„Mein Freund, Joh. Phil. Becker zu Biel, steht im Begriff gleich mir, ein Bürgerrecht im Kanton Bern nachzusuchen. Könnten Sie ihm dabei behilflich sein, so bitte ich Sie, es zu thun. Ich kenne keinen tüchtigeren Mann, an ihm wird der Kanton einen thätigen, kräftigen und hochherzigen Bürger gewinnen. Nach meiner Überzeugung wiegen alle Deutsche, die seit 3 Jahren Bürger in Bern geworden, diesen einen nicht auf.”

Of all the political and ideological debates which confronted the French Socialist movement between the Paris Commune and the Great War, the problem of anticlericalism was one of the most complex. The concept of anticlericalism gives rise to a certain degree of confusion, partly because of the fact that it was a war-horse ridden jointly by the radical republicans and by the Socialists. The simplest definition of anticlericalism is that offered by the dictionary of Robert: “opposition à toute immixtion du clergé dans la politique”.

During the two first centuries of Portuguese colonization in America there was an intense debate about the legitimacy of enslaving Africans and Indians. In Portuguese America, the mission to spread the Christian faith was connected with the subjection of populations on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean to an ideology that considered labour as God's punishment for Adam's sin. In that sense, the justification of the unfree labour inflicted upon Indians and Africans in Portuguese America was a product of the same ideology, one that condemned manual work as rendering a man dishonourable. The purpose of this article is to review the debate from its medieval origins in Portugal, and to examine what effect the arrival of the Jesuits in America had on that debate, until the final prohibition of Indian enslavement in the mid-eighteenth century, documented by letters, reports, and sermons.

This article analyses the changes in the organization of labour during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in colonial Charcas, present-day Bolivia, focusing on the role that different colonial authorities played in this process and its consequences. The Spanish took advantage of the pre-Hispanic organization of labour from the beginning of their conquest. However, in a colonial context, labour relations changed significantly, and the architect of those alterations was Viceroy Francisco de Toledo. We examine the transformations in mine labour carried out by the Spanish colonial polity; these had a significant effect not only on mining, but also on all labour relations in the southern colonial Andes.

In our reply to Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk’s “Big Questions and Big Data: The Role of Labour and Labour Relations in Recent Global Economic History”, we focus on her observations on the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations. We endorse many of her suggestions to connect global labour and economic history and to regard labour relations not only as a dependent variable. In fact, as the examples from various Collab workshops and publications show, some of these ideas are already being put into practice. These examples also show that if we seriously want to combine global labour and economic history data and join the debate on the growth (or decrease) in social inequality, workers’ individual and collective agency must be taken on board. Finally, we argue that global labour and economic historians can benefit most from each other’s disciplines by truly working together in collaborative projects, developing new theories, perhaps less grand than those with which economic historians attract so much attention, but more profound.

By analysing the first great railway strike in São Paulo (Brazil), this article aims to understand the role of the Companhia Paulista railway workers’ movement and its impact on labour relations in the São Paulo state. To that end, I have examined selected newspapers, the minutes of workers’ meetings, police investigations into the strike, and the reports of the Companhia Paulista's directors. Differing from the views of other historians who have tended to see the 1906 railway strike as a relatively inconsequential conflict about wages, I interpret it both as rooted in deeper grievances about labour conditions and as a starting point for a period of heightened militancy and changing labour-management relations.

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.

The change in the social background of university students in nineteenth-century Russia, and in particular the “arrival of the raznochinets”, to use Mikhailovskii's celebrated term, have long been considered a major turning-point in Russian social history and a watershed in the development of the revolutionary movement. Historians have often attributed to it the chief role in producing the evolution of ideological attitudes between the “Fathers” of the 1840's and the “Sons” of the 1860's and the upsurge in radical agitation in the universities on the eve of the Emancipation of the Serfs.

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.

More than 800,000 people were exiled to Siberia during the nineteenth century. Exile was a complex administrative arrangement that involved differentiated flows of exiles and, in the view of the central authorities, contributed to the colonization of Siberia. This article adopts the “perspective from the colonies” and analyses the local dimension of exile to Siberia. First, it underscores the conflicted nature of the practice by highlighting the agency of the local administrators and the multitude of tensions and negotiations that the maintenance of exile involved. Secondly, by focusing on the example of the penal site of Tobolsk, where exile and imprisonment overlapped, I will elucidate the uneasy relationship between those two penal practices during Russian prison reform. In doing so, I will re-evaluate the position of exile in relation to both penal and governance practice in Imperial Russia.

