The introductory chapter to this volume presented a number of theories and hypotheses on the determinants of endogamy; the following chapters described endogamy in different historical settings and tested some of those hypotheses. The tests looked especially at the effects of individual characteristics of spouses, and sometimes of their parents. Results relating to changes in macro characteristics over time and their effect on the likelihood of endogamy were presented. Because all these chapters refer to only one country or region, regional comparisons are seldom made (there are some exceptions: Bras and Kok on differences between parts of the province of Zeeland; Pélissier et al. on differences between rural and urban areas, and Van de Putte et al. on differences between several Belgian cities and villages).

Partition, the break-up of colonial India in 1947, has been the subject of considerable serious historical research, but almost exclusively from two distinctive perspectives: as a macropolitical event; or as a cultural and personal disaster. Remarkably, very little is known about the socioeconomic impact of Partition on different localities and individuals. This exploratory essay considers how Partition affected working people's livelihood and labour relations. The essay focuses on the northeastern part of the subcontinent, where Partition created an international border separating East Bengal – which became East Pakistan, then Bangladesh – from West Bengal, Bihar, Assam, and other regions which joined the new state of India. Based largely on evidence contained in “low-level” state records, the author explores how labour relations for several categories of workers in the new borderland changed during the period of the late 1940s and 1950s.

This article places the campaign for rights of public access in London in context. It provides a structural analysis of the importance of public space in metropolitan radicalism, and in so doing explores prevailing assumptions about the different uses of such space in a provincial and metropolitan setting. Its chief focus is upon opposition to restrictions on rights of public meeting in Hyde Park in 1855 and 1866–1867, but it also charts later radical opposition to the enclosures of common-land on the boundaries of London and at Epping Forest in Essex. In particular it engages with recent debates on the demise of Chartism and the political composition of liberalism in an attempt to explain the persistence of an independent tradition of mass participatory political radicalism in the capital. It also seeks explanations for the weakness of conventional liberalism in London in the issues raised by the open spaces movement itself.

This article emphasizes the credibility of popular intellectuals as a point of contention in framing contests. A movement group – a faction, clique, submovement, network cluster, organization, etc. – asserts its authority to speak on behalf of an issue or constituency by emphasizing the perceived knowledge, character, and logic of its popular intellectuals while attacking those of rivals. Four basic framing strategies relevant to the credibility of popular intellectuals are identified: (1) vilification – demonizing competing popular intellectuals; (2) exaltation – praising ingroup popular intellectuals; (3) credentialing – emphasizing the expertise of the ingroup intellectuals; and (4) decredentialing – raising questions about the expertise of rivals. Al-Qaeda's intramovement framing struggle with nonviolent Islamic fundamentalists over the permissibility of violence is used as a case study. In an attempt to assert its right to sacred authority, the movement portrays scholars who support its jihad as logical, religious experts of good repute while characterizing opposing clerical popular intellectuals as emotional, corrupt, naïve, and ill-informed about politics.

For decades after the socialist revolution, people in rural China continued to wear homespun cloth, and millions of rural women continued to spend a large part of their waking hours producing cloth and clothing. This is puzzling because the state opposed manual cloth production as wasteful of labor and raw materials, and because state monopolies should have ensured that all cotton ended up in the hands of the state and that all rural people were supplied with rationed machine-made cloth. This article looks at the reasons for the long survival of handloom cloth. These include the ways in which manual cloth production was integrated with rural gender norms and with a gift economy that prescribed the exchange of cloth at major life cycle events, and the existence of interlocking scarcities (of grain, cash, cotton, and cloth) that forced rural people to sell their cloth rations and make their own cloth from whatever cotton they could scrape together.

