In the decades after 1550 the soldiery of the Netherlands witnessed the disappearance of the Landsknecht, who had the right to participate in decision-making and shape his daily life. He gradually became a mere “soldier”, subject to stricter discipline and control. This development accelerated after 1572 because William of Orange needed to maintain the support of the inhabitants of the Netherlands for the Revolt. Better discipline and control over his soldiers were imperative in this. Meanwhile, a progressive process of proletarianization left them largely unable to resist: they simply had nowhere else to go.

Seit einigen Jahren hat eine grössere Anzahl von Forschern der Geschichte des Bundes der Kommunisten viel Aufmerksamkeit zugewandt. Ihrer Arbeit ist eine ganze Reihe beachtlicher Spezialstudien zu verdanken.1 Das gröksste Verdienst dieser Publikationen ist es, dass in ihnen ausserordentlich reichhaltiges Material über die polizeiliche Verfolgung des Bundes zusammengetragen wurde, und zwar vor allem aus dem Deutschen Zentralarchiv II, Merseburg, dem Brandenburgischen Landeshauptarchiv, Potsdam und dem Sächsischen Landeshauptarchiv, Dresden. Wir erhielten so eine wohl erschöpfende Darstellung des Kesseltreibens gegen den Bund der Kommunisten, das auf direkten Wunsch des an Verfolgungswahn leidenden Friedrich Wilhelm IV. veranstaltet wurde und bei dem die deutschen Regierungen und Polizeibehörden einträchtig zusammen-arbeiteten. Der Verlauf des Kölner Kommunistenprozesses von 1852 wurde durch die Wiedergabe zeitgenössischer Presseberichte im Detail vergegenwärtigt. Mit den Winkelzügen, Provokationen und Fälschungen der Polizei sind wir vertraut, und auch unsere Kenntnis der Hintergründe dieser Verfolgungsaktion wurde durch die Mitteilung amtlicher Schriftstücke wesentlich erweitert.

In his famous study of attitudes to the state in nineteenth-century England, Dicey described the period 1825–70 as “the period of Benthamism or Individualism”. Evangelicalism and Benthamism, he argued later, “represented the development in widely different spheres of the same fundamental principle, namely, the principle of individualism”. Only later did laissez faire fall into eclipse: “somewhere between 1868 and 1900 … changes took place which brought into prominence the authoritative side of Benthamite liberalism.” Dicey's interpretation has come under sustained attack during the last twenty years, and historians now pay more attention to the continuing momentum of state intervention from the 1830s, and to the collectivist aspect of Bentham's teaching. Yet Dicey's critics have ignored a movement which in some ways lends more support to their case than any other mid-Victorian development, and which draws attention to hitherto unappreciated virtues and defects of Dicey's account.

During the Directory the Journal des hommes litres de tous les pays was a major spokesman for the repubhcans and its pages reflect the difficulties that the Babouvist Conspiracy created for them. Although the newspaper gave a sympathetic hearing to Babouvist ideas, it was aware that the conspiracy weakened the republican movement and favored the royalists and the moderates. One discovers in the columns of the Journal the interests, goals, and strategy of the Jacobins rather than merely the programs and rationale of the “unregenerated terrorists” of the Extreme Left. Accordingly, this newspaper is an important source on the problems and the objectives of French republicans from 1795 to 1800. After a brief description of the editorial staff and the circulation of the daily, this article will deal with its attitude towards the Babouvists and its major tendencies during the First Directory, the phase of this regime which ended with the coup d'état of 18 Fructidor Year V (September 4, 1797).

This article examines the ways in which unionization impacted upon race relations in Chicago's meatpacking industry. It focuses upon a period when a dynamic working-class movement sought to overcome barriers imposed by a hierarchical job structure and reinforced by ethnic and racial divisions. The movement drew its strength from several sources. The support of the Chicago Federation of Labor threw the resources of a powerful local movement behind the campaign and encouraged the emergence of new, inclusive, forms of organization. The existence of shop-floor organizations further augmented the movement's power. Finally, the intervention of the government, in the form of binding arbitration, led to dramatic improvements in wages and conditions which helped the movement consolidate its position. Although these gains were undone and the movement destroyed, the union campaign transformed racial and class experiences in the stockyards.

