Social historians have quite frequently referred to the “silent masses” in history. They have thereby hinted at the problem that most preserved documents derive from a tiny elite. The great majority of the people, being illiterate, only very rarely left private letters, diaries, autobiographies and testaments, or official acts, charters, statistics, and reports. Besides the source problem, this view reflected concerns of structuralism and Marxism, both very fashionable among social historians up to the 1970s, who related the masses' interests to socioeconomic conditions. Ordinary people thus appeared rather as objects of economic structures than as subjects of historical processes. Though some German-speaking social historians integrated the anthropological category of “experience” into their studies in the 1980s, they assumed that ordinary people had interests in, and experiences of, but still no influence on historical processes. Merely local and reactive early modern social protest thus remained historically unimportant – in sharp contrast to the nineteenth-century working class movement. During the 1990s, studies of social conflict focused on the concept of agency and discussed the influence historical actors had on processes such as modernization.

The “Brenner Debate” launched by Past and Present in 1976 was about “agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe”. Robert Brenner's recent book, Merchants and Revolution, has opened a new front in the debate by introducing merchants and “commercial change” into the equation. Although the book's massive Postscript carefully situates Brenner's analysis of commercial development in the context of his earlier account of the agrarian transition from feudalism to capitalism, this is unlikely to foreclose debate about how, or even whether, his more recent argument about the role of merchants in the English revolution can be squared with the original Brenner thesis. What is at issue here is not just divergent interpretations of historical evidence but larger differences about the nature of capitalism. The following argument has more to do with the latter than with the former, and it will be concerned with Brenner's work and the debates surrounding it not just for their own sake but for what they reveal about the dominant conceptions of capitalism, in Marxist and non-Marxist histories alike.

The advent and expansion of trans-oceanic shipping aboard wooden, wind-powered vessels between India and Europe created uniquely onerous working conditions for the Indian seamen who volunteered to labour aboard – conditions distinct from either coastal or land-based employment in either India or Europe. Indian (and European) seamen on such vessels may have been “free labour” prior to boarding ship, but they were in many respects “unfree labour” while at sea. They were unable to change jobs, to vary the amount of labour extracted from them, to increase the compensation or necessities provided, or to quit – in short, to do much to improve their working conditions generally. They sailed for uncertainly long periods of time, confined to constricted, unhealthy spaces and limited diet, almost constantly facing the various dangers of the open sea under the virtually unavoidable, unrelenting, and unalterable hierarchic authority and often brutal physical discipline of European officers.

Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the Italian “1977 Movement” in its conflict with the grey, humourless political system was its use of irony to ridicule its opponents. Irony was central to the identity of the movement and its cultural and political break with the institutional old and vanguardist new lefts. Its use, particularly by the “Metropolitan Indians”, the transversalists and other “creatives”, marked a social revolt by mainly marginalized young people, who invented a new political counter-culture based on linguistic experimentation in circumstances far from the optimism of 1968. The paper, based directly on primary sources from the movement and on interviews with former participants, reassesses a movement usually characterized as “violent” by Italianist social history. It concludes that the movement's “ironic praxis” contributed to a fundamental change in Italian society in the late seventies and has influenced the political style of contemporary alter-globalist and anti-capitalist movements.

Event-structure analysis (ESA) is a member of a family of formal analytic procedures designed to analyze and interpret text, in particular the temporal sequences constituting the narrative of a historical event. Its basic purpose is to aid the analyst in “unpacking” an event – that is, in breaking it into constituent parts – and analytically reconstituting it as a causal interpretation of what happened and why it happened as it did. ESA focuses on and exploits an event's “narrativity” – its temporal orderliness, connectedness and unfolding – thereby helping historians and social scientists infer causal links between actions in an event, identify its contingencies and follow their consequences, and explore its myriad sequential patterns. Unlike most other formal analytical techniques, it is completely non-numeric and non-statistical: ESA's value is largely heuristic and centered on how it relentlessly probes the analyst's construction, comprehension and interpretation of the event.

This article examines the revival of Sufism and mysticism by the Sindhi separatist movement in South Pakistan. It explores the emergence of a network of young intellectuals from rural and mostly peasant background, and focuses on two pioneers of Sindhi nationalism and Sufi revivalism: G.M. Syed and Ibrahim Joyo. Influenced by Gandhian as well as Marxist ideas on social reform and national identity, these two leaders transformed the annual urs celebration at local shrines into commemorations of the martyrs of Sindh. The article traces their relationship as well as their pioneering role as political leaders, education reformers, and teachers. Analysing their ideas as a particular form of Islamic reform, the article discusses the way they adapted and innovated existing cultural ideas on Islamic nationalism, ethnicity, and social justice.

As co-editor of this IRSH supplement “Uncovering Labour in Information Revolutions”, I have to begin this commentary with a confession. Before I entered the world of abstract knowledge production, commodification, and consumption known as academia, I was myself a worker in a world of much more concrete information processing: I was a computer programmer in the US from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, a time we might now consider the nostalgic heyday of desktop-office information technology (IT). In the spirit of full disclosure, before I leap into an analysis of how we might more broadly conceptualize information technology together with information labor in different historical contexts, I have decided to work through my own historical narrative a bit. After all, if historical practice teaches us nothing else, it teaches that each of us makes sense of the world through the lens of personal experience, leaving historians (among others) with the daunting task of interpreting, translating, and finding patterns of meaning in those experiences. Thus I offer this candid admission: “I was a teenage information worker!”

