This issue, and the supplement published simultaneously, conclude the fiftieth volume of the International Review of Social History. In 1956 when the first issue appeared, A.J.C. Rüter, director of the International Institute of Social History (IISH) at the time, provided three reasons for launching the journal. He observed that the “rather meagre” interest in social history in the current journals (including the French Annales) was “a fact readily explained by the space available on the one hand and the supply of manuscripts on the other”. He believed, moreover, that there was a demand for an international medium, where social historians from different countries and continents could exchange views on mutual similarities and differences. Finally, Rüter noted that social historiography, which had slowly come to fruition under the protective aegis of economic historiography, had become emancipated and had acquired its own dynamics.

Henri Lefebvre famously seized upon the duality of the modern city: how for some it is a space of play and liberation, and for others a centre for power and repression. This article explores this duality through an analysis of the changing historical geography of Barcelona's Raval district, an inner-city working-class community and the birthplace of Catalan industrialization. From the 1920s onwards, elite groups and social commentators defined the Raval as Barcelona's “Chinatown”, an imagined geography that continues to influence historical representations of the area. Through a social history of the Raval, it is argued that the “Chinatown” myth served specific political ends, that it formed part of a cultural project to impose a slum myth on Barcelona's most important and most rebellious working class district. The article concludes with an analysis of how this “moral geography” culminated in far-reaching plans for the moral and physical reordering of the Raval for the benefit of urban elites.

Accounts of the founding of the International Labour Organization (ILO) usually emphasize the role of social-reformist intellectuals and politicians. Despite the indisputable role of these actors, however, the international labour movement was the actual initiator of this process. Over the course of World War I, the international labour movement proposed a comprehensive programme of protection for the working classes, which, conceived as compensation for its support of the war, was supposed to become an international agreement after the war. In 1919, politicians took up this programme in order to give social stability to the postwar order. However, the way in which the programme was instituted disappointed the high expectations of trade unions regarding the fulfilment of their demands. Instead, politicians offered them an institution that could be used, at best, to realize trade-union demands. Despite open disappointment and sharp critique, however, the revived International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) very quickly adapted itself to this mechanism. The IFTU now increasingly oriented its international activities around the lobby work of the ILO.

In 1919 a pioneering generation of scholars, social policy experts, and politicians designed an unprecedented international organizational framework for labour politics. The majority of the founding fathers of this new institution, the International Labour Organization (ILO), had made great strides in social thought and action before 1919. The core members all knew one another from earlier private professional and ideological networks, where they exchanged knowledge, experiences, and ideas on social policy. In this study, one key question is the extent to which prewar “epistemic communities”, such as the International Association for Labour Legislation (IALL), and political networks, such as the Second International, were a decisive factor in the institutionalization of international labour politics. In the postwar euphoria, the idea of a “makeable society” was an important catalyst behind the social engineering of the ILO architects. As a new discipline, international labour law became a useful instrument for putting social reforms into practice. This article also deals with how the utopian idea(l)s of the founding fathers – social justice and the right to decent work – were changed by diplomatic and political compromises made at the Paris Peace Conference. The article thus reflects the dual relationship between idealism and pragmatism.

The social history of work and workers is currently in the paradoxical position of having defined the subject of study in all its rich complexity as never before – a fact borne out by some excellent works – yet fewer and fewer social historians are working on the subject.

Beyond Imagined Communities. Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Ed. by Sara Castro-Klarén and John Charles Chasteen. Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Washington DC; Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore [etc.] 2003. 280 pp. $45.00. (Paper: $22.95.)

Boyer, Christopher Robert. Becoming Campesinos. Politics, Identity, and Agrarian Struggle in Postrevolutionary Michoacán, 1920–1935. Stanford University Press, Stanford (Cal.) 2003. xii, 320 pp. Ill. £45.95.

Forment, Carlos A. Democracy in Latin America, 1760–1900. Volume I, Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru. [Morality and Society Series.] University of Chicago Press, Chicago [etc.] 2003. xxix, 454 pp. Maps. $35.00; £24.50.

Larson, Brooke. Trials of Nation Making. Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810–1910. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2004. xiii, 299 pp. Ill. Maps. $70.00; £45.00. (Paper: $24.99; £17.99.)

Studies in the Formation of the National State in Latin America. Ed. by James Dunkerley. Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, London, 2002. 298 pp. £14.95; € 20.00; $19.95.