The primary aim of this article is to problematize the WIDF's interpretations of the rights of women from (post)colonial countries and its tactics in working for and together with these women. It shows that, in the context of rapid geopolitical changes – the growing anti-colonial struggle and Cold War competition – the WIDF had to change its ideology, ways of working, and communication strategies in order to keep its leading position in transnational work for women's rights and to maintain the sympathies of women from countries outside Europe. The main focus is on the contradictions, negotiations, and adjustments inside the WIDF with respect to the new political situation and the demands of women from Africa and Asia, in particular, during the highest period of anticolonial transformation (1950s to early 1970s). This article also pays attention to Soviet ideas on the emancipation of women and, in particular, to the influence of Soviet experiences of emancipating women from non-Slavic (Eastern and Southern) parts of the USSR on the WIDF's perception of and policies for the improvement of the situation of women in Asia and Africa. This article is based primarily on analysis of the WIDF's archival documents preserved in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) in Moscow, along with the WIDF's official publications.

In the Northern textile areas of Yorkshire and Lancashire, the unskilled laborer's hostility to the new industrial middle classes led him to Chartism but not to class-consciousness, the recognition that his interests differed not only from the middle classes but from the upper classes as well. The unskilled workingman's antagonism to the middle classes did not depend upon developing feelings of working class solidarity nor was it directed towards the older rural gentry. When the unskilled worker reacted against the middle classes in the 1830's and ̓40's he was not yet prepared economically or psychologically for independence or class action.

Popular conceptions of the politics of Robert Owen have changed surprisingly little since the early nineteenth century. Within a short time of the advent of his national campaign for Poor Law reform, Owen came under attack from radical parliamentary reformers on the grounds of his ostensible political conservatism. Among the rumours then afloat among the reformers, Richard Carlile later wrote, one was “that Mr. Owen was an instrument of the Government, to bring forward this plan of providing for the lower and poorer classes, for the purpose of drawing their attention from Parliamentary Reform”.

This paper investigates the history of the labour process in New Zealand's state-owned railway workshops and questions the idea that large-scale industry inevitably destroyed whatever agency skilled workers had enjoyed. It also shows that relations of production vary with the political and cultural contexts. Craft control of the labour process survived in New Zealand's state-owned railway workshops and the union played only a minor role. Jop control was more important in achieving bureaucratic instead of autocratic control over such matters as hiring and firing; the retention of apprentice-based crafts; the institutionalization of seniority; and in resisting both de-skilling and the “premium bonus”. The strength and vitality of shop culture, based on craft control of the labour process, also survived and modified the Government's vigorous attempt to introduce “scientific management”. In brief the article concludes that productive processes do not inevitably determine social relations of production, that capitalism has been neither homogeneous nor uniform, and that mechanization never inevitably results in de-skilling.

In terms of production volume, most Ottoman state factories cannot be regarded as success stories, yet the labour relations they initiated, engendered, and supervised were important for the emergence of factory labour in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish republic. One of those state factories was the Imperial Fez Factory, where, throughout the nineteenth century, approximately 500 workers were employed, making it the second highest concentration of industrial workers in the empire after the Imperial Arsenal. Very recently, a limited number of wage ledgers for the fez factory became available for research. Those ledgers provide unprecedented information not only on remuneration but also on the production process and labour-control practices in the fez factory. Those ledgers enable us, for the first time, to formulate research questions within the framework of a broad labour history, in particular for the Ottoman factory workforce in the late nineteenth century. This article examines the effects of the ethno-religious characteristics and gender of Ottoman factory labourers on employment practices and wage-earning at the fez factory.

I and my son are bakers and barbers, you and your sons are lapidaries and gardeners, but if you bid one of your sons be barber, a second baker, a third lapidary and a fourth gardener, all is confusion, and how can good come out of it? Furthermore he is no barber nor baker who does not belong to the Guild of the Barbers and the Guild of the Bakers. If your son [does not go] to the peshkadim and rank himself among the apprentices; next to the tehaoosh, to bid him inscribe his name on the rolls; then to the kihaya, to pay him toll, how should he be a member of the guild? Ask of the scheikh if I have not spoken well.

One of the by-products of the Keynesian Revolution has been a painstaking search for precursors of Keynes. Diligent academics have compiled an impressive array of “proto-Keynesians”, although some have only slender claims to the title. There has been a preoccupation with those writers whose contributions were exclusively theoretical. This bias is surprising in view of the nature of Keynes' own approach which was to progress from policy prescription to theory. The “proto-Keynesians” in general failed to proceed to Keynesian policy prescriptions, being unable to withstand the attacks of orthodox theorists; yet some commentators, ignorant of theoretical niceties, intuitively arrived at policy programmes which Keynes later endorsed. This latter group placed particular emphasis on public works programmes as a method of combating unemployment. Economists have credited the Liberal Party, J. M. Keynes and H. D. Henderson with being the first, in the inter-war years, to emphasise public works as one solution to the problem of chronic unemployment. Klein, examining Keynes' and Henderson's arguments in support of the Liberal Party's 1929 General Election commitment to a public works programme, states that “no one was thinking seriously along these lines at the time of the Great Depression.” Most other commentators have stressed the original nature of the Liberal programme of 1929, notably Harrod, Macgregor and Dillard. The purpose of this paper is to indicate the contribution of the Labour movement to the inter-war discussion of public works. It is contended that there has been undue emphasis on the Liberal Party's literature of the 1920S and early 1030s. In fact, the Liberal programme was in many respects similar to that which had been expounded by trade unionists and the Labour Party since 1917. To establish this argument it is necessary, first, to outline the historical background against which the inter-war discussion of public works took place.

