The aim of this article is to study discussions within the International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF) about the early postwar process of European integration at the intersection of international cooperation and nationally defined interests. The central question is the future of the Ruhr. This article argues that the developing Cold War, and the conflict between social democrats and communists, limited the reach of international trade-union cooperation but simultaneously strengthened the perceived need among social-democratic trade unionists in Western Europe to coordinate their policies in relation to supposed enemies. European integration in combination with the Cold War also highlighted a need to coordinate the resources of European and anti-communist trade unions in North America. The article shows that the IMF generally supported European integration as a defence against the hypothetical threat from the East, but made attempts to sway the process to include a pronounced social dimension.

This article contributes to the debate on the persistence of forced labour within capitalist development. It focuses on Spain, which has been deeply rooted in the global economy, firstly as a colonial metropolis, and later as part of the European Union. In the first place, I analyse the different modalities of unfree labour that are included in the taxonomy established by the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, taking into account the different political regimes in which they are inserted. Therefore, the legal framework regarding unfree labour is analysed for four different political contexts: liberal revolution with colonial empire (1812–1874); liberal parliamentarism with colonial empire (1874–1936); civil war and fascist dictatorship, with decolonization (1936–1975); and parliamentary democracy within globalization (1975–2014). The article goes on to deal with the importance of the main economic reasons driving the demand for forced labour: relative labour shortage and the search for increasing profits. In the conclusion, and taking the Spanish case as a basis, I suggest a series of challenges for furthering the global debate on the role of forced labour under capitalism.

This article discusses the working and living conditions of unskilled labourers in South Tehran, and pays particular attention to the workers of the brick-kiln factories of Khatunabad. The brick-kiln workers, mostly transient rural workers, were among the poorest of the Iranian labour class. At the same time, in terms of sheer numbers they represented 5 per cent of the population of Tehran in 1960. They lived and worked under appalling conditions but, nevertheless, they only seldom went on strike. The brickworkers' main concern was not so much their working conditions, but rather to get and hold a job. This was difficult, because (1) they were seasonal labour; (2) they had no representative workers' organization to speak for them; (3) the way their industry was organized left them with little power; and (4) there was strong competition from other unskilled and unemployed labourers. Finally, the six known strikes by the brick-kiln workers will be highlighted, and used to discuss the context in which all Iranian workers had to operate.

The French republican calendar, dictated by the National Convention, has had its forerunners. The most important among them was Sylvain Maréchal, a highly original and remarkable figure.

In 1788 Sylvain Maréchal issued the Almanach des Honnêtes Gens, dated “Fan premier de la Raison” (the first year of Reason), in which the names of the days of the week, the Christian festivals and the table of Saints were omitted. It was this almanac, modified in accordance with the circumstances, that served as the prototype for the republican calendar. Maréchal was put into prison, and afterwards exiled from Paris. His calendar was impounded and burnt by order of the Parliament. Later on Maréchal issued other almanacs and fought in the press for the reform of the calendar. All this is dealt with in the present study, and the name of Marechal will forthwith be linked to those of Romme and Fabre d'Eglantine, the two members of the Convention to whom the republican calendar is due.

This article uses the concept of labour commodification to critique common historiographical portraits of skilled workers in transition to industrial capitalism. The meanings with which skilled workers in late nineteenth-century Australia understood their own labour went far beyond a repertoire of technical abilities. They viewed skill as a socio-biological disposition specific to a human type (adult, male, Anglo-Saxon), and this view intimately connected artisans' work and selfhood. Capitalist industrial change threatened to disrupt those connections. The notoriously exclusive union policies skilled workers invented can thus be seen as designed not simply to position their members more advantageously on the labour market, but to protect artisanal selves and identities from the corrosive effects of labour commodification.

On 3 May 1954, Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company announced that it would close its anthracite mining operations in Pennsylvania's Panther Valley. Company officials had hoped to keep some mines open but net losses in 1953 amounted to $1.4 million and the trend continued into early 1954. The company stated they would reopen the mines only if miners would work harder and produce more. All area locals of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) voted to accept the program except one, Tamaqua Local 1571. Arguing that the new rules violated existing wage agreements, workers from this Local picketed the mines and called on miners across the anthracite region to join them. Tamaqua miners offered an alternative plan that called for workers to share control over management and production decisions. Lehigh managers refused and closed the mines, effective from 30 June. As other mining companies began to collapse in the 1950s and 1960s, local workers, business owners, union leaders, and politicians made efforts to either open mines or attract new industries. However, unemployment remained a difficult problem for the Panther Valley and for the entire anthracite region and the area still exhibits higher than average unemployment.