This article presents the findings of a long-term study of social homogamy in the rural community of Rendalen, Norway, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Prior to 1870, the occupation of parents was not normally recorded in the Norwegian parish registers. It is therefore difficult to carry out historical studies of social homogamy in Norway over any length of time. The Rendalen database, however, provides this information from several other sources. Structural changes over time, which led to an increase in the number of farm workers, reduced the degree of homogamy among farmers as well as creating a larger marriage market for the farm workers, thereby increasing homogamy among these farm workers. Controlling for these structural changes, it is clear that social boundaries between farmers and farm workers prevailed at least until the end of the nineteenth century. Using a multivariate analysis, we are able to identify different family characteristics that led young men and woman to marry homogamously. The farmers, especially, exerted influence on their eldest sons to marry farmers' daughters, but the role of the father in the mating process also secured more economically viable partners for the other children too.

The absence of significant federal regulation in the area of immigration legislation until 1882 no more denotes a laissez-faire approach in this area than in many other aspects of American economic life. For many generations Congress had left the task of regulating the immigrant stream to the states and localities. The first general federal law (1882) is best understood in the context of antecedent activity on the local level. Eventually most of the seaboard states, including many without an important passenger traffic, enacted statutes dealing with immigration. Table I presents a brief outline of their essential features.

This article analyses the debate on trafficking and policies to combat the recruitment of persons for commercial sex within the Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children of the League of Nations. Its main argument is that the Committee's governmental and non-governmental representatives engaged in what might be called a “moral recruitment of women”. This form of recruitment had a double purpose: to protect females from prostitution through the provision of “good employment”, and to repress intermediaries of prostitution by means of criminalization. Three elements of the Committee's internal debates and concrete actions will receive special attention. Firstly, the ideological framework (feminism, social purity, humanitarianism, abolitionism, regulationism, and/or class); secondly, the gender dynamics (differences of opinion between the Committee's male and female representatives); and thirdly the degree of gendering (construction or reinforcement of gender roles and relations).

This paper examines the role of kin networks in intergenerational mobility in rural Liaoning, China, 1789–1909. Classic studies of social mobility in historical China based on the records of imperial examination candidates suggest that society was relatively fluid. It has been claimed, however, that associations between fathers' and sons' outcomes overestimate the fluidity of historical Chinese society because many men who achieved prominence had been helped by senior kin other than their fathers. We test these claims by applying event-history techniques to longitudinal, nominative household register data, measuring the effects of characteristics of kin on the chances of obtaining an official title. Even though distant kin influenced the chances of obtaining a title, kin networks did not monopolize opportunities. There was substantial downward mobility among the sons of prominent families, and high proportions of titleholders were new, in the sense of not having any senior kin who held titles.

The “Labour Question”, a well-known obsession pervading the archives of Africa, was posed by colonial rulers as a calculated question of scarcity and coercion. On the Spanish plantation island of Fernando Pó the shortage and coercive recruitment of labour was particularly intense. This article examines two distinct clandestine labour recruitment operations that took hold of Rio Muni and eastern Nigeria, on the east and the north of the Bight of Biafra. The trails of the recruitment networks were successfully constructed by the specifically aligned “mediators” of kinship, ethnicity, money, law, commodities, and administration. The conceptual focus on flat “mediators” follows Bruno Latour's sociology of associations and has been set against the concept of an “intermediary” that serves to join and uphold the structure/agency and global/local binaries.

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.

Although research on survival strategies is still at a relatively early stage, there are clearly some areas where there is considerable difference in emphasis placed by historians on the relative importance of particular “expedients” deployed by the poor in extremis There is, for example, uncertainty regarding the amount of support given by neighbours as opposed to relatives. There is some historical contention, too, over the importance to the elderly of care by their children, as opposed to alternative sources of maintenance such as earnings, charity and especially the formal institutions of poor relief. After all, in the early modern period the principle source for a study of the survival strategies of poor people is always likely to be the records of poor relief or charitable agencies and institutions. The obvious danger here is that historians of poor relief consistently overestimate the importance of such relief to the poor. Both Richard Wall and Pat Thane, using evidence from nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, for example, have demonstrated that the elderly received far more support from relatives than has been realized. Professor Thane has argued that this situation is unlikely t o have been new. Other historians, however, are much more sceptical over the value of intergenerational flows of wealth from children to elderly parents.

