The National Socialist planning for a recolonization of Africa was based on a new social and labour policy and focused chiefly on the “labour question”. In designing their schemes, planners strove to mobilize wage labour and circumvent the much-feared “proletarianization” of the workers. The key problem in exploiting the African colonies had two main aspects: a shortage of manpower and migrant labour. Therefore, planners designed complex systems of organized, state-controlled labour recruitment, and formulated rules for labour contracts and compensation. An expanded labour administration was to ensure that the “deployment of labour” ran smoothly and that workers were registered, evaluated, and supervised. Furthermore, “white labour guardians” were to be assigned the responsibility of overseeing the social wellbeing of the African workers. As was evident not only in Germany but in the colonial powers, France and Great Britain, as well, these concepts all fit into the general trend of the times, a trend characterized by the application of scientific methods in solving social issues, by the increased emphasis on state intervention, and by the introduction of sociopolitical measures. Nazi planning was based on Germany's prewar politics but also reflected the changes occurring in German work life after 1933.

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.

England's first important socialist organization was the Social-Democratic Federation. During the eighteen-eighties this organisation was in the forefront of the socialist movement. It came to present an extreme and dogmatic socialism. But it is curious to recall that in origin the organization was not socialist. Although it had a few socialist members, it had no socialist program. The leader of the S.D.F., the wealthy Cambridge University graduate, the formerly pro-Tory journalist, H. M. Hyndman, is always associated with the growth and development of this organization. Yet it has not been recognized that in the very early days of the S.D.F. there was no certainty that Hyndman would hold the reins. Our aim in this essay is twofold: I. to detail the non-socialist beginnings of the S.D.F. and 2. to indicate Hyndman's connection with the new organization. The story of the formation of the S.D.F. – at first called the Democratic Federation – has never been told in its entirety. We will relate what happened at the first meetings. We will show how Hyndman came to gain control and how the Member of Parliament from Newcastle, Joseph Cowen, who could have been the leader, was superseded.

The period 1870–1880 represents an important phase in the history of social movements in Russia. Within that decade ideas and groups merged whose influence can be discerned in the events that preceded and those that followed the upheaval of 1917.

Among those groups one of the more interesting was the so-called Lavrists, or vperedovtzy, named after the publication “Vpered” (Forward), founded and edited by Peter Lavrov (1823–1900) and first published in Zurich, Switzerland, where volumes I and II were brought out in 1873 And 1874 respectively, and then in London, where volumes III, IV And V (the last-named not under the editorship of lavrov) as well as a bimonthly edition of “Vpered” were published during 1874–1877. In addition, the printing office of “Vpered” also produced several books and pamphlets.

This article will argue that scholars concerned with the nexus between socialism and nationalism have overlooked the work of Eric Hobsbawm, the foremost present-day Marxist historian and a key theorist of modern nationalism. The article will repair that neglect by providing the first systematic analysis of Hobsbawm's encounter with the national question. It will contend that Hobsbawm's work is a key site for those interested in exploring the clash between class-consciousness and national identity, and that his historical and political writing provides a unique window on the nexus between nationalism and socialism in the last half of the twentieth century. The article will also suggest that Hobsbawm's changing conception of the relationship between nationalism and socialism is crucial to an understanding of the shifts his politics have undergone in the last three decades or so.

Historians have mostly ignored Kingston and its enslaved population, despite it being the fourth largest town in the British Atlantic before the American Revolution and the town with the largest enslaved population in British America before emancipation. The result of such historiographical neglect is a lacuna in scholarship. In this article, I examine one period of the history of slavery in Kingston, from when the slave trade in Jamaica was at its height, from the early 1770s through to the early nineteenth century, and then after the slave trade was abolished but when slavery in the town became especially important. One question I especially want to explore is how Kingston maintained its prosperity even after its major trade – the Atlantic slave trade – was stopped by legislative fiat in 1807.

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.

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.

The article examines the debates at the Asian Socialist Conference's (ASC) inaugural gathering in Rangoon in January 1953, using a variety of sources, including the minutes of the conference meetings found in the Swedish Social Democratic Party archives. The focus is on the efforts of Asian socialists to define Asian socialism in terms of three broad subjects: international politics; domestic politics; and economic politics. Throughout, particular attention is accorded to the role played by understandings of European socialism. The argument is threefold: that socialism was central to the ASC project, prompting efforts to define Asian socialism; that these efforts invariably raised the fraught question of Asian socialism's relationship with European socialism; and that the stakes involved in Rangoon were not limited to Asian socialism, but also involved socialism's potential as a global movement.

The image of the crowd as an irrational, spontaneous multitude is commonly related to the works of a first generation of social psychologists writing in the early twentieth century, yet its basic features can be found in conceptual innovations developed as early as the Enlightenment. This article focuses on a particular protest in eighteenth-century Spain in order to reflect on the transformation in the meaning of essential terms which occurred in the semantic field of disorder. The so-called motín de Esquilache of 1766 forced the authorities to renew their discourse in order to deprive the movement of legitimacy, fostering semantic innovation. The redefinition of riot implied a process of conceptualization that not only stressed the protagonism of the disenfranchized but also altered a long-established tradition that linked riots to conspiracies and devised a new anthropology depicting the populace as a subject unable to produce ideas on its own.

