In 2002, Dirk Hoerder published his magnum opus, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, NC, 2002). In this book, Hoerder describes and analyses, with an unusual breadth of scope, the origins, causes, and extent of human migration around the globe from the eleventh century onward to the present day, paying particular attention to the impact migrations have had in the receiving countries and the cultural interactions they have triggered. At the 28th Annual Meeting of the American Social Science History Association, organized in November 2003 in Baltimore, Dirk Hoerder's book was the winner of the Allan Sharlin Memorial Award for the best book in social science history.

In this review symposium, seven migration scholars from differing national and cultural backgrounds give their comments on Hoerder's book, with a concluding response by Dirk Hoerder.

In nineteenth-century restaurants and cafés, customers’ tips provided the income of an increasing number of waiters and waitresses. Not only did employers refrain from paying serving staff a fixed wage, the latter had to share their employers’ general expenses, while some even had to pay a fee for the privilege of working. Exploring newspapers, pamphlets, reports, and union sources, the article discusses in a comparative way how and why these practices were deployed in Amsterdam, Brussels, Vienna, London, and French and German cities. As a result of the overcrowding of the labour market in hospitality, hiring workers became not only a cost-free transaction, it even developed into a source of income. Serving staff paid for the opportunity to collect tips, even if their increasing number reduced individual income. However, as a result of the tipping system, such staff often managed to secure higher “wages” than they would normally have earned.

This article analyses the establishment of a network of hostels for unemployed workers in Yugoslavia between the two world wars. The analysis investigates the legal, political, and institutional background to these hostels, and how they were conceived and financed. By looking at the development of a new public social policy from the perspective of the jobless, the article aims to examine the nature, goals, and especially the boundaries of a modern provision for Yugoslav workers, namely its strategies and practices of social inclusion and exclusion. The article reveals how a modern concept of unemployment gradually emerged. These hostels were not part of a traditional policy on poverty; they were the expression of a new and more modern form of social policy. The article further shows how new social differences and distances between “non-working” people were created, and what specific impact those differences and distances had on the functioning of these institutions.

Labour commodification is a core process in building capitalist society. Nonetheless, it is given remarkably little attention in labour and social historiography, because assumptions about the process have obscured its historical character. Abandoning these assumptions, a close study of labour commodification in the boilermaking trades of late colonial New South Wales (Australia) illustrates the historical character of the process. In these trades, labour commodification was deeply contested at the most intimate level of class relations between workers and employers. This contest principally took the form of a struggle over the scheme of occupational classification used as the basis of pay rates. It was a highly protracted struggle, because workers developed strategies that kept the employers' efforts at bay for four decades. Employer efforts to intensify the commodity character of boilermakers' labour were largely ineffective, until they were given great assistance in the early twentieth century by the state arbitration system.

On impulse one afternoon during the early stages of my research into the Dirty War in Argentina and the political past of the former Minister of Agriculture, Jorge Zorreguieta, I sent an e-mail to an Argentinian friend and colleague asking for suggestions about recent literature.

Advancing under socialist banners, the labor movement in Western Europe won such success by the end of the nineteenth century as to produce a deep moral and intellectual crisis in European socialism. Internecine quarrels over revisionism, participationism, and antipolitical syndicalism reflected the malaise of a “revolutionary” movement that each year bound itself more closely to the system it had vowed to destroy. For socialist theoreticians, the crisis was cognitive or “scientific” – it had to do with issues of adequate historical analysis and prediction – but for the theorists of French revolutionary syndicalism it was essentially a moral crisis. In their eyes the socialist parties had already failed because they were the instruments for manipulation and betrayal of the workers by leaders whose ambitions could be gratified through the capitalist establishment. They identified a practical and moral alternative to political socialism in the revolutionary general strike prepared and carried out by autonomous proletarian organizations. Such organizations were necessary to the idealists of the general strike if their programs were not to degenerate into a strictly verbal revolutionary Couéism and they therefore put great stock in the development of militant working-class associations. Among these, the Bourses du Travail, which flourished from 1895 to 1901 under the dedicated direction of the anarchist intellectual, Fernand Pelloutier, seemed the most promising.

The discussion of labour history in South Asia was first shaped in the early twentieth century by the hands of the members of a very limited intelligentsia who assumed an adversarial role in relation to capital and colonial state power. Many of them happened to be activists and leaders in the organizations and protest movements of the working classes. Their constituents, sections of the labouring poor, were particularly underprivileged in the general context of economic underdevelopment and low per capita GNP in South Asia.

