It is frequently asserted by students of the history of the Third French Republic that the years before 1914, and especially from 1911 to 1914, were a period of nationalist revival, a somewhat exceptional period when politics were dominated by a novel concern for national unity, prestige, and power; by calls for order, tradition, and discipline; and by catchwords connected with all these things. I propose to inquire first into the social aspect of this apparent change in the ruling ideology of the Republic, and then into the background and nature of the Nationalist movement.

Police verification of domestic servants has become standard practice in many cities in contemporary India. However, the regularization of work, which brings domestic servants under protective labour laws, is still a work in progress. Examining a long timespan, this article shows how policing of the servant, through practices of identification and verification, came to be institutionalized. It looks at the history of registration within the larger mechanism of regulation that emerged for domestic servants in the late eighteenth century. However, the establishment of control over servants was not linear in its subsequent development; registration as a tool of control took on different meanings within the changing ecosystem of legal provisions. In the late eighteenth century, it was discussed as being directly embedded in the logic of master–servant regulation, a template that was borrowed from English law. In the late nineteenth century, it was increasingly seen as a proxy for formal means of regulation, although this viewpoint was not universally accepted. Charting this history of changing structures of inclusion and exclusion within the law, the article argues that overt policing of servants is a manifestation of the colonial legacy, in which the identity of the servant is fused with potential criminality.

This study investigates child factory labour in Victoria, the most populous and industrialized colony in Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century. Three sources of primary data are analysed: Royal Commission reports, texts of bills and statutes, and parliamentary and public debates. The findings inform current academic debates by enhancing understanding of the role played by child workers during industrialization. They show that children were low-cost substitutes for adult males and that child labour was central to ongoing industrialization. A wide range of industries and jobs is identified in which children were employed in harsh conditions, in some instances in greater proportions than adults. Following the reports of the Royal Commission, the parliament of Victoria recognized a child labour problem serious enough to warrant regulation. While noting that circumstances were not as severe as in Britain, it passed legislation in 1885 with provisions that offered more protection to children than those in the British factory act of 1878. The legislation also offered more protection than factory laws in other industrializing colonies and countries. The findings throw light on the character of colonial liberal reformers in a wealthy colony who sought to create a better life for white settlers by adopting policies of state intervention.

Inequality has increased in most Western countries since the early 1980s. In a recent report, the international non-governmental organization Oxfam noted that the twenty-six richest people in the world own as much wealth as the poorest fifty per cent of the world's population. Discontent with the growing disparities in wealth and income has soared in recent years, especially in the wake of the 2007/2008 financial crisis and the “Great Recession” that followed. The Occupy movement protested against the greed of the “one per cent”, referring to the highly skewed income distribution in the US. Former US president Barack Obama proclaimed the growth of within-country economic inequality as “the defining challenge of our time”. Yet, he enacted few policies that reduced inequality during his two terms in office; the Gini coefficient in the US actually increased slightly between 2007 and 2016. His successor, whose election has often been explained as a consequence of these high levels of inequality, has slashed taxes for the wealthy, probably causing further rises in inequality in the future. In this essay, I will review two recent economic history books that examine the historical roots of within-country inequality on a global scale: Branko Milanovic's Global Inequality (2016) and Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler (2017). Formerly a lead economist at the World Bank, Milanovic is a well-known scholar working in the field of economic inequality, while Scheidel has a background as a specialist in the economic, social, and demographic history of antiquity.

Pour la France, la Commune est un grand moment socialiste. Pour l'Amérique latine, c'est un des points-clé du développement d'une société moderne. Il ne s'agit pas de rendre ici un hommage purement sentimental à ces hommes qui montèrent à «l'assaut du ciel»; il ne nous importe guère non plus de faire le compte des informations, ou des calomnies qu'on répandit sur la Commune dans le Nouveau Monde. Il nous semble en revanche qu'il vaut la peine de dire ce que fut l'impact politique et social de la Commune, et quelles orientations les Communards proscrits ont imprimées à notre histoire. Cet impact fait partie de tout un processus idéologique – l'introduction du socialisme, de l'anarchisme, du marxisme et de l'internationalisme – qui a donné son élan et ses doctrines au mouvement politique et à la lutte des classes en Amérique latine.