Between 1787 and 1868 a total of 830 convict vessels left the British Isles bound for the Australian penal colonies. While only one of these was seized by mutineers, many convicts were punished for plotting to take the ship that carried them to the Antipodes. This article will explore the circumstances that shaped those mutiny attempts and the impact that they had on convict management strategies.

From 1919 to 1923, Barcelona experienced unprecedented levels of social conflict. The growth of the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (CNT) had awakened the spectre of social revolution among the city's conservative classes, and a broad constellation of reactionary forces lined up against it, the Sindicatos Libres (free trade unions) being the most formidable among them. Created in 1919 by Catholic workers, the Sindicatos Libres were able to capitalize on the exhaustion that had set in among certain working-class groups who had grown wary of reckless strike action. Using violence to fight back against the CNT, the Libres could claim 175,000 members by mid-1922. They mobilized the religious, corporatist, and regionalist sentiments harboured by sectors of the city's workforce and, by adopting a modern repertoire of action, they bypassed the traditional aversion to mass mobilization that had characterized the Catholic labour movement and Spanish conservative parties until then. In many ways, the ideology and tactics of the Libres adumbrated fascism, but their success was short-lived. In late 1922, an upswing in strike action and an abatement of state repression allowed the CNT to recover at the expense of the Libres. This article explores the rise and fall of an organization the study of which has been neglected, situating it in a European context of political polarization whereby the traditional right attempted to modernize its tactics and adapt them to a rising challenge from the revolutionary left. It will also serve as a window through which to examine the complex relationship between workers’ trade union affiliations and their political and cultural identity.

Based on the author’s experience as one of the German translators of The Making, this article lays out its protracted and contradictory reception in Germany. When E.P. Thompson’s magnum opus was published fifty years ago, German scholars on both sides of the Iron Curtain failed to take note of it for several years. The relatively muted reception in West Germany during the 1970s was marked by its dismissal as theory-lacking and “subjectivist”. Examining the contrasting contexts of postwar Britain, with its popular anti-fascist experience, and post-fascist West Germany helps to understand why Thompson’s “empirical idiom” of class history failed to strike a chord at the time with leading representatives of the new generation of “progressive” social historians in Germany and a broader reading public. It was only with the arrival of Alltagsgeschichte, feminist history, and, more generally, the cultural turn in humanities that The Making and its German translation became a canonical point of reference both in working-class history and the wider humanities. A brief epilogue discusses its lasting potential for a historical understanding of today’s processes of post-Cold War class formation and human rights struggles.

This article aims to analyze residents’ associations organized around specific working-class neighborhoods in São Paulo between the end of World War II and the Brazilian Military coup in 1964. It examines, in particular, the connections between neighborhood associations and labor union struggles. Based on the strong social networks and informal relationships created by workers, organizations like the Neighborhood Friends Societies (Sociedades Amigos de Bairro) were fundamental to the construction of political communities that had a powerful impact on electoral processes and on the formation of the state at the local level. Likewise, this article will show how, during that period, identities at the neighborhood level frequently developed in dialogue with processes of class formation, staking claim to a language of rights associated with the condition of being a worker and, simultaneously, a citizen. Finally, the piece suggests how analyses with such a localized scope, like those focused on specific working-class neighborhoods can intervene in debates concerning Global Labor History.

The aim of this study is to link up the general trend of Dutch and international political developments with certain events in the domain of social history, some of which are scarcely known and some exciting little attention, being regarded as of mere local interest.

A description of the organising methods and the political tactics of the early socialist movement in Western Europe forms an introduction to this enquiry. There are in the main three methods of proceeding in the matter and the one chosen is determined by the particular political conditions of a country at a given moment.

Educational societies for the working classes are being founded and the leading executive positions occupied by men belonging to socialist-communist secret societies. These, which are perfectly legal and in every sense public societies, serve as a means for collecting into a body the active-minded workers; at the same time they form a sieve for the selection of such elements as might seem useful and worthy of admittance to membership of the secret society.

This review essay engages with Dorothy Sue Cobble's For The Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality from the perspective of European histories of socialist feminism during the Cold War. The essay suggests three themes that might lead to further discussion. These concern first of all the role of left-Catholic as well as Social Democratic women within the networks that Cobble describes in For the Many; second, the influence of nationalist or other exclusionary discourses on debates about the rights of immigrant workers, and third, the role of social democratic actors in shaping debates about working women's rights in other international organizations - particularly regional organizations such as the EEC/EU. The essay concludes that For the Many is a major contribution to our understanding of transatlantic socialist feminisms in the Cold War world.