This article looks at how rural inhabitants navigated state power under a regime led by a former socialist party that negotiated its conversion to a market economy while keeping tight control on the whole society. In that regard, it addresses adjustment in a very specific context, by analysing a distinctive chronology, raising the ruling party's ability to negotiate with the international financial institutions, and considering popular reactions from a rural point of view. The regime led by the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) managed to delay measures of structural adjustment during the 1990s and 2000s while deepening structures of state control it partly inherited from the former military junta. Brutal structural adjustment plans were refused, while international financial institutions were kept away from the Ethiopian government's policy mix, by way of elaborate ideological and institutional arrangements. The EPRDF coined its own version of the “developmental state” and renewed state control of the economy while deepening its articulation to global markets. Under the EPRDF, all sectors of society and especially peasantries were closely monitored and mobilized in the name of development. But although the open expression of dissent remained rare, peasants resorted to many strategies to cope with political control and to some extent divert it. By taking agricultural policies as a case study, the article describes peasant practices and questions differences between resistance, false compliance, and diversion, underlining how blurred such labels can actually be.

The present essay studies the Iranian migrants residing on the margins of the Tsarist empire. The article deals with the social forces causing migration; the formation of the Iranian subaltern community in the Caucasus; the community's social structure (gender, ethnicity and age); the migrants' working and living conditions; and their political culture.

This article clarifies the differences between occupational health and workplace health and reveals how the two overlap. It unravels a multi-layered narrative about cotton textile workers’ understandings and experiences of ill-health at work in America and Britain, utilizing a combination of oral histories, government documents, company and union records, and the trade press. It aims to identify the multiple influences on contemporary debates about health at work. Contrary to current historiography, I argue that gender was only occasionally important to such discussions among workers, and that gender did not significantly influence their responses to unhealthy conditions. Workers’ understandings of, and responses to, workplace hazards were individual and related to knowledge about risk, ill-health and socioeconomic factors. American and British workers’ understandings of and responses to their working environment reveals more convergence than divergence, suggesting a universal human response to the health risks of work that is not significantly influenced by national or industrial constraints, or by gender.

The friend of Havelock Wilson, the founder of the National Union of Seamen, who once told him that true unity among seamen would never be achieved because seamen were like “a rope of sand”, washed away with every tide, would no longer be considered a sage. It was not only Wilson who, during his career as trade unionist, proved beyond any doubt that the “rope of sand” could indeed hold together. The seamen, too, had shown long before the rise of the new unions at the end of the nineteenth century that they possessed more cohesive power than Havelock's friend was prepared to credit them with – at least, if British employers are to be believed. One of the first occasions on which British employers appealed to the Combination Act of 1799 was during a labour dispute in December 1799, when coal merchants (through the intermediary of the Mayor of London) urged the Home Secretary to take action against an alleged combination of seamen in Shields. The Coal Trade Committee of 1800 blamed combinations of seamen for the high wages, which had reached an unprecedented level.

This paper examines a town in northwest England and a particular set of conditions that inhibited the growth of working-class politics during the twentieth century. The paradox of class politics in Lancaster is that despite a proletarian population, the labour movement locally remained extremely weak. Ironically, it was only upon the deindustrialisation of the town in the later 1960s that labour showed any collective strength. Explanation of quiescence in terms of paternalism and deference is rejected. Rather an account is given in terms of powerlessness. Local structural conditions rendered Lancaster workers so highly dependent that resistance to political domination was precluded.