Starting from an incident in the colonial port city of Paramaribo in the autumn of 1750 in which, according to the Dutch governor Mauricius, many of the proper barriers separating rich and poor, men and women, adults and children, white citizens and black slaves were crossed, this article traces some of the complexities of everyday social control in colonial Suriname. As gateways for the trade in commodities and the movement of people, meeting points for free and unfree labourers, and administrative centres for emerging colonial settlements, early modern port cities became focal points for policing interaction across racial and social boundaries. Much of the literature on the relationship between slavery and race focuses on the plantation as “race-making institution” and the planter class as the immediate progenitors of “racial capitalism”. Studies of urban slavery, on the other hand, have emphasized the greater possibilities of social contact between blacks, mestizos, and whites of various social status in the bustling port cities of the Atlantic. This article attempts to understand practices of racialization and control in the port city of Paramaribo not by contrasting the city with its plantation environment, but by underlining the connections between the two social settings that together shaped colonial geography. The article focuses on everyday activities in Paramaribo (dancing, working, drinking, arguing) that reveal the extent of contact between slaves and non-slaves. The imposition of racialized forms of repression that set one group against the other, frequently understood primarily as a means to justify the apparent stasis of the plantation system with its rigid internal divisions, in practice often functioned precisely to fight the pernicious effects of mobility in mixed social contexts.

During the last 15 years or so, the study of Chinese history in the United States and Europe has been transformed through new foci of interest as well as the employment of social science methodologies. This article surveys a selected number of recent publications and categorizes them according to five themes: “commoners, women, and outsiders”, “the structural approach”, “state and society”, “China and l'histoire globale”, and “China and the West”. It is demonstrated that the continuities within Chinese development, including the progressive demographic expansion of the Chinese population, the formulation and exercise of gentry rulership, the general vigour of the economy, and increased regional and subregional agricultural/industrial production and distribution are not confined to specific dynastic periods and should be viewed in a long-term context.

Until the late 1920s, anarchism was still a significant presence in Chinese radical thinking and activity, and till the middle of the decade, gave serious competition to the Communists. The essay discusses the nature of the anarchist movement in China, anarchist criticism of Bolshevik Marxism, and anarchist revolutionary strategy and activity during 1921–1927. It argues that while anarchists were quite innovative with regard to revolutionary strategy, their repudiation of organized power deprived them of the ability to coordinate revolutionary activity on a national scale, and what success they achieved remained local and short-lived. Indeed, the Communists were able to make better use of anarchist tactics than were the anarchists themselves. Anarchist critique of power rested on a denial of a center to society (and history). While this undercut the anarchists' ability to organize the revolutionary movement, it is also revealing of a basic problem of socialist revolution: the problem of democracy. In ignoring the anarchist critique of power, the successful revolutionaries deprived themselves of a critical perspective on the problem of socialist revolution, and were left at the mercy of the new structures of power that they brought into existence. Hence the importance of recalling anarchism.

This article analyses and compares the careers of a group of socialist militants who were active in several regions of Brazil in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. It underscores their similarities and differences with a view to understanding the various ways of being a socialist in that context. This includes examining their wide-ranging activities, the main ideas they upheld, and their role in the development of Brazilian labour laws in the 1930s and 1940s.1

