pointing to the penal colony in New Caledonia as evidence. Conversely, French commentators, while acknowledging that Britain's transportation of convicts to Australia had inspired their own penal colonial designs in the South Pacific, insisted that theirs was a significantly different venture, built on modern, carefully preconceived methods. Thus, both sides engaged in an active practice of denying comparability; a practice that historians, in neglecting the interconnections that existed between Australia and New Caledonia, have effectively perpetuated. This article draws attention to some of the strategies of spatial and temporal distance deployed by the Australian colonies in relation to the bagne in New Caledonia and examines the nation-building ends that these strategies served. It outlines the basic context and contours of the policy of convict transportation for the British and the French and analyses discursive attempts to emphasize the distinctions between Australia and New Caledonia. Particular focus is placed on the moral panic in Australian newspapers about the alleged dangerous proximity of New Caledonia to the east coast of Australia. I argue that this moral panic arose at a time when Britain's colonies in Australia, in the process of being granted autonomy and not yet unified as a federated nation, sought recognition as reputable settlements of morally virtuous populations. The panic simultaneously emphasized the New Caledonian penal colony's geographical closeness to and ideological distance from Australia, thereby enabling Australia's own penal history to be safely quarantined in the past.

Inequality has increased in most Western countries since the early 1980s. In a recent report, the international non-governmental organization Oxfam noted that the twenty-six richest people in the world own as much wealth as the poorest fifty per cent of the world's population. Discontent with the growing disparities in wealth and income has soared in recent years, especially in the wake of the 2007/2008 financial crisis and the “Great Recession” that followed. The Occupy movement protested against the greed of the “one per cent”, referring to the highly skewed income distribution in the US. Former US president Barack Obama proclaimed the growth of within-country economic inequality as “the defining challenge of our time”. Yet, he enacted few policies that reduced inequality during his two terms in office; the Gini coefficient in the US actually increased slightly between 2007 and 2016. His successor, whose election has often been explained as a consequence of these high levels of inequality, has slashed taxes for the wealthy, probably causing further rises in inequality in the future. In this essay, I will review two recent economic history books that examine the historical roots of within-country inequality on a global scale: Branko Milanovic's Global Inequality (2016) and Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler (2017). Formerly a lead economist at the World Bank, Milanovic is a well-known scholar working in the field of economic inequality, while Scheidel has a background as a specialist in the economic, social, and demographic history of antiquity.

In the late 1930s, three mobile penal camps were established in the French colony of Senegal in order to assemble convicts with long sentences and compel them to work outside the prison. Senegalese penal camps were thus a place both of confinement and of circulation for convicts who constantly moved out of the prison to work on the roads. This article argues that the penal camps were spaces of multiple and antagonistic forms of mobility that blurred the divide between the “inside” and the “outside” world. The mobility of penal camps played a key role in the hazardous living and working conditions that penal labourers experienced. However, convict labourers were not unresponsive and a range of protests emerged, from breakout to self-mutilation. These individual and intentional forms of mobility and immobility threw a spanner in the works of the day-to-day functioning of Senegalese penal camps and, more broadly, in the colonial project of mise en valeur.

The International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) was a radical trans-Atlantic network for the propagation of black proletarian internationalism, established by the Red International of Labour Unions in 1928. Its key mastermind was James W. Ford, an African American communist labour union activist who was in charge of the organization and its operations until the autumn of 1931. This article critically highlights Ford's ambitions as well as the early phase of the organization. Both in terms of its agenda and objective as well as in its outreach among black workers in the Black Atlantic, the ITUCNW and its main propagators stressed the “class-before-race” argument of the Comintern rather than the pan-Africanist “race-before-class” approach. This is not surprising as the ITUCNW was one of the organizations that had been established when the Comintern and the RILU had started to apply the “class-against-class” doctrine, which left no room for cooperation between communists and radical pan-Africanists.

