The grass-roots activities of the Independent Labour Party have been the subject of increased scrutiny from historians over the past few years, especially in the pages of this journal. Consequently we can now be a little surer about the contribution of the party to the development of an independent labour movement in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, though with every fresh case-study a different local strategy seems to come to light. The one outstanding profile in this field is the closely observed account of the ILP in Bradford by J. Reynolds and K. Laybourn, who identify several key features in the party's growth in that city, notably the reformist nature of ILP socialism and the close associations with local trade unionism. “From the outset”, they tell us, “Bradford trade unionism and the Bradford ILP were seen as two aspects of a single homogeneous labour movement aimed at the emancipation of the working class from poverty and exploitation.”

The paper centers on the question of how widespread was the impact of the lively discussion of housing and household reform during the Weimar Republic. Therefore the focus is on the experiences of working-class women. Against the background of material conditions in proletarian households, it analyzes which norms and standards concretely shaped working women's everyday housework in the urban working-class milieu in the 1920s, and how these norms and standards arose. The paper demonstrates the substantial reservations and resistance with which even better-off working women approached all efforts at rationalizing their housework in the 1920s. They wanted better living conditions and new household appliances, but the vast majority could not afford both. The specific norms and standards against which a “good” housewife was measured, norms and standards which corresponded more to the “old” model of the “economical, clean and tidy” housewife, also blocked acceptance, however.

This paper discusses Pietro Gori’s charismatic leadership of the Italian anarchist movement at the turn of the nineteenth century and, in particular, the characteristics of his political communication. After a discussion of the literature on the topic, the first section examines Gramsci’s derogatory observations on the characteristics and success of the communicative style adopted by anarchist activists such as Gori. The second investigates the political project underpinning the kind of “organized anarchism” that Gori championed together with Malatesta. The third section unveils Gori’s communication strategy when promoting this project through those platforms considered by Gramsci as being primary schools of political alphabetization in liberal Italy: trials, funerals, commemorations, and celebrations. Particular attention is devoted to the trials, which effectively demonstrated Gori’s modern political skills. The analysis of Gori’s performance at the trials demonstrates Gramsci’s mistake in identifying Gori simply as one of the champions of political sentimentalism.

By investigating the place of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the cities of the Atlantic world, this article explores many of the themes of this Special Issue across empires, with an emphasis on the Americas in the late eighteenth century, the eve of abolition. The article finds that, in nearly every manual occupation, slaves were integrated with free laborers and, not infrequently, slaves who had reached the level of journeyman or master directed the work of free apprentices. The limited number of slave insurrections in cities may be explained by the fact that they often worked semi-independently, earning money to supplement the livelihood provided by the master, or sometimes almost entirely on their own. To them, city life offered advantages that would have been inconceivable for their rural counterparts, especially the scope of autonomy they enjoyed and the possibilities to secure manumission.

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.

Coalmining in Brazil began in the mid-nineteenth century in the municipality of São Jerônimo, Rio Grande do Sul, the country’s southernmost state. European workers were brought in and joined Brazilian workers, mostly local peasants with no experience in mining. This article discusses the role played by the immigrants in the making of a working class in the coalfields of southern Brazil. The research on which this article is based draws on numerous sources, including lawsuits and the application forms used to request professional licences. It focuses on ethnic and racial ambiguity, and on political strategies. The identity of the miners in the region is commonly represented as an amalgam of all ethnic groups, but this article shows that this self-propagated solidarity and cohesion among workers had its limits.

This article traces the chequered history of the reception of E.P. Thompson in postwar Japan and tries to assess what kind of impact his thoughts and ideas had on the Japanese intellectual world. In so doing, this article will draw on interviews with several academics in Japan from various generations as well as written documents. The article begins with a survey of postwar left-wing politics in Japan, against which background Thompson was introduced as a New Left thinker. It also considers the National History Movement, whose problematic legacy seemed to condition the reception of The Making of the English Working Class in Japan in the 1960s. After exploring the limited reception of The Making among Japanese historians, we witness the more favourable reception of the concept of “moral economy”. The article demonstrates that the rather awkward history of the reception of E.P. Thompson in Japan cannot be understood without referring to the postwar concerns of Japanese intellectuals, concerns that changed fairly dramatically in the course of time.