This article provides a reinterpretation of Stalinism through the lens of Marx's concept of primitive accumulation. It connects a series of defining events that are usually viewed separately – the debates and oppositional movements of the 1920s, industrialization, collectivization, and the “Great Terror” – to the state's need to accumulate capital for development. Using the idea of “primitive socialist accumulation”, first introduced by the Soviet theorist and left oppositionist Evgeny Preobrazhensky, it examines the challenges of building socialism in an underdeveloped, overwhelmingly peasant country. It argues that the emergence of the left and right oppositions in the 1920s and the grain crisis in 1927–1928 resulted from the state's struggle to create a stable balance between rural and urban exchange. The hastily implemented move to collectivize resulted in a cascade of unintended consequences, including a disastrous famine, decrease in food supplies, and a precipitous fall in real wages that impelled record numbers of women into the labor force. Against a background of social instability and discontent, the Kirov murder proved a fearful trigger, igniting fears among Party leaders that ultimately resulted in mass political and social repression. The article is part of a dossier, comprising an introduction and three articles, which offers a new approach to our understanding of socialism in the Soviet Union, China, and Romania.

Few problems in modern Russian history are more complex or more bewildering than that of political Masonry (politicheskoe masonstvo) and its contribution to early-twentieth-century oppositional politics. A decade and a half ago Nathan Smith observed that “Available firsthand evidence about the [political Masonic] movement […] is incredibly limited and raises as many questions as it answers.” That observation is still valid as the origins, structure, composition and activities of the conspiratorial political Masonic organization remain among the best-kept secrets of Russia's past. Indeed, political Masonry was first mentioned in the historiography on the February Revolution only in the early 1930's. Then, for nearly three decades, scholars simply ignored the problem altogether. This was partially due to a paucity of sources; but equally important was the fact that the subject conjured up images of that pernicious Jewish-Masonicconspiracy theory so popular among right-wing émigré circles. During the 1960's historians once again turned their attention to political Masonry, although infrequently and usually only in passing. Since that time a number of treatments have appeared, yet none takes account of all the available evidence. Moreover, many historians continue to reject out of hand all efforts to deal with political Masonry, dismissing them as attempts to perpetuate the Jewish-Masonic-conspiracy myth, while other scholars reject the suggestion that the political Masonic organization played a crucial role in the overthrow of the Russian Monarchy and the establishment of the Provisional Government in 1917.

This article introduces the present Special Theme on the global reception and appropriation of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). It aims to interrogate Thompson’s legacy and potential vitality at a moment of renewed social and intellectual upheavals. It emphasizes the need for an interdisciplinary and global reflection on Thompson’s work and impact for understanding how class, nation, and “the people” as subjects of historical inquiry have been repeatedly recast since the 1960s. Examining the course of Thompson’s ideas in Japan and West Germany, South Africa and Argentina, as well as Czechoslovakia and Poland, each of the following five articles in the Special Theme is situated in specific and different locations in the global historiographical matrix. Read as a whole, they show how national historiographies have been products of local processes of state and class formation on the one hand, and transnational transfers of intellectual and historiographical ideas, on the other. They highlight the remarkable ability of Thompsonian social history to inspire new lives in varying national contexts shaped by different formations of race, class, and state.

This article examines some aspects of working-class standards of living in three Lancashire towns, Barrow-in-Furness, Lancaster and Preston, in the period 1890 to 1914. By looking on one hand at a number of externally determined factors, such as real wages and the cost of living, and on the other at the strategies with which the working-class families attempted to maximise their standards of living, an assessment is made of the relative success of these various strategies, particularly at periods when wages were on or below the poverty line. Particular stress is laid on evidence from Preston, in part because it has not previously been reported, but also because there appear to be a number of significant variations between Preston on the one hand, and Barrow and Lancaster on the other, when placed in apparently similar intrinsic conditions and in comparatively close geographical proximity to each other. These variations underline the extent to which generalisations derived principally from statistical data may be misleading, and also the importance of looking at individual discrete communities before relying on theoretical models of the relationship between, for example, income from primary employment and standards of living. If it is possible to demonstrate that working-class people in some towns were more successful than their near neighbours in combating poverty, we need to identify the reasons for these differences. Factors discussed include the economy of Preston compared with Barrow and Lancaster, comparisons of wage rates, the employment of women and its effects, and diets (including the use of allotments), the effects of drinking, as well as a look at possible negative factors, such as family size, and housing and hygiene.