A study of parliamentary elections in a certain area must be preceded by the attempt to describe the character of the electorate. This is the more necessary as it is often little recognised to what a large extent the size and composition of the new electorate created by the £ 10 franchise varied from borough to borough. This was due to some extent to the strength of local registration societies and the different interpretation which the revising barristers gave to the term ratepayer, but its main cause was the character of the housing in the constituencies. Land values, custom and, of course, the wage structure of the community determined the quality and standard of building and in consequence rent and rates. While the urban middle classes were probably everywhere in possession of the vote the above mentioned factors clearly determine the proportion of the working-class who enjoyed the franchise. It seems useful therefore to compare the Yorkshire figures with those for other parts of the country. To do this it is best to disregard York and Hull with their large number of freemen voters and to concentrate on the newly enfranchised boroughs.

The electorates in the five new boroughs were all of a fair size; the smallest, Halifax, had 1,491 electors and Sheffield over 7,000. Yet with the exception of the latter, where as the result of the many skilled workmen and small masters we expect to find a large democratic electorate, the proportion of voters, whether measured in terms of inhabitants or houses, is almost inversely related to the size of the town.

The strike of stevedores and dock labourers in the Port of London in 1889 has come to symbolise that ferment and upsurge of labour activity, in favour of combined action, which found expression in the “new unionism”. Indeed the great spread of union organisation in the London area at this period has usually been regarded as the main phase of new unionism. It is true that labour historians have long been aware that widespread agitation and union recruitment were also afoot among both provincial dockers and other groups who had been either unorganised, or whose previous attempts at unionism had proved sporadic and abortive. The Liverpool dockers, in particular, became engaged in 1890 in a protracted struggle involving almost as great a number of strikers as on the London docks in the previous year. This Liverpool strike had all the makings of a “labour war”, and it resulted in a profound impact upon industrial relations on the Mersey waterfront. However, the events and consequences of this dispute together with the activities of the National Union of Dock Labourers which organised it have so far received less detailed attention than either the dock strike in the metropolis or the London dockers union.

Maarten Prak argues that urban citizen associations remained vigorous in the West from the Middle Ages through the Industrial Revolution, and that their support for commercial activity helped bring about that Revolution. That is half correct. During the two thousand years from 300 BC to 1750 AD, numerous societies had similar peaks of urbanization, commercial activity, and per capita income (often approaching, but never exceeding, a “peak pre-industrial income” level of roughly $1,900 in 1990 international dollars.) Vigorous urban societies produced repeated episodes of comparably high incomes, not ever-escalating levels of GDP/capita. What produced the breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution was a particular manifestation of urban citizenship that occurred only in Great Britain – the victory of Parliament over royal authority creating exceptional religious and intellectual freedom and institutionalized pluralism. This was not common to urbanized, commercial societies except in rare periods; only in Britain did urban associations and culture blend with scientific culture, producing a broad surge of scientific and technical activity that overcame the prior limits on organic societies.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, scholars had transformed our understanding of class, race, and ethnicity in the rise and demise of the US coal industry. Under the twin impact of the modern Black Freedom Movement and the rise of the New Labor History, studies of American labor and race relations fragmented during the late twentieth century. Following the lead of pioneering labor historian Herbert Gutman, one influential body of scholarship resuscitated the early history of the United Mine Workers of America and accented the emergence of remarkable forms of labor solidarity across the color line during the industrial era. Before this scholarship could gain a firm footing in the historiography of labor and working-class history, however, social activist and labor scholar Herbert Hill forcefully argued that emerging emphases on interracial working-class cooperation downplayed the persistence of racial divisions even during the most promising episodes of labor unity. In significant ways, the Hill−Gutman debate fueled the florescence of whiteness studies and the myriad ways that both capital and labor benefitted from a racially stratified workforce. Based upon this rapidly expanding historiography of coalminers in America, this essay explores how the overlapping experiences of black and white miners established the foundation for modes of cooperation as well as conflict, but the persistence of white supremacist ideology and social practices repeatedly undermined sometimes heroic movements to bridge the chasm between black and white workers.

The socialism of Charles Fourier (1772–1837) though primarily a French movement succeeded in exerting a not insignificant influence in early nineteenth century Britain. At first it did little more than modify the views of native pioneer socialists who imported a sprinkling of Fourierist ideas into their own writings – usually greatly modified and without acknowledgement of their origin. Gradually, however, Fourierism made more wholehearted converts and by the eighteen forties a group of enthusiastic disciples in London had succeeded in creating an embryonic movement, with mass meetings and a weekly journal. Though the movement died out after about a decade of active propaganda and even if it never achieved anything like the success it obtained in the United States (where no less than twenty-seven Fourierist communities were attempted), English Fourierism produced a fairly extensive literature and undoubtedly exerted an important influence on the general pattern of English socialist thought, having in this respect a probably more significant career than the more spectacular movement of the Saint Simonians.