The close connection between old age and retirement and to what extent society accepts work-free retirement in old age emerged as the topical themes we know in France and Germany as late as the 1950s and 1960s. By analysing the relevant discussions in the labour circles of both countries the author examines whether this modern concept of retirement originated in the early phase of the welfare state. The concepts and points of criticism which each of the labour movements developed for old age provision show, by virtue of the different national mental attitudes, that their considerations about old age as a life phase diverged from one another to a great degree. The German labour movement believed that old age pensions were primarily a compensation for the reduction in income on reaching an advanced age, and it thus gave preference to the invalidity pension. In contrast, French society supported the idea of welfare security for the old. Along with criticisms of state social policies, the purpose of providing for the old is at the centre of the essay's analysis, more specifically the contrary forms this discussion took in Germany and France: obliged to work in old age or well-earned retirement.

In this dossier, Marx's concept of primitive accumulation is applied to socialist development in the Soviet Union, China, and Romania, three countries in which socialist revolution occurred before the full development of capitalism. The introduction profiles the ideas of Evgenii Preobrazhensky, the Soviet theorist and left oppositionist, who first applied Marx's concept to the problems of socialist development, and was executed under Stalin in 1937. Preobrazhensky advanced the idea of “primitive socialist accumulation”, a process that would fund industrialization by extracting surplus through planned, non-coercive transfers from market-based and state sectors. Preobrazhensky's ideas sparked debates within communist parties over collectivization and the tempo of development. The introduction and articles in the dossier point the way towards future comparative research, suggesting that the processes of primitive capitalist and socialist accumulation shared painful similarities.

To this day, the history of indigenous orphans in colonial India remains surprisingly understudied. Unlike the orphans of Britain or European and Eurasian orphans in the colony, who have been widely documented, Indian orphans are largely absent in the existing historiography. This article argues that a study of “native” orphans in India helps us transcend the binary of state power and poor children that has hitherto structured the limited extant research on child “rescue” in colonial India. The essay further argues that by shifting the gaze away from the state, we can vividly see how non-state actors juxtaposed labour and education. I assert that the deployment of child labour by these actors, in their endeavour to educate and make orphans self-sufficient, did not always follow the profitable trajectory of the state-led formal labour regime (seen in the Indian indenture system or early nineteenth-century prison labour). It was often couched in terms of charity and philanthropy and exhibited a convergence of moral and economic concerns.

This article illuminates the transforming impact of collective action in the light of the industrial jacquerie of 1886 in Belgium. This important episode of popular struggle fuelled a dialectical process of change which was marked by a fundamental shift in both social policy and in repertoires of collective action. In 1886 workers still drew on an old repertoire of collective action. Their struggle had such a disruptive force that it forced the state to intervene in labour conflicts. The conservative political élite responded with conciliatory gestures that foreshadowed a legislative programme of social reform. In the changed political climate the position of progressive wings in the two conservative parties was enhanced as the growing strength of the labour movement became more apparent. The industrial jacquerie functioned as a catalyst in the transition from old to new repertoires of collective action. In the aftermath of the revolt, mass collective action quickly, and extensively, came under the control of the Parti Ouvrier Belge (POB).

This article introduces a bottom-up perspective to the history of the Revolution of 1908 in the Ottoman Empire by focusing on the experiences of workers in the Imperial Naval Arsenal (Tersâne-i Âmire) in Istanbul. Drawing mainly on primary documents, the article explores, from a class-formation perspective, the struggles and relations of Arsenal workers from the second half of the nineteenth century until the revolution. The Arsenal workers’ involvement in the revolution was rooted in their class solidarity, which was revealed in a number of ways throughout this period. The workers’ immediate embrace of the revolution was spurred by their radicalization against the state; such radicalization stemmed from the state's failure to solve the workers’ persistent economic problems, and its attempts to discharge them and replace them with military labor. The case of the Arsenal workers thus points to the role of working-class discontent in the history of the revolution, a dimension that has thus far been only minimally addressed in Ottoman historiography.