Décembre 1872. Depuis sept mois, la loi Dufaure a mis l'Internationale en dehors du droit commun. Les informateurs de la police, soucieux de prouver la réalité de la grande conjuration contre l'ordre, surveillent méticuleusement toutes les organisations populaires. L'un d'eux rapporte la discussion qui s'est tenue au Cercle Fraternel de Pierre Scize, dans le faubourg lyonnais de Vaise: «Voici ce que l'on aurait dû faire et l'on [sic] aurait pas perdu», déclare l'ouvrier coopérateur Terrasse, ancien trésorier, en 1867, d'un groupe de 1'Internationale: «il aurait fallu que les grandes villes se lèvent pour protester et dire à Versailles de laisser administrer Paris seul, et s'il s'administre bien, vous serez dissous [sic]. Si l'Assemblée avait vu toutes les villes se lever pour défendre Paris, elle se serait vue obligée de céder à la Commune.»

“MIKHAIL ALEKSANDROVICH BAKUNIN is in San Francisco ”, announced the front page of Herzen's Kolokol November 1861. “HE IS FREE!Bakunin left Siberia via Japan and is on his way to England. We joyfully bring this news to all Bakunin's friends.” Arrested in Chemnitz in May 1849, Bakunin had been extradited to Russia in 1851 and, after six years in the Peter-Paul and Schlürg fortresses, condemned to perpetual banishment in Siberia. On June 17, 1861, however, he began his dramatic escape. Setting out from Irkutsk, he sailed down the Amur to Nikolaevsk, where he boarded a government vessel plying the Siberian coast. Once at sea, he transferred to an American sailing ship, the Vickery, which was trading in Japanese ports, and reached Japan on August 16th. A month later, on September 17th, he sailed from Yokohama on another American vessel, the Carrington, bound for San Francisco. He arrived four weeks later, completing, in Herzen's description, “the very longest escape in a geographical sense”.

The history of labour on public works construction is usually presented as a masculine experience, either because the workforce studied is mostly male, or because the labour of women remains unrecorded. Does the history of labour and wage on public works undergo change if we account for women labourers? This article examines this question in the context of famine public works in the second half of nineteenth-century India. State employment on public works was part of a famine relief programme and women, largely from agricultural labouring and small peasant families, worked on the construction of roads, railways, canals, and tanks. The article traces the development of task-gender association on famine public works both as a norm and in practice. Further, it analyses the evidence on negotiations made by women labourers themselves with the existing gendered notions of work and wage. This study contributes to the historiography of labour in a colonial context in two ways: first, it adds to the existing corpus on forms of labour extraction for construction work; and, second, it explores the question of women's work and remuneration outside factories, mills, and mines.

Rechercher des liens de filiation possibles entre la Commune et le mouvement boulangiste présente au premier abord un caractère paradoxal. Car le général Boulanger, officier de carrière, a combattu les Communards dans les rangs de l'armée de Versailles. Et les adversaires de Boulanger dans le mouvement ouvrier et socialiste n'ont pas manqué de rappeler ce souvenir. C'est ce que fait notamment l'ouvrier Avronsart, dans une interview de Boulanger dont l'authenticité fut d'ailleurs contestée. Plus tard, lorsque Boulanger pose sa candidature à l'élection partielle de la Seine, se constitue contre lui un groupe qui s'intitule précisément «la Commune» et qui présente la candidature de Protot. Tout serait à citer de la proclamation de ce groupe, dont nous nous bornerons à extraire ce raccourci historique quelque peu hardi:

«Robespierre tue la Commune et fait Bonaparte; Cavaignac tue la Commune et refait Bonaparte; M. Thiers tue la Commune et voilà Boulanger.»

The Conseil d'Etat of the Second Republic was dissolved on 2nd December 1851. A letter of protest, signed by eighteen of the forty Conseillers, was sent to Boulay de la Meurthe, Vice-President of the Republic. The Conseil was distrusted by Louis Napoleon; although initially well-disposed towards him after his election, it had generally sided with the Legislative Assembly in its clashes with him. Less than a month before the coup d'état, the Conseil clearly demonstrated where its sympathies lay; in November 1851, a large majority backed the Assembly and not the President over the project of law on “la responsibilité des dépositaries de l'autorité publique” (the “Loi des Questeurs”).

In 1907, the Second International adopted a resolution on migration that rejected restrictions on the free movement of workers. In this article, we contend that, despite this official stance, the issue of migration was a highly controversial one for the international socialist community. We present a multi-level analysis, in which we detail the migration debate as it took place on the platforms of the Second International (roughly between 1903 and 1907) and the way in which this debate played out domestically for the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands and the Socialist Party of America – two parties that openly rooted for restrictions at the international level. We discern three ideal-typical stances on immigration – internationalism, on the one hand, and protectionist nativism and xenophobic nativism, on the other – and argue that it was the incompatibility of the internationalist and nativist positions that caused internal divisions to arise during the debates. Apart from speaking to the classic historiography on the Second International, which deals with the incompatibility of internationalism and nationalism, this article traces the influence of additional racist and culturalist ideologies on the debate and further historicizes it within the broader context of the modern international migration system that was taking shape at the time.

The history of urban labor in modern China is deeply entangled in questions of the communist revolution, and so are the interpretations of that history. If we leave out two important accounts of labor in Chinese written by organizers before the 1960s, studies of labor in modern China only have a four-decade history.