There exists no such thing as a single mode for the social organization of proto-industrial iron production, but a number of alternative ways. In the following article the dominance of one or another mode is viewed as dependent on its societal context, and not least on the social relations of the rural world. Each mode of organization had its own peculiarities and generated its own contradictions and conflicts.

The importance of the “Lavrists” or “Vperedovtsy”, named after the publication Vpered (Forward) (1873–1877) founded and edited by Peter Lavrovich Lavrov, in the evolution of the socialist ideas and groups in Russia has been recognized by historians from Alphonse Thun to Franco Venturi. The journal's role in the dissemination of the socialist credo among Russian Jews has never been seriously disputed, although seldom recorded in concrete terms.

The history of prostitution, defined as the commercial exchange of sexual services, provides a fertile ground for the study of the intersections between gender, race and class. Obviously, the sale of sexual labour has implications for constructions of gender, although the specific implications may change with time. Commercial sex offers particularly sharp insights into the ways in which gender considerations intersect with class and race because of the physical intimacy and potential for procreation involved in the sex act. Prostitution literally forces societies to come face to face with their assumptions about and attitudes to class and race hierarchies and relationships. The Australian case is especially useful for studying these relationships because of the imbalance in the ratio of men to women which has characterized colonial society generally and certain types of communities in particular, and the ways in which this imbalance affected some classes and ethnic groups more than others. Colonial Australia also provides a complex tapestry of ethnic/racial issues because it included divisions not just between “white” settlers and indigenous Aborigines, but also between both of these groups and various groups of immigrant, “coloured” workers. In the twentieth century, when demographic patterns became more balanced in gender terms and more homogenous in racial terms, the international sex industry continued to be important because it played a part in Australia's quest for recognition as an independent member of the community of “civilized”, white, nations. Finally, the process of reassessing Australia's place in the world was intimately connected to a reassessment of Australia's domestic policies, both in relation to prostitution generally and to the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women.

This article analyses free and unfree labour in mining centres in the Andes during early Spanish colonial times. It focuses on two themes: the condition of indigenous or “native” people as “free labourers”, and the mita system of unfree labour. For that purpose I shall consider the cases of Potosí, the most important mining centre in the Andes, and San Antonio del Nuevo Mundo in southern Bolivia, a large mine unaffected by the mita system of labour obligations.

In 1917, in the midst of war, the internationalist ideals of the old Second Socialist International came close to achieving an unparalleled diplomatic triumph of non-governmental initiative by bringing together responsible political leaders of the left from the countries of opposing belligerents to discuss peace terms with neutrals on neutral ground at Stockholm.

The successful reassertion of the authority of the Court of the Earl Marshal, in the recent case of the Corporation of Manchester vs. The Manchester Palace of Varieties, Ltd., has renewed interest in this ancient institution. The court ruled that The Manchester Palace of Varieties had wrongly displayed the heraldic arms of the Corporation, contrary to the laws and customs of arms, and that the court itself, which had last sat in 1751 and which Blackstone described as having fallen into contempt and disuse, was still empowered to give relief to those who thought themselves aggrieved in such matters.

This article examines the labour disturbances which occurred in Freetown, Sierra Leone (Figure 1), between 1938 and 1939. Contrary to the prevailing interpretation that the colonial state in Africa was faced with an alternative of either forcefully pushing the working class out of the city or moving towards some form of corporatism, this article argues that such an option was only feasible in situations where labour was relatively quiescent or where a casual labour problem existed. In Freetown, where a stable labour force existed, the choice was between accepting a militant labour movement over whom officials had little or no control, or creating a labour movement that would eschew militant protest and follow the path dictated from above. The existence of a militant organization committed to continous agitation and the use of strike weapons to force employers to acknowledge the presence of a working class were critical factors in shaping official response to labour disturbances in the British colonies.

This article explores the chasm between party leaders and rank-and-file workers within the postwar Italian Socialist Party and Polish Socialist Party between 1944 and 1947. So far only studied in the context of communist parties, existing historiography on this theme has observed a deep rift between the radicalization amongst grassroots activists defending the self-management workers had won during the final days of World War II and the moderation practised by party leaders desperate to demonstrate their trustworthiness as government partners. Based on an analysis of the sentiments amongst socialist workers in Łódż and Sesto San Giovanni, and of the visions espoused by provincial and national socialist leaders, this article argues that the dynamics within socialist parties were exactly the other way around. Whereas socialist leaders ascribed a crucial role to grassroots participatory structures in their efforts to teach the working classes democracy, socialist workers were more concerned with day-to-day survival than with participation, self-management, or any other question.