Everybody knows that refuse is a ragpicker's raison d'être. Continuous collection of the waste from big city consumption, along with the rubbish and the refuse, led to collection efforts that gradually brought about a wholesale trade and an industry for recycling these wastes back into production. Until the famous prefectorial decree of 24 November 1883, garbage was left on the public thoroughfares and collected by the dust carts of the licensed garbage collectors at daybreak. During the night, the bins were searched by the ragpickers, who constituted a unique category of workers known as ramasseurs (gatherers). They seemed to work with standard equipment from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards. Each carried a hook, a basket suspended from the back (a “dummy”), and a lantern. They sought and garnered a wide variety of products, from fabric to cork, ranging through metals, bones and skins, each item serving a specific purpose, from the most common-place (old papers and rags for paper production) to the most extraordinary (crusts of bread for the crumbs used by butchers for frying). Around 1900, the ragpicker's take consisted of all kinds of old papers, twine, rags for manufacturing paper (50 to 60 per cent), all types of bones (20 to 25 per cent), and an infinite variety of objects (15 to 30 per cent). At this time, however, the rag industry changed dramatically as a result of technological advances (especially the new manufacture of paper from wood pulp). The subsequent collapse of most of the markets exacerbated the recent differentiation between ragpickers. Nevertheless, ragmen still siphoned off 13 per cent of the tonnage of garbage in Paris. Annual exports of this capital resource by the rag trade totalled 27 million francs.

During the first three decades of the Third Republic there appeared a group of left-wing republicans who became known as Radical-Socialists. As a group they had many ideas in common and tended to vote on many issues with a rather high degree of unity. However, a careful study of their voting record allows three divisions to be made among them. On the extreme Left were the hard core Radical-Socialists (HCRS). They are so designated because their voting record attained a total of about 90% on bills and orders of the day of an advanced social nature. Somewhat less consistent were the Radical-Socialists (RS) who attained at least 75%. Among the former were deputies whose stand for reform was about as consistent as that of the average Socialist. Some of the most famous were Georges Clemenceau, Camille Pelletan, Georges Perin, Tony Révillon, Désiré Barodet, Henri and Félix Mathé, Armand Duportal, Félix Cantagrel, Camille Raspati, Sigismond Lacroix, Ernest Lefèvre, Martin Nadaud, Stéphan Pichon, Emile Chautemps and Marius Chavanne. Among the Radical-Socialists were Antoine Achard, Jules Baulard, Henri Maret, Germain Casse, René Goblet, Paul Doumer, Edouard Lockroy, Gustave Mesureur, Louis-Bernard Montaut, Michel Salis, Emile Brousse, Jules Lasbaysses, Roque de Fillol, Gustave Hubbard, and Benjamin Raspati. Another group, somewhat peripheral to the present study but included in order to round it out, were the social Radicals(SR), or Radicaux de Gauche, as they called themselves after 1881. Their voting record averaged about 60%. The term “left-wing Radicals” includes all the above categories. The moderate or orthodox Radicals were really advanced liberals as regards social legislation, and do not form part of the groups examined in this essay.

Massive, rapid capital accumulation is usually associated with capitalist development, but historically, socialist states were among the most aggressive accumulators. Accumulation in Maoist China was faster than even in Stalin's Soviet Union, despite the fact that China was a much poorer country with fewer natural resources. China's accumulation rate, defined as the ratio of gross capital formation to gross national income, reached twenty-five to thirty per cent in 1957–1962, peaking at forty-four per cent in 1958. This level proved to be unsustainable, but after a slowdown in the early 1960s, the rate rose back to thirty-six percent.1 As is well known, the cost of China's rapid industrialization was borne mostly by its rural population.2 My aim in this chapter is to show that it was disproportionally borne by rural women, who contributed to socialist accumulation in direct and indirect ways: directly, as collective farmers, growers of the grain, cotton, soy, tea, sugarcane, etc. that fueled industrialization; and indirectly, by biologically, socially, and materially reproducing the country's labor force and by submitting to a regime of extreme austerity that allowed the government to extract scarce resources and direct them to the cities and the export trade. My argument proceeds in three steps. I will begin with an overview of socialist primitive accumulation under Mao, its preconditions and mechanisms, and the ways it replicated earlier Soviet policies or diverged from them. Next, I will discuss the various ways in which rural women's work underpinned capital accumulation and laid the foundation for China's rapid industrialization in the years since Mao's death. Finally, I will look in some detail at rural women's work at home, to show how their self-exploitation, overwork, and underconsumption in the domestic realm created the conditions for accumulation. My focus is on cotton work – both cotton cultivation and domestic cloth production – but I will also look at other ways in which domestic work supported accumulation.

