Recent studies of Latin American indigenous intellectuals affiliated with social movements demonstrate that, while the hold that national intellectuals have as mediators between the state and civil society may be precarious, intellectuals from subordinated minorities are intermediaries between the national society and minority groups, successfully articulating ethnic strivings within national arenas and building ethnic discourses in local communities. But in order to comprehend the success of indigenous intellectuals, it is necessary to inquire into how their discourse is developed internally. To achieve this, we must pay close attention to the heterogeneity of the indigenous movement, in which an array of different types of intellectuals interact and debate issues in a range of ethnic organizations. This article explores the complexities of the negotiation of ethnic discourse by intellectuals within the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca, a Colombian indigenous organization, focusing on a conflict in which indigenous cultural activists and politicians are at loggerheads over the nature of indigenous political autonomy.

The concept of the second slavery radically reinterprets the relation of slavery and capitalism by calling attention to the emergence of extensive new zones of slave commodity production in the US South, Cuba, and Brazil as part of nineteenth-century industrialization and world-economic expansion. This article examines the conceptual framework and methodological procedures that inform this interpretation. It reformulates the concept of the capitalist world-economy by emphasizing the mutual formation and historical interrelation of global–local relations. This open conception of world-economy permits the temporal-spatial specification of the zones of the second slavery. In this way, it is possible both to distinguish the new zones of the second slavery from previous world-economic zones of slave production and to establish the ways in which they are formative of the emerging industrial world division of labor. From this perspective, analysis of sugar production in Jamaica, Guyana, and Cuba discloses spatial-temporal differences between what would otherwise be taken as apparently similar historical-geographical complexes. This comparison demonstrates how world-economic processes produce particular local histories and how such histories structure the world-economy as a whole. This approach locates the crisis of slavery during the nineteenth century in the differentiated response to processes of world accumulation, rather than the incompatibility of slave production with industrialization and open, competitive markets. More generally, it calls attention to the continuity of forms of forced labor in the historical development of the capitalist world-economy and to the ways that processes of capitalist development produce social-economic differentiation and hierarchy on a world scale.

All disciplines and sub-disciplines are defined through a series of inclusions and exclusions. They are based on specific assumptions and conventions that delineate their appropriate objects and methods of study. Historians, like scholars in other fields, including the so-called “natural sciences”, do not simply record some objective reality that exists independently of their taken-for-granted ideas about the nature of that reality. Rather, their decisions as to which subjects and events will be objects of study and how they will be conceptualized are shaped both by widely accepted philosophical tenets and common-sense understandings of the nature of human society.

Over the past forty years, the social struggles of the “long 1960s” have been continuously reinterpreted, each interpretation allocating a new mix of relevance and irrelevance to the brief global uprising. This article is a contribution to one such interpretation: the small but growing body of literature on the central importance of experiments with democracy within movements of the 1960s. Rather than examining the transformative effect of 1960s movements on institutional politics or popular culture, this article examines the lasting transformation 1960s movements had on social-movement praxis. Based on seven years of ethnography within contemporary global movement networks, I argue that when viewed from within social-movement networks, we see that the political legacy of the 1960s lies in the lasting significance of movement experiments with democracy as part of a prefigurative strategy for social change that is still relevant today because it is still in practice today.

In an earlier article in these pages I examined the origins of the price-control legislation of the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, suggesting that it ought, most properly, to be regarded not as a revolutionary innovation, but rather as the re-emergence in a new environment of an old and well-established tradition of popular action to fix fair market prices, and thus maintain living standards, by riot and demonstration. At the same time, and in passing, I indicated briefly that a similar tradition existed in 18th-century England, if anything more strongly marked and more widespread than in France itself. The present article will be concerned with a discussion of the significance of this English tradition.

Investigations into uses of humour associated with the militant suffrage campaign of the Women's Social and Political Union have been largely concerned with the satirizing of suffragettes. The uses that suffragettes themselves made of humour as a considered political tactic have been less considered. This paper explores three ways in which suffragettes turned humour to their advantage during their campaign: by deliberately adopting “silly” behaviours as a counterpoint to over-formal and male dominated Edwardian politics; by quick-witted retorts to hecklers who sought to disrupt suffragette meetings and finally as a means of venting private political dissent and alleviating some of the stresses of hectic political campaigning. The exploration of humour within the WSPU's work reveals some of the links between humour and social protest in the early twentieth century, and considers the extent to which its use in public political behaviour might be gendered.