On April 6, 1920 the French government, in reprisal for the entry of German troops into the demilitarized zone of the Ruhr, occupied Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Hanau, and Homburg. During the occupation French Moroccan soldiers fired on a German mob in Frankfurt and killed several. In covering the event the Daily Herald, alone among English newspapers, called special attention to the “race” of the French troops. It headlined:

FRANKFURT RUNS WITH BLOOD

FRENCH BLACK TROOPS USE

MACHINE GUNS ON CIVILIANS

On April 10, the Herald followed its accounts of events on the Rhine by a front page article by Edmund Dene Morel under banner leads:

BLACK SCOURGE IN EUROPE

SEXUAL HORROR LET LOOSE BY FRANCE ON RHINE DISAPPEARANCE OF YOUNG GERMAN GIRLS

France, Morel wrote, “is thrusting her black savages …into the heart of Germany.” There “primitive African barbarians”, carriers of syphilis, have become a “terror and a horror” to the Palatinate countryside. The “barely restrainable beastiality of the black troops” has led to many rapes, an especially serious problem since Africans are “the most developed sexually of any” race and “for well-known physiological reasons, the raping of a white woman by a negro is nearly always accompanied by serious injury and not infrequently has fatal results.…” Morel had reports of rapes, “some of them of an atrocious character”, and of “dead bodies of young women discovered under manure heaps and so on”. German municipalities were forced to provide bordellos and white women, and even young boys, for these over-sexed blacks. Master-minding this effort to “ruin, enslave, degrade, dismember [and] reduce to the lowest depths of despair and humiliation a whole people” was a “ruthless” and militaristic French government. Furthermore Morel warned his working class readers, “If the manhood of these races, not so advanced in the forms of civilisation as ourselves, are to be used against the Germans, why not against the workers here or elsewhere?”

This paper examines the relationship between science and anarchism in Kropotkin's theory of mutual aid and analyses it in the light of his concerns about the rise of social democracy and individualism. Tracing the development of the theory from the 1890s to Kropotkin's death in 1921, it affirms the centrality of mutual aid in his work but argues, contrary to existing readings, that the theory can be seen as an attempt to inspire the revival of the anarchist movement. It concludes that there is an unresolved tension in Kropotkin's work arising from the imbalance between the idea of a “natural anarchist tendency” and anarchist propaganda.

The twentieth century has been a period of rapid change in terms of production and consumption, work, and employment. Much of this change has been driven by developments in technology or the application of new technologies to existing production systems and ways of ordering and organizing work. In characterizing such change, Schumpeter popularized the term innovation. In viewing innovation as the main engine of economic growth, Schumpeter was interested in the idea of the entrepreneur as innovator, not simply in terms of an agent for the introduction of new inventions but more broadly as an organizational innovator introducing new systems of work, new products, and new forms of production.

The view that class occupied a central place in the lives of nineteenth-century English workers has recently come under increasing criticism within the fields of labour and social history. Joyce (1980), Stedman Jones (1982 and 1983), Calhoun (1982) and Glen (1984) are prominent examples of scholars who have proclaimed, albeit to varying degrees and with different points of emphasis, that at various times during the nineteenth century workers were far less motivated by class than claimed by Edward and Dorothy Thompson, Hobsbawm and likeminded historians. Criticisms of this latter group of historians are, of course, not new. Nevertheless it may be suggested that the recent criticisms of class do possess two distinguishing characteristics. Firstly, they have surely gathered a momentum and a degree of influence within labour and social history which the criticisms of the 1960's (especially the positivist-based critiques of Edward Thompson's view of class) failed to achieve. (This change is, in part, related to the defeats and retreats suffered by the labour movement under Thatcherism, and the current intellectual and political re-assessment of the historical strength of class-consciousness within the British working class.) Secondly, the criticisms of the 1980's issue from a much wider range of theoretical perspectives than was the case during the 1960's.