On 15 June 1999 our colleague and friend Leo van Rossum died of the consequences of a heart attack. Leo had – often unbeknownst to readers – played a major role in the development of the International Review of Social History. As a member of the Editorial Board for over three decades (from 1964 to 1995), he enhanced the journal's quality immeasurably through his stimulating suggestions and meticulous critiques of texts.

As a staff member of Amsterdam's International Institute of Social History (which issues the Review), Leo van Rossum ran the east-European activities for many years. He collected archives, arranged scholarly publications and advised countless researchers who approached him. His impressive command of languages (in addition to Dutch, French, German, English, and Spanish, he knew Russian, Polish, Serbo-Croat, Czech, Romanian, and Bulgarian), his vast knowledge of east-European social history, and his considerable charm repeatedly left a deep impression.

The rescue of east-European archives may have been Leo's greatest achievement. Over time he preserved many documents that might otherwise have been lost, especially of left-wing opposition movements and persons. After the changes of 1989–1990 Leo was deeply involved in the fate of archives in danger of being neglected.

International migration has flowed and ebbed in two long waves over the last two hundred years. The major determinants of international migration have been the economy and the state. The economic forces impinging on migration are demography, technology, the level of wages, and geographical proximity, transportation, and communications. The state is the confluence of social and political forces within countries which define, encourage or curtail, and regulate movement across borders. The lesson of the nineteenth-century migration system is that states created it or allowed it to happen. They also always had the power to end it, and they eventually did. The huge break in the history of migration which accompanied the era of the world wars points to the decisive power of the state to control migration and, by extension, the direction of economic development itself. The present article reviews the major phases of the history of modern migration in order to put the present crossroads in perspective.

This article examines the use of information by British trade unions to react to occupational change. Using a case study of the response to welding by the Boilermakers' Society, it looks at the barriers that prevented the use of information. It then examines the rise of trade union research departments. This leads to an outline of a framework for looking at the ways in which trade unions used information, based on their attitude towards their environment. The article suggests that an “information perspective” is a useful supplement to existing ways of examining trade union history which may shed new light on their development.

This paper explores the relationship between social mobility and class formation in a working-class industrial suburb. By establishing the degree of class closure in three periods we can identify the relationship between the country's political history, dominated by the rise of a left-wing Labour Party, and the changing levels of closure. Labour established itself during a period of low mobility then stalled when mobility increased sharply in the 1920s. Comparison with the mobility rates for cities in other countries allows further analysis of the relationship between social structure and political behaviour. Our evidence indicates that voters were not unconscious of the shifting patterns of class rigidity.

Rural–urban migration, which started long before Independence, has accelerated during the last half century. Only a small minority of that army of migrants has found work in the formal sector of the economy, however. The greater part of the urban population, both long-established and newcomers, are excluded from such employment. How, then, has this gradually increasing mass of people managed to earn a living? The answer is with work of very diverse character which provides very little stability taken over the year, even if continuous and full-time. The categorization of informal-sector employment is largely determined by the image evoked by Hart on launching the concept. Hart's description stressed the colourful cavalcade of petty trades and crafts that can be encountered while walking the streets of Third-World cities, including those of India: hawkers, rag-and-bone men, shoe cleaners, tinkers, tailors, market vendors, bearers and porters, drink sellers, barbers, refuse collectors, beggars, whores and pimps, pickpockets and other small-time crooks. In the 1970s and 1980s in particular, registration of this repertoire of work expanded enormously. A noticeable factor is that publications on the subject did not originate among conventional researchers into labour, who were interested mainly in formal-sector employment. The contents of leading professional journals, such as The Indian Journal of Industrial Relations and The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, show that, for the time being, that one-sided interest did not change.