The US Constitution preserves the right of the people to petition the government for redress of grievances. This right allows individuals to request private legislation from Congress and, as such, private bill petitions involve individual claims or pleas for relief for a specified person, or persons. Private petitions to Congress fall into two principal categories: claims against the US government (e.g., claims stemming from automobile accidents with government vehicles) and relief from immigration and naturalization laws. Although private laws concerning immigration and naturalization have influenced later public legislation by highlighting areas in need of reform, the private laws have limited application. Other than serving as precedent for subsequent private legislation for similarly situated individuals making requests for enactment of private laws, the laws do not benefit anyone other than the named beneficiaries of the bills.

One of the most important aspects of late nineteenth century European intellectual life was the revival of Thomism, which enveloped the philosophical, social and political outlooks of Catholics. The great influence of the Neo-Thomistic intellectual current appears somewhat enigmatic in view of recent criticism of the methods and substantive propositions employed by turn of the century Thomistic philosophers. The very word “philosopher” might in fact be justifiably denied to many of these Neo-Thomists, since they seem to have forgotten too often that philosophy means asking questions. It is rare to see in their works a creative application of Thomistic ideas to the modern world. Instead, they attempted to fit modern society into a rigid, dogmatic framework of Thomistic principles. And if these principles turned out to be straightjackets, neither philosophy nor Aquinas, but only the Neo-Thomists are to blame. For Aquinas' philosophy, as Etienne Gilson and Ralph M. McInerny have recently pointed out, was an extremely creative adaptation of Aristotle's thought to medieval intellectual, social and political conditions, as well as to the principles of Christianity. Aquinas' method of continuous questioning stood in contrast to the dogmatism of most of his self-proclaimed disciples in modern times.

The history of working-class politics in Britain during the last hundred years might be written in terms of changing attitudes towards Liberalism; a Liberalism which was continuously redefining itself as its social composition altered and political circumstances changed. Successive generations of working-class leaders attempted both to identify themselves with Liberalism and to disengage themselves from it. Those who saw the political future of labour in terms of full incorporation within the Liberal party were never left unchallenged; those who believed in political independence rarely thought of that independence as involving a complete break with Liberal values. From the eighteen-sixties onwards the conflict between the desire to be assimilated and the urge to independence was continuously present within individuals as well as within movements.

This article discusses how residents of early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, defined vagrancy. Commentators on the 1890 Penal Code sought to explain the terms of the article related to vagrancy, article number 399, and its application. Evaristo de Moraes, a lawyer, essayist, and public intellectual at that time, similarly dedicated several works to this topic, as did journalists and literary writers who worked in the press. But these debates in the lettered realm were not isolated from the views and actions of average citizens, a phenomenon that one can observe by reading the criminal proceedings against women who were arrested for repeat offenses against anti-vagrancy laws. In the interventions and arguments of the accused and their defenders, it is possible to observe how vagrancy took on new meanings and how, over the course of time, the relationship between these women and the world of work evolved.

At the very beginning of the investigation, it is necessary to find a word to describe the European masses before the coming of the twin revolutions, the French and Industrial, that have contributed so much to the making of the modern world. “Proletariat” is clearly anachronistic; “wage-earners” is inadequate in a society where cash wages were far from being the most common form of payment for labor. “Working class” is too much identified with nineteenth century developments and, what is worse, conjures up an image of a homogeneous group that does not conform to eighteenth century realities. “Laboring poor” is by far the best, for it emphasizes two primary facts about the people with whom we are concerned: first, that, to one extent or another, they earned their living by doing manual labor, and, second, that they were being continuously impoverished, as Professor Labrousse has shown. The category has several virtues as a tool of historical analysis. It is large enough to take account of the complexities of eighteenth century social conditions, stressing the mobility and social intercourse that existed, albeit on a diminishing scale, between the master artisans and shopkeepers, their apprentices and journeymen on the one hand, and the domestics, beggars, criminals and floating elements in the population, on the other. Classes laborieuses and classes dangereuses lived side by side and recruited their personnel from one another. They did in fact form a whole, whom contemporaries called “les classes inférieures”. If we look toward the future, we see that the French Revolution Was to bring about a temporary split in their ranks by politicizing those among them who became the sans-culottes, and that the Industrial Revolution was to complete this division on other bases by allowing some of the laboring poor to become petty capitalists, While forcing the majority to become proletarians or to fall further still into the nether world of the lumpen-proletariat. In sum, the use of the concept of the laboring poor enables us to come close to the reality of eighteenth century paris and to watch the disagregation of that reality with the passage of time.