Between 1963 and 1983, unions in the US launched a major campaign to try to organize J.P. Stevens, the nation's second-largest textile firm. Labor leaders felt that if they could organize Stevens, other gains in the nonunion South would follow. Stevens resisted the campaign by firing and intimidating union supporters, repeatedly breaking labor laws in the process. This article examines the union's organizing efforts and argues that the campaign's failure was not due simply to the company's lawlessness. In particular, the influx of African Americans into the workforce had an important impact on organizing. While African Americans did respond enthusiastically to the union, their activism tended to scare off whites, and the union struggled to build effective interracial unions. Other factors, such as the company's willingness to match union wage rates and the economic decline of the textile industry, also prevented the union from making more progress.

In eighteenth-century Spain the encouragement of commerce and industry occupied an important place in the plans of the Bourbons for reviving national strength after the great crisis of the seventeenth century. Successive royal administrations resorted to a formidable array of measures designed to stimulate economic development. Government policy was directed primarily to furnishing commerce and industry with material assistance: subsidies, tax exemptions, protective tariffs, etc. The crown was also concerned, however, with the deleterious effects upon economic progress of an apparently pervasive and tenacious system of values which looked upon manual labor in an industrial context and economic enterprise in general as dishonorable for noble and commoner alike.

Comparative analyses of labour often assume a dividing line between free and forced labour which is universally applicable. The contributions to this special theme argue that the tensions between “freedom” and “unfreedom” may be identified more precisely as those between multiple notions and practices of contract, status, and social conditions. Free and unfree labour on the one hand, status and contract on the other, are historically determined categories. This introduction argues that those histories do not run in parallel but are strictly intersected. From that point of view, social and economic inequalities are mutually linked to legal entitlements; a modification in legal entitlements strongly influences the economic and social equilibrium, and vice versa. Underlying this conclusion is a perspective that is resolutely non-Eurocentric and global. We do not endeavour to find the “missing” freedom of contract in the “periphery”, nor do we consider the “cultural” and economic domination of “the West” as a starting point. We stress instead the mutual connection between “peripheries” and “core” categories and practices. Such a bilateral circulation of ideas and practices contrasts with the argument according to which “the West” invented “freedom” and coercion as well.

Une des formules les plus généralement admises par les interprètes et les exégètes de la politique française a été celle d'un progrès vers la gauche, progrès plus ou moins continu, inscrit dans des pages d'histoire où les fastes de la Grande Révolution ouvraient toute une perspective de révolutions et de réformes amenant le pays à des attitudes et à des institutions toujours plus démocratiques, et où chaque pas en arrière serait recompensé par deux pas en avant…au moins à longue échéance. C'était une version eschatologique de l'histoire (une de plus) qui ne mettait pas en doute la réalisation inéluctable des grands rêves humanitaires et libéraux du dix-neuvième siècle, incarnés dans une gauche sans cesse renouvelée mais consistante dans son réformisme, son progressisme, son radicalisme et sa conscience d'un triomphe éventuel. La gauche devait vaincre selon cette doctrine et elle allait vaincre parce qu'elle était dans la ligne de l'histoire, mais aussi parce qu'elle était le parti du peuple, c'est-à-dire de la majorité, et qu'elle détenait ainsi non seulement la force morale mais aussi la force numérique.

Among the various methodological prescriptions of Anthony Giddens, perhaps the most useful for labor history are his advisories on social change, on the anxieties and tensions attending a society's transition from one geographical scale to another. Labor's experience in the United States offers a case in point. The nation's transformation from a preindustrial to an industrial society entailed, in addition to the inexorables of accelerated urbanization, industrial expansion, and market extension, certain fundamental changes in the conditions of labor. Industrialization restructured the geography of labor markets, revised principles of wage determination, fomented sectarian division in the ranks of labor, and soured the relations between labor and capital. These structural changes led, in turn, to the inevitable responses of, among others, worker combination, protest, industrial violence, and a splintering in the ranks of labor.

In 1980, thousands of metalworkers from the region of greater São Paulo known as the “ABC” region carried out one of the most intense and lasting strikes in the history of the Brazilian working class. For forty-one days, striking workers resisted the repression that bosses and the nation's military regime mounted against them, which contributed to the collective worker mobilization that spread throughout the spaces of the city – especially the streets of the São Bernardo do Campo neighborhood. Expelled from factories and major public spaces, workers were able to maintain the strike mainly in the neighborhoods where they lived, thus politicizing the spaces and relationships of their daily lives and redefining the geography of collective mobilization. This article analyzes aspects of this process, highlighting the importance of workers’ social networks to the notable (re)appropriation of urban space that characterized the strike movement.