At the University of Pisa, where he studied law, Buonarroti had been acquainted with the i8th century social philosophers especially Helvetius, Mably, Rousseau and Morelly, who had moulded his social and political ideology. When the French Revolution broke out he was among the most courageous protagonists to defend its ideas: “J'attendais depuis longtemps le signal, il fut donné”. In October 1789 he left his native Tuscany, “ivre de l'amour de la liberté, épris de la courageuse entreprise des Français, indigné centre la tyrannic, et las de l'inquisition et des persécutions du despotisme”, as he said later in his defence at Vendôme. In Corsica he published an Italian paper in defence of the French Revolution, the Giornale Patriottico, and in November 1790 he obtained a post in the administration of the island as head of the “Bureau des domaines nationaux et du clergé”. In this capacity he had to deal with the administration and sale of landed property. The rural economy of the island was based on a nearly equal distribution of very small holdings, there were hardly any labourers, and there existed a strong tradition of common interests and collective rights. In his Survey of Corsica Buonarroti wrote: “La communalité des biens semble garantir partout au pauvre le sentiment de son indépendance: partout les communes des campagnes réclament des biens que la tyrannic génoise et française ravit au peuple pour récompenser les crimes de ses favoris. Les grands propriétaires sont en très petit nombre: l'homme sans terre est rare, comme celui sans courage”.

Im Paragraphen 2 der Misère de la philosophie führt Marx in der Polemik gegen Proudhon drei Titel von englischen „Sozialisten” an, in denen längst vor Proudhon „die egalitäre Anwendung der Ricardoschen Theorie” vorgeschlagen worden sei:

Nous pourrions citer à M. Proudhon: l'Économie politique de Hopkins, 1822; William Thompson: An Inquiry into the Principles of the distribution of wealth, most conducive to human happiness, 1824; T. R. Edmonds: Practical, moral and political Economy, 1828; etc., etc., et quatre pages d'etc.

The career of Ricardo Flores Magón, the foremost Mexican anarchist of the twentieth century, involves a curious paradox. On the one hand, he must be counted among the leading inspirers and martyrs of the Mexican Revolution. His movement, embodied in the Partido Liberal Mexicano, set in motion the forces that, in May 1911, drove Porfirio Díaz into exile; and his journal, Regeneración, which in the early stages of the Revolution reached a circulation of nearly 30,000, played an important part in rousing Mexican laborers, rural as well as urban, against the Díaz dictatorship and in pushing the Revolution in a more egalitarian direction than it might otherwise have taken. Under the banner of “Land and Liberty”, the Magonista revolt of 1911 in Baja California established short-lived revolutionary communes at Mexicali and Tijuana, having for their theoretical basis Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread, a work which Flores Magón regarded as a kind of anarchist bible and which his followers distributed in thousands of copies. Today the memory of Flores Magón is honored throughout Mexico. His remains rest in the Rotunda of Illustrious Men in Mexico City. In all parts of the country streets and squares bear his name, and Mexicans pay him homage as a great “precursor” of their Revolution, which was one of the major social upheavals of the twentieth century.