Capturing people, sometimes by taking relatives hostage, is a common practice for purposes of conscription and law enforcement in the Wa State of Myanmar. Given the unreliability of the local census, as well as the relative weakness of civil government, and registration in a de facto state governed by an insurgent army, the personal politics of capture provides a functional equivalent to state legibility. This personal politics operates based on the reorganization of personal networks between representatives of the military state and ordinary people: first, circles of acquaintances within the military state that provide access to local knowledge, and second, relationships of patronage formed on the basis of those new acquaintanceships, as well as connections of kinship and co-residence. Conscription by capture, however, also requires anonymity; that is, the passive non-recognition of mutuality with strangers and the active refusal of mutuality with acquaintances. This article describes the historical emergence of networks of acquaintances and relationships of patronage as a combination of Maoist state-building and local institutions of war capture and adoption. It demonstrates how conscription by capture relies on relationships of acquaintances and non-recognition, as well as on patronage and the refusal of mutuality. The politics of conscription by capture are contrasted with conscription in imperial states and contemporary nation-states.

From 2007–2012, a dramatic upsurge in maritime piracy off the coast of Somalia captivated global attention. Over three hundred merchant vessels and some three thousand seafarers were held hostage with ransom amounts ranging from $200,000 to $10 million being paid to release these ships. Somali piracy operated exclusively on a kidnap-and-ransom model with crew, cargo, and ship held captive until a ransom was secured. Ransom, unlike theft or seizure, requires willing parties and systems of exchange. Ransom economies, therefore, bring together disparate actors and make visible the centrality of protection as a mode of accumulation and jurisdiction. As an analytic, this article proposes an anthropology of protection to undercut divides between legality and illegality, trade and finance, piracy and counter piracy. It argues that protection is key to apprehending processes of mobility and interruption central to global capitalism.

Among various grassroots governance practices adopted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), few have proven more adaptive and effective than the deployment of work teams—ad hoc units appointed and directed by higher-level Party and government organs and dispatched for a limited time to carry out a specific mission by means of mass mobilization. Yet, perhaps because work teams straddle the boundary between formal and informal institutions, they have received scant analytical attention. While work teams figure prominently in narrative accounts of the major campaigns of Mao's China, their origins, operations, and contemporary implications have yet to be fully explored. This article traces the roots of Chinese work teams to Russian revolutionary precedents, including plenipotentiaries, shock brigades, and 25,000ers, but argues that the CCP's adoption and enhancement of this practice involved creative adaptation over a sustained period of revolutionary and post-revolutionary experimentation. Sinicized work teams were not only a key factor in securing the victory of the Chinese Communist revolution and conducting Maoist mass campaigns such as Land Reform, Collectivization, and the Four Cleans; they continue to play an important role in the development and control of grassroots Chinese society even today. As a flexible means of spanning the center-periphery divide and combatting bureaucratic inertia, Chinese work teams, in contrast to their Soviet precursors, contribute to the resilience of the Communist party-state.

What is the relationship between schism and political identity? Existing scholarship has tended to focus on the determinants of schism while treating the ideational basis on which schisms are made as largely fixed. In this paper, I develop a new interpretation of the 1933 “neo-socialist schism” within the French Socialist Party to highlight how new political identities can be constituted in and through the process of schism itself. The 1933 schism is often understood as the convergence of a doctrinal revision called “neo-socialism” and a separate tactical challenge to the party's parliamentary practice. But a careful reading of the factional conflict within the party reveals that it was the preceding tactical debate over ministerial participation that was transformed over time into a debate over socialist doctrine. This distinction between “tactics” and “doctrine” performatively defined the limits of acceptable party discourse, and as such was both a weapon and a stake in the factional conflict. I trace the evolution of this conflict and show that, so long as the minority faction was weak, the issue of participation was widely considered “tactical” and thus safe for discussion. But when minority strength grew, the majority sought to redefine the conflict as doctrinal to delegitimate the challengers. Finally, only when a schism appeared inevitable did the challengers themselves adopt the label of “neo-socialism.” Neo-socialism was thus not a pre-constituted political heresy driving the schismatic process, but the contingent and emergent outcome of this very process.

