The American revolution, with its accompanying changes in the economic, social and political life of the thirteen colonies, failed to alter the Negroes' “outsider status”. In this article the struggle for political rights will be considered as a factor in changing that “outsider status.” It seems justifiable to single out for special treatment a period of less known political action aimed at improving – or sometimes simply defending – the Negro's status as a citizen.

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.

This article offers a sensitive reading of oppositional political cartoons in Togo in the early 1990s, during the period of structural adjustment, which was accompanied by the swift reversal of democratizing trends and the restoration of authoritarian rule. Togolese satirists perceived this moment as a moment of “fraudonomics”, thus contesting rampant corruption and clientelism in politics. They poked fun at the president, local politicians, businesspeople, and bureaucrats of the international institutions. The article begins by examining the making of satirical newspapers with a focus on the biographies of the satirists. As students, they started out on the adventure of publication with their own money and learned most of their drawing and printing techniques as work progressed. Secondly, an analysis of the readership shows that, although the satirical newspapers were a crucial element of the media in the early 1990s, it was mostly an elitist and urban phenomenon. The third section analyses the changing visual repertoire of contention through in-depth analysis of four selected caricatures.

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.

La Belgique de 1871 était le pays le plus industrialisé du continent. En 1830 la bourgeoisie, alliée aux catholiques, avait réussi à imposer au pays un régime parlementaire, qui, limitant à l'extrême le pouvoir du souverain, assurait l'exercice effectif de l'autorité à une faible minorité de bourgeois aisés et de grands propriétaires. Depuis ce moment, l'industrie s'était encore développée, augmentant la puissance de la bourgeoisie capitaliste qui avait gouverné le pays presque sans interruption de 1848 à 1870. Au moment où nous parlons ici, les divergences internes au sein de cette bourgeoisie avaient permis aux conservateurs catholiques de se hisser au pouvoir, où ils resteront jusqu'en 1878.

Leicestershire is one of the East Midland's smaller coalfields, though it was growing faster than any other coalfield in the two decades before the First World War, and its output, and number of persons employed, unlike those of many far larger coalfields, were greater in 1925 than they had been in 1913. Annual average earnings per shift were also among the highest in the country and the level of unemployment among the miners was relatively low by coal-mining standards. The Leicestershire Miners' Association had 7,428 members at the end of 1925, which represented about three-quarters of the coal-miners employed in the coalfield, and relations with the coal-owners were by tradition peaceful with the owners agreeing to assist the LMA's “closed shop” policy and allowing union business to be conducted on colliery premises. The Leicestershire coalfield was one of that select band of inland coalfields that enjoyed relative prosperity in the early 1920's, and this state of affairs was reflected in the fact that the owners did not lock their men out to enforce either reduced wages or increased hours in May 1926, but rather the miners struck in support of the policies of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain, to which they had been affiliated since its inception in 1889.

E-commerce in China has developed and expanded rapidly in recent years. Conflicts and confrontations have accumulated in parallel. Using Taobao e-marketplace – one pillar platform of the Alibaba group – as its case, this article aims to analyse the developmental logic and profit-seeking strategies of e-commerce capitalism in China and beyond. It also investigates how small online merchants responded to and resisted the particular rent-extractive and exclusive mechanisms designed by the platform. I attempt to identify the emerging responses from below to both the creative and destructive sides of this newest capitalist development in China. I argue that, despite the militancy and innovation involved in these movements, and despite the use of Maoist rhetoric borrowed from the past, the contentious collective actions (online or offline) organized by these small online merchants lack the solidarity, the shared identity and consciousness, and the powerful ideological language observed among the “traditional” working class in industrial capitalism, and hence they are more improvised, transient, and easily defeated.

Georges Lefebvre concluded his Preface to the 1957 edition of Buonarroti's famous history of Babeuf's conspiracy with a sort of challenge to historians, saying that the final word on it still remains to be said. Whether Lefebvre's summons to further research on the subject has been a cause of new studies cannot be answered. All that can be said is that historians have continued to lift the veil on some hitherto obscure aspects of this conspiracy. Evidence of this trend was produced at the International Colloquium of Stockholm on August 21, 1960, to commemorate Babeuf's birthday.1 What appeared to be comparatively new was the emphasis on the impact of Babouvism outside of France. This was shown in three papers, two on Germany and one on the Austrian Tyrol. The two on Germany2 dwell on the reporting of the movement in the German press. We are told that alongside the generally turgid and hostile accounts there were analyses of Babouvist ideas in Minerva, the review of Hamburg, drawn from Le Tribun du peuple and the dossiers of the Babouvist trial. This review ran as many as ten articles on Babeuf and Drouet, who was boosted into prominence because of his official standing. The third paper3 suggests the probability of Babouvist infiltration among the insurgent Tirolese peasants early in the nineteenth century. It has also been shown elsewhere that Babeuf's organization served as a model, both in structure and methods, for the Italian underground, Società dei Raggi, that reached out from Piedmont to Romagna with the object of uniting the peninsula.4