For hundreds of thousands, the naval wars of the 1790s meant shock proletarianization at sea. Unprecedented numbers of men – many without previous experience of the sea, many of them foreign-born – were forced into warships and made to work under the threat of savage violence. Desertion rates reached previously unimaginable levels as men fled ships and navies. The greatest wave of naval mutiny in European history followed in their wake. Hundreds of crews revolted, sometimes paralyzing whole fleets in the midst of the annual fighting season. This article considers the struggles in the French, Dutch, and British navies, concluding that the key development that precipitated the sudden explosion of mutiny was the internationalization of Europe’s lower decks.

This article proposes a biographical approach to the study of anarchist activism, applied to the French journalist, editor, theorist, novelist, educator, and campaigner Jean Grave, one of the most influential figures in the French and international anarchist movement between the late 1870s and World War I. Adopting a relational approach delineating Grave’s formal and informal connections, it focuses on the role of print in Grave’s activism, through the three papers he edited between 1883 and 1914, and highlights his transnational connections and links with progressive circles in France. Due to the central place of both Grave and his publications in the French anarchist movement, this biographical and relational approach provides a basis to reassess the functioning and key strategic orientations of French anarchist communism during its “heroic period” (1870s–1914), by stressing its transnational ramifications and links beyond the anarchist movement.

In the exciting new social history of the 1960s the concept of class struggle tended to underpin much of the work on the working class in general, and on various labour groups in particular. Historians sought to find faces in crowds and to rescue others from “the enormous condescension of posterity”. The police, however, when they appeared in this history, were usually as nameless and faceless as the crowds had been previously. They were also commonly portrayed as oppressors, and even in the more perceptive and ground-breaking attempts to explore the police themselves, they were seen through the refracted lens of their working-class critics as “blue locusts” and as a bourgeois instrument for controlling a new society. Parallel research conducted at roughly the same time by sociologists, social psychologists and others developed theoretical perspectives based on two assumptions: first, that certain kinds of authoritarian personality were attracted to police careers, and second, that policing roles had predictable effects on the behaviour and personality of policemen. Subsequent research has suggested these assumptions to be largely unfounded, yet in this respect also, historical explorations of policemen as workers remain few.

Recent literature on radical movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has re-cast this period as a key stage of contemporary globalization, one in which ideological formulations and radical alliances were fluid and did not fall neatly into the categories traditionally assigned by political history. The following analysis of Charlotte Wilson's anarchist political ideas and activism in late Victorian Britain is an intervention in this new historiography that both supports the thesis of global ideological heterogeneity and supplements it by revealing the challenge to sexual hierarchy that coursed through many of these radical cross-currents. The unexpected alliances Wilson formed in pursuit of her understanding of anarchist socialism underscore the protean nature of radical politics but also show an over-arching consensus that united these disparate groups, a common vision of the socialist future in which the fundamental but oppositional values of self and society would merge. This consensus arguably allowed Wilson's gendered definition of anarchism to adapt to new terms as she and other socialist women pursued their radical vision as activists in the pre-war women's movement.

Research undertaken over the last generation has greatly enhanced our understanding of the survival strategies of the labouring poor in early modern Europe. Under economic conditions where poverty was endemic, most families were forced to take to various forms of work and to draw on whatever forms of income were available. Whether among small peasants, proto-industrial producers, landless labourers or casual workers, their mere subsistence depended on the effort of as many family members as possible. Women's and children's work were the norm well into the nineteenth century, and their contribution to the family income greater than previously assumed. There were, nevertheless, many who could not make ends meet. The reasons for which people had to turn to others for help are legion: structural, cyclical or seasonal unemployment and underemployment; insufficient earnings and debts; illness and accidents; death within the family. A lot of assistance was informal and went through networks of kinship, neighbourhood and local community. Friendly societies provided rudimentary forms of collectively-organized support. Some state or municipal agencies supplying poor relief and charitable institutions offered assistance of various types, but most of it was meagre and combined with social control of the clients. It is no wonder, therefore, that many people took to begging, prostitution or petty crime.

In Asia Minor in the Second Century B.C., an ephemeral revolutionary regime held sway which has been variously hailed as the first volley of Marxism or the last stand of Cloudcuckooland. Since Aristonicus did not hesitate to openly proclaim class warfare against the bourgeoisie of Pergamum, even restrained scholars label his City of the Sun as a “proletarian state”. Ironically, though he challenged the majesty of Rome, Aristonicus won the support of Blossius of Cumae, the Stoic adviser of Tiberius Gracchus and the ideologue of the Roman reformers, who would perish in the debacle of the Pergamene revolution.