Technological convergence in the international sugar economy began in the 1830s and was substantially complete by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. By the end of the nineteenth century, the industrialized sugar factory was a global phenomenon like the steamship and the railway engine (to which key aspects ofits innards were closely related). We will argue that the single most importantfact about nineteenth-century sugar industries was the degree of technological convergence that came to characterize their manufacturing sectors, regardless of the type of labour involved. A revisiting of the literature of the past twenty-five years, both in the New and Old Worlds, suggests that historians have yet fully to come to terms with the global character of this convergence and with the question of why convergence in the factory had no parallel in the field, where there continued to be a striking global divergence between the means and modes by which the industry was supplied with raw material. This problem in the recent historiography of the subject also highlights issues relating to the “proletarianization” of labour and the assumption that industrial capitalist modernity was inextricably associated with the development of “free labour”. More specifically, it draws attention to major flaws in the terms of reference of the now classic debate about the nexus between technological change and the predominant forms of labour in the Caribbean production area. In so doing, it underlines the need for a global rather than simply regional approach to the dynamics of change in the international sugar industry of the late colonial era. The latter part of our article outlines the broad historical parameters of this divergence in the sugar-cane field, and suggests the need for exploring the political economies surrounding the sugar producing areas and their mechanisms of ethnic segmentation of the labour force in particular.

How did philanthropy adjust to the transformation of society in the nineteenth century? What was its role in social relations and in relieving poverty? Recent writers studying these issues have suggested the need for detailed studies at local level, and in studying some English towns and cities in the earlier part of the nineteenth century they have come to varying conclusions. Roger Smith's study of Nottingham shows that philanthropy added insignificantly to the amount of relief available through the Poor Law. By contrast Peter Searby's study of Coventry shows that philanthropic funds were quite abundant and after some reforms in the 1830's even applied to the relief of the poor! Professor McCord's articles on the North-East of England in the early nineteenth century seek to establish the more ambitious claim “that nineteenth-century philanthropy provided increasing resources and extended machinery with which to diminish the undesirable effects of that period's social problems”.

Critics of E. P. Thompson have questioned his emphasis on the ties between radicalism and trade unionism in early nineteenth-century England; historians have likewise described the 1818 strikes as simple wage disputes in which the radicals played a negligible role. This essay challenges these assumptions about the 1818 strikes and radicalism. In the summer of 1818, when a wide range of grievances touched off the strike wave, the radicals rallied to the side of the trades and sometimes served as leaders of the strikes; that summer the radicals and striking trades also drew upon and contributed to a shared repertoire of old and new tactics and forms of action.

This article examines the role of “Turkish” leatherworkers in New England’s labor movement in the early twentieth century. It begins with the exodus of a large Ottoman population from eastern Anatolian provinces to eastern Massachusetts, and their employment in New England’s leather factories. Throughout the article, the rise of the leather business in eastern Massachusetts cities (including Peabody and Salem), the Turkish immigrants’ concentration on Peabody’s Walnut Street (which came to be called “Ottoman Street”), the importance of kin and friends in providing practical information vital for adjusting to the new environment, and the coffee house as a response to industrial conditions are discussed at length. The author argues that, although many of the Turkish leatherworkers originated from rural backgrounds and had no experience in unionizing and striking, their quick adjustment to the industrial city and their growing awareness of labor rights was a result of lectures given within the Turkish community, changing circumstances in the old country and in the United States, such as the Balkan Wars and World War I, and their unchallenged place in the tanneries of Peabody, MA.

In global terms, Ming China was one of the largest of the economies and political entities that saw increasing integration. Between 1500 and 1650 it experienced a phase of commercialization that influenced perceptions and valuations of work in various ways. Taking a multi-layered approach, this study explores Confucian tenets that made a distinction between mental and physical work, and between four main occupational groups. It discusses earlier Buddhist perspectives on work which were still valid during the Ming period. Further, the legal regulations concerning work in the Ming penal code and the valuations of work and particular occupations in a contemporary literary source, a carpenter's handbook, and an agricultural guide are probed for direct and indirect evidence of the commodification of work in cities and in the countryside, and of gendered division of labour. A consideration of the usefulness of work songs for studying the self-expression of workers concludes the essay.