In an earlier article, I outlined some of the main social and demographic characteristics of the Bedfordshire parish of Cardington during the late eighteenth century, using for the purpose the invaluable survey of the parish compiled by a local schoolmaster, James Lilbourne, in 1782. Because of the growing interest in the historical process of social change, it has been thought worthwhile to examine the socio-demographic structure of Cardington at a later period. The date chosen for this second snap-shot was 1851 and the source materials used are the enumerators' schedules of the parish which were prepared for the census of that year. Although the listings for 1782 and 1851 differ somewhat, both in the nature of their content and in the degree of their coverage of the local population, a crude comparison between them has proved to be possible.

This article focuses on the varied workforce in and around the Enugu Government Colliery, located in south-eastern Nigeria and owned by the British colonial state. Opened in 1915 at Udi and in 1917 at Iva Valley and Obwetti, the mines were in a region with a long history of slave raids, population shifts, colonization, and ensuing changes in local forms of political organization. The mines brought together an eclectic mixture of forced and voluntary unskilled labor, prisoners, unskilled contract workers, and voluntary clerical workers and artisans. Moreover, the men were from different ethno-linguistic groups. By taking into account this complex background, the article describes the gradual process by which this group of inexperienced coalminers used industrial-protest strategies that reflected their habituation to the colonial workplace. They organized strikes against the village men, who, as supervisors, exploited them in the coalmines. Their ability to reach beyond their “traditional” rural identities as “peasants” to attack the kinsmen who exploited them indicates the extent to which the complex urban and industrial environment challenged indigenous identities based on locality as well as rural status systems and gender ideologies. One of the major divisions to overcome was the one between supposedly backward “locals”, men who came from villages close to the mine, and more experienced “foreigners” coming from more distant areas in Nigeria: the work experience as “coalmen” led “locals” to see themselves as “modern men” too, and to position themselves in opposition to authoritarian village leaders. The article thus traces the contours of the challenges confronting a new working class as it experimented with unfamiliar forms of affiliation, trust, and association with people with whom it shared new, industrial experiences. It investigates the many ways that “local” men maneuvered against the authoritarian control of chiefs, forced labor, and workplace exploitation by “native” and expatriate staff.

Soit qu'on l'en blâme, soit qu'on l'en loue, on rapporte souvent au Marxisme la paternité de l'idée des oppositions de classes dans la société industrielle. Nous voudrions montrer ici qu'il y a là une vue excessivement schématique et que, s'il est vrai que c'est le Marxisme qui a donné à cette idée sa portée sociale, sa portée de propagande surtout, la notion des “antagonismes” immanents à la société contemporaine s'est formée bien avant les premiers manifestes du Marxisme. Nous utiliserons pour cela la littérature sociale française en prenant pour point de départ les oeuvres de Saint-Simon et en nous bornant à suivre l'évolution de cette idée dans la lignée de quelques auteurs qui se rattachent à son influence, jusqu'en 1848.

Während die Literatur über den Marxismus unübersehbar geworden ist, wurde der Erforschung von Marx' Persönlichkeit und Lebensgang nicht die erforderliche Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet, und zudem ist der grösste Teil der biographischen Literatur unkritisch. Das ist um so auffallender, als die Kenntnis der Marx-Biographie unerlässlich für das Verständnis des Marxismus ist; E. H. Carr hat darauf nachdrücklich hingewiesen. Es ist nun kein Geheimnis, dass Marx' Biographie grosse Lücken aufweist; über wichtige Ereignisse und ganze Abschnitte seines Lebens sind wir ungenügend unterrichtet. Selbst der Briefwechsel mit Engels, die Hauptquelle der Biographie, ist ein Torso; man darf annehmen, dass einige hundert Briefe fehlen. Nicht nur quantitativ ist das ein entsetzlicher Verlust; zweifellos sind sehr viele wichtige Briefe vernichtet worden. Engels selbst gab Marx einmal den Rat, bestimmte Briefe zu vernichten, was Marx jedoch bei der Gelegenheit nicht tat.

Für die Kenntnis des Menschen Marx fehlen uns die wichtigsten Unterlagen. Wie war sein Verhältnis zur Familie, zur Mutter, zur Frau, zu Engels? Welche Motive und Einflüsse bestimmten die Wandlung seiner Beziehungen zu politischen Freunden und Gegnern? Rjazanov erinnert sich, Laura Lafargue einmal sein Bedauern darüber ausgesprochen zu haben, dass „Marx uns so wenig ‘Subjektives’, rein Persönliches hinterlassen” habe; sie habe ihm darauf die „Bekenntnisse” gezeigt, mehr nicht. Gerade viel intimes Material ist verloren.