In the years before and immediately after World War I, gendered and racialized bodies at work became the focus of debate and discussion in France amongst an informal alliance of engineers, doctors, scientists, employers, workers, and the state. Seduced by the promise of “modernity”, and the seemingly endless possibilities of science and mechanization, the state attempted to modernize public services and employers sought new ways to discipline labor for greater productivity. Both mobilized rationalization – Taylorism and work science – in the service of greater efficiency and in an effort to identify the allegedly “natural” qualities that made gendered and racialized workers suitable for certain kinds of jobs and would exclude them from others. A not insignificant dimension of this project lay in how French work scientists began to envision the potential uses of gendered French and colonial labor. The development of the French North-African and Indochinese colonial empires around the turn of the century heightened attention to racialized difference. World War I had opened the opportunity to use racialized colonial bodies, both on the military front and in the factory. Thinking about race and gender characteristics continued to influence work science and its applications in the 1920s and 1930s. Work scientists' experiments to ascertain the physical endurance of colonial male workers and white workers underscored the durability of gender meanings i n dealing with white French workers and the instability of those meanings in assessing the abilities of workers of color.

Does intra-national migration matter for partner choice? A number of conflicting hypotheses on the effects of migration on the likelihood of endogamy according to social class of origin are formulated and tested on the French historical record over the past two centuries. We conclude that migrants were less likely to marry endogamously, especially if they migrated from rural villages to cities; this is explained mainly by the fact that they thereby escaped the social pressure of their parents and peers and met more people from different social backgrounds. Contrary to what we expected, the relationships between migration characteristics and endogamy changed hardly at all over the two centuries. We also investigated whether temporal differences in endogamy could be explained partly by changes in migration patterns. We found that they could. The increase in the number of men and women living in or moving to cities was one particularly important cause of the decreasing likelihood of endogamy. Finally, we were interested in the possible bias in regional studies on endogamy. Our results show that this bias is especially large if these regions include only rural areas or cities. This is because the likelihood of endogamy differs between rural areas and cities, and is also especially low for people who move between these two types of region.

In 1770 a British official in Madras observed groups composed of men, women, and children who formed “a kind of travelling community of their own under a species of Government peculiar to themselves, with laws and customs which they follow and observe wherever they go”. These itinerant, coveted groups of earth and stone workers – “even courted by Princes” – circulated from worksite to worksite where they dug tanks (small reservoirs), ditches, and wells, and built roads and fortifications. They lived close to their worksites in “temporary hutts which they throw up for the occasion, and always chuse a spot distinct from any village, wandering from one place to another as is most convenient”.

This article analyses women's work in the Dutch textile industry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries within the framework of dual (or segmented) labour market theory. This theoretical framework is usually applied to the modern labour market, but it is also valuable for historical research. It clarifies, for example, how segmentation in the labour market influenced men's and women's work in the textile industry. Applying this analysis, we find that, even in periods without explicit gender conflict, patriarchal and capitalist forces utilized the gender segmentation of the labour market to redefine job status and labour relations in periods of economic change. Although this could harm the economic position of all women and migrants, it appears that single women were affected most by these mechanisms.

The Nieboer-Domar hypothesis has proved to be a powerful tool for identifying the economic conditions under which slavery was more likely to emerge as a dominant form of labour. It states that in cases of land abundance and labour shortages the use of slavery was likely to become a vital alternative means of increasing production. These conditions have been identified for large parts of pre-colonial and semi-colonial Africa. The Nieboer-Domar hypothesis has been used by a number of historians and economic historians to analyse the role of slavery and bonded labour in Africa. The hypothesis is not, however, uncontested. Scholars have criticized it on both theoretical and empirical grounds. This article discusses the validity of the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis using the eighteenth-century Cape Colony as our point of departure. We show that the hypothesis holds in part, but also that it needs to be modified. First, slavery emerged as an urban phenomenon. Second, the use of slaves increased in parallel with other forms of labour, and the role of slaves can be understood only in relation to a wide range of existing labour contracts. Once established, slavery came to play a significant role in facilitating increased production on the settler farms in the eighteenth century. Capacity for surplus production was the key factor, but why slavery became a major form of labour was partly a consequence of its existence in the urban areas and partly of how it could be combined with other forms of labour.

From the 15th to the 18th century Holland, the most urbanized part of the northern Netherlands, had a tradition of labour action. In this article the informal workers' organizations which existed especially within the textile industry are described. In the 17th century the action forms adjusted themselves to the better coordinated activities of the authorities and employers. After about 1750 this protest tradition disappeared, along with the economic recession which especially struck the traditional industries. Because of this the continuity of the transition from the ancien régime to the modern era which may be discerned in the labour movements of countries like France and England, cannot be found in Holland.