This article investigates the production of conservation science at nodes of transnational networks of encounter through an examination of field studies conducted during the mid-1920s in North China's Shanxi province by the American forester and soil conservation expert Walter C. Lowdermilk with his student, colleague, and collaborator Ren Chengtong. Even in the politically fragmented China of the 1920s, their research on deforestation, streamflow, and erosion benefited from alliances with Shanxi's regional powerholder, Yan Xishan, and produced environmental knowledge that furthered the agenda of harnessing natural resources to strengthen the state. By paying attention to two-way interactions between Chinese and foreign actors in the construction and transmission of knowledge about nature, the article speaks to the global context of the early twentieth-century conservation movement and adds to recent scholarship that recasts China's encounter with modern science as one of active appropriation, translation, and innovation rather than passive reception.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. government paid the economics department at the University of Chicago, known for its advocacy of free markets and monetarism, to train Chilean graduate students. These students became known as the “Chicago Boys,” who implemented the first and most famous neoliberal experiment in Chile after 1973. Peruvian, Mexican, and other Latin American economics students followed a similar path and advocated a turn to neoliberal policies in their own countries. The Chicago Boys narrative has become an origin story for global neoliberalism. However, the focus on this narrative has obscured other transnational networks whose ideas possess certain superficial, but misleading, similarities with neoliberalism. I examine Chilean and Peruvian engagements with Yugoslavia's unique form of socialism, its worker self-management socialism, which was part of a worldwide discussion of anti-authoritarian socialism. I first introduce the Yugoslav socialist model that inspired those in Chile and Peru. I then examine socialist discussions in Chile and Peru that called for decentralized, democratic socialism and looked to Yugoslavia for advice. I conclude by examining the 1990s postponement of socialism in the name of a very narrow democracy and realization of neoliberalism. The Chicago Boys story assumes the easy global victory of neoliberalism and erases what was at stake in the 1988–1994 period: radically democratic socialism on a global scale.

Why does civil society in some cases become a tool of elite organization and domination of non-elites, and in others a sphere for non-elite self-organization and self-determination? To answer this question, this article compares the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century divergent developments of civil society in two regions of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Russian-ruled Congress Poland, with a focus on the Warsaw Governorate (1815–1915), and Austrian-ruled western-Galicia, concentrating on the Grand Duchy of Krakow (1846–1914). This analysis of variation in elite domination of civil society shifts the focus of civil society debates away from the market and the state and toward elites. It argues that while imperial policies of regional integration and socioeconomic changes spurred by the transition from feudalism shaped the potential paths of civil society's development in both regions, their effects on civil society's relative autonomy in each were mediated, and thus steered, by the interests and conflicts of local elites.

Two European missionary teams, one Catholic and the other Protestant, encountered each other in the Tamil country in the first decade of the eighteenth century. They acted as if and thought that their goals were irreconcilable, even if the Protestants in Tranquebar admitted that the Catholic Jesuit proselytism in the region had been efficient as “preparatio evangelicae” for the Protestant mission. Jesuits and Pietists were not only rivals; they also collaborated, uneasily and unequally, in collecting, processing, and disseminating knowledge. Missionary linguistic and medico-botanical expertise was considered an indispensable proselytizing tool, and it showcased their “scientific” achievements that were admired and envied in Europe. Both Pietists and Jesuits of this period were fighting the early Enlightenment atheists while feeding them the materials from the missions. Both missionary groups were also victims of Enlightenment historiography. Despite their theological differences, they were far closer in their practices than either the missionaries themselves or their historians, who have mostly written from the same denominational perspective, have been willing to acknowledge. In part this was because the Protestants, especially their mission's founders, relied on both texts and converts produced by their Catholic rivals.

Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an immense body of morality literature emerged in the Ottoman Empire as part of a widespread turn to piety. This article draws upon the anthropology of Islamic revival and secularism to reassess this literature's importance and propose a new view of the history of political thought in the empire. It does so through a close analysis of a fundamental concept of Ottoman political life: “naṣīḥat, ” or “advice.” Historians have used “advice books” to counter the presumption that the Ottoman Empire declined after the sixteenth century, but in doing so they have overlooked the concept's broader meaning as “morally corrective criticism.” I analyze two competing visions of naṣīḥat at the turn of the eighteenth century to reveal how the concept was deployed to politically transform the empire by reforming its subjects’ morality. One was a campaign by the chief jurist Feyżullah Efendi to educate every Muslim in the basic tenets of Islam. The other was a wildly popular “advice book” written by the poet Nābī to his son that both explicates a new moral code and declares the empire's government and institutions illegitimate. Both transformed politics by requiring that all subjects be responsible moral, and therefore political, actors. The pietistic turn, I argue, turned domestic spaces into political battlegrounds and ultimately created new, individualistic political subjectivities. This, though, requires challenging functionalist conceptions of the relationship between religion and politics and the secularist inclination among historians to relegate morality to the private sphere.