Wir wollen es keinem Leser verargen, wenn er befürchtet, daß ihn in diesem Aufsatz ein Kehraus der Kulturgeschichte erwartet. Hat die Disziplin nicht längst ihren Offenbarungseid geleistet und, was irgend an Werten greifbar war, an ihre Hauptgläubiger, z. B. an die Diszi-plinen Volkskunde und Geistesgeschichte abgetreten? Man wird es aber auch uns nicht verargen, wenn wir uns dagegen verwahren, das Thema einer Marotte halber gewählt zu haben und bei einer Art der Geschichtsbetrachtung und Geschichtsschreibung stehen geblieben zu sein, von der es schon zur Zeit Wilhelm Giesebrechts sarkastisch hieß, sie sei „eine Olla podrida von tausend Wunderlichkeiten”, und von der wir selbst behaupten, sie sei nicht erst durch eine wissenschaftliche Entwicklung überholt worden, sondern ihrem Wesen nach von Anfang an überholungsbedürftig gewesen. Obwohl wir diese Art Kulturgeschichte nicht im Sinn haben, wollen wir das Problem der Kulturgeschichte nicht ganz auf sich beruhen lassen. Denn da sie nun einmal schon zur Zeit Giesebrechts „ein so vieldeutiger und viel mißdeuteter Name” war, kann man sich nicht einfach dadurch sicherstellen, daß man darauf verweist, daß in der Epoche des Imperialismus die Kulturgeschichte, die sich in der baürgerlichen Gesellschaft vieler Anhänger erfreute, die aber vom Staat allenfalls gleichgültig betrachtet wurde und kaum über Lehrstühle verfügte, von der Politischen Geschichte, die nach der Gründung des Deutschen Reiches von der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft aufgewertet wurde, dem jungen nationalen Machtstaat vonnoten war und über zahlreiche Lehrstühle verfügte, in einem sehr ungleichen Kampf aus dem Felde geschlagen wurde. Genügte es, hierauf zu verweisen, so ließe sich nach dem Spruch: nomen est omen auf das allgemeine Los der Besiegten kommen und behaupten, die Kritik an der Kulturgeschichte sei bloße Kritik am Namen Kulturgeschichte, Kritik an einer ohnmächtigen und verdrängten Disziplin, Kritik, die Auswüchse statt der Sache selbst zur Zielscheibe nahm und fälschlich „eine Olla podrida von tausend Wunderlichkeiten” dem Gespött von Zunft, Verwaltung und Öffentlichkeit preisgab, während beispielsweise einem Lamprecht doch nur etliche Schludrigkeiten und Irrtümer nachzusagen waren. Ist aber nicht Dietrich Schäfer, der Herold der triumphierenden Politischen Geschichtsschreibung, in-zwischen mit seinem ganzen System, aller Stichhaltigkeit des Détails ungeachtet, hinfällig und anrüchig geworden?

On p. 116 the following item was omitted:

Heimann, Eduard. Vernunftglaube und Religion in der modernen Gesellschaft. Liberalismus, Marxismus und Demokratie. [Ver-öffentlichungen der Akademie für Gemeinwirtschaft, Hamburg]. J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tübingen 1955. xiv, 315 pp. According to the author the cultural crisis of the Western world is characterized by the failure of individualism and collectivism, which are the fruits of — optimistic — Rationalism. Only a higherlevel synthesis between the two — in the form of a democracy on a Christian basis which combines personal freedom with social justice — offers a way out. This thesis is elaborated in a generally lucid and well-founded argument, dealing with 19th-century liberalism and with Marxism, especially with a view to developments in Russia. In the last part of his book the author outlines the manner in which the aforementioned synthesis should theoretically and practically be brought about. He shows himself strongly influenced by the ideas of Reinhold Niebuhr.

This essay is animated by a single, seemingly simple, question: “What has happened to Soviet labor and working-class history?” The obvious answer is that it went the way of the Soviet working class. But to attribute changing scholarly interests or emphases to recent or contemporary Russian politics is too simplistic. It ignores too many other factors that impinge on why and how we study what we do. While the near disappearance of class from post-Soviet discourse certainly has had an impact on Western historians, I would suggest that both broader and narrower trends have been at work shaping our scholarly agendas. In 1990, just as the Soviet Union was in its last throes, Leo van Rossum published in this very journal an outstanding omni-review of “Western Studies of Soviet Labour during the Thirties”. A few years further on, “in the cold light of the post-Soviet dawn”, Ron Suny and I searched Soviet history for its working class. It is time once again to revisit this terrain.

This article questions the prevalent assumption that prior to 1914 the Irish in Britain were unquestioningly attached to the Liberal party. It suggests that Home Rule forced the Irish into wider political sympathies which embraced both radical Liberalism and Labour. The Irish in Manchester are highlighted and the “progressive” nature of local Nationalism described. It is also denied that the transfer of Irish loyalties to Labour was proof of the emergence of a class politics or of their integration into the unskilled working-class. It is suggested that this was, in fact, evidence of their continued cultural and political distinctiveness.