The early labour movements in Western Europe and North America were all dominated by urban artisans, a fact reflected most clearly at the programmatic level by the prominence of demands for producers' cooperatives. This article presents a proposal for and an extremely brief sketch of a comparative investigation of this first phase of the labour movement in England, France, Germany, and the United States. Different aspects of class formation, such as the economic situation of the trades, the social relationships within them, or the role of artisanal and corporate traditions in artisanal politics and trade-union organization, are discussed. Comparative labour history, it is argued, must employ such a theoretical framework, one that allows the integration of the many dimensions of class formation; otherwise it will have to sacrifice whatever progress the last generation of labour historians has achieved.

In comparative perspective, U.S. employers have been unusually hostile to unions. Their labor policies varied from one time and industry to another, however, in defiance of familiar interpretations of American “exceptionalism”. It is argued that before World War I, open shops and trade agreements represented different solutions for common labor problems. The timing of changes in technology and industrial structure relative to union growth determined which strategy would be more attractive to employers. This argument is developed by comparing one open shop industry (the machine trades) with its British counterpart and, more briefly, with some U.S. industries where trade agreements prevailed.

Historical truth, like other kinds of intellectual understanding, proceeds through argument and discussion. Thus, we should be grateful to Jonathan Zeitlin for his rigorous responses to a body of scholarship which he categorizes as “rank-and-filist”. Although much of Zeitlin's argument is unexceptional, its proposal to consign as erroneous and irrelevant the scholarship that fits his “rank-and-filist” paradigm requires some examination. Most troubling are the procedures he uses to make his case; the prescriptive advice he offers though not without merit is also highly problematic. I shall discuss these objections in a moment. But first we must define the problem as Zeitlin sees it.

This article examines social heterogamy as an indicator of “societal openness”, by which is meant the extent to which social origin, as defined by the social position of one's parents, is used as the main criterion for selection of a marriage partner. We focus on two topics. The role first of migration and then of occupational identity in this selection of a partner according to social origin. And in order to evaluate the true social and economic context in which spouses lived, we do not use a nationwide sample but rather choose to examine marriage certificates from eleven cities and villages in Belgium, both Flemish and Walloon, during the nineteenth century. By observing different patterns of homogamy according to social origin we show in this article that partner selection was affected by the relationship between migration, occupational identity and class structure. It seems difficult to interpret all these divergent patterns in terms of modernization. In our opinion the historical context creates a complicated set of conditions reflected in differences in the type and strength of migration and in the sectoral composition and evolution of the local economy. The whole exerts an influence over partner selection.

As “They Came in Ships” by the Guyanese poet Mahadai Das suggests, scholarship on indentured immigration is not an exclusively academic concern in Caribbean countries with sizeable Indian populations. An international conference on Indian diaspora held recently at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago, was not only covered by national news media, but also attended by Trinidadians (almost exclusively of Indian descent) unattached to the university, some of whom also contributed papers, helped to organize and run it. In Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, contestations over national identities are grounded in and self-consciously refer to a shared historical archive. This includes conventional, written material such as colonial administration records, newspapers, travelogues, and memoirs that reflect the concerns of privileged observers: government officials, reporters and editors, missionaries, labour activists, historians, anthropologists. It also includes memories and accounts of personal and group experiences by others in these societies, transmitted orally or through other popular media, and they all simultaneously and unevenly undermine as well as authorize each other.

An examination of the history of profit-sharing and co-partnership in England in the nineteenth century serves two purposes. One is to add to the growing body of evidence which contradicts the generalization that in the third quarter of the nineteenth century trade unionists were beginning to espouse the capitalist ethic; the other aim of this paper is to draw attention to one of three innovations in the history of labour relations in this period. Of these, both arbitration and conciliation, and cooperation have received considerable attention from historians, but profit-sharing and labour co-partnership schemes, which were forcefully canvassed by such prominent contemporary figures as G. J. Holyoake, respected veteran chartist, and George Potter, the influential labour leader, have not attracted the attention they deserve. The Royal Commission on Trade Unions in 1868 was chiefly concerned with the legal status of trade unions, yet in addition to their discussion of arbitration and conciliation the commissioners took evidence on the progress and achievements of profit-sharing and co-partnership. This reflected the existence of considerable interest in this subject at that time, which in turn provides evidence of the search by contemporaries for a solution to the growing problem of conflict between capital and labour, a matter which generated an extensive literature in the 1860s. The historical failure of profit-sharing, in terms of its limited growth and its lack of success as a method of improving labour relations, even compared with the progress of arbitration and conciliation, does not excuse the historian from neglecting a subject about which a number of influential contemporaries evidently felt strongly – though as it subsequently proved with excessive optimism. This article sets out to describe briefly the origins of the profit-sharing movement of the nineteenth century, proceeds to analyse the course of development, and finally examines its significance within the context of labour relations in England in the period 1850 to 1914.

The idea of a “labour aristocracy” pervades writing about the British working class of the second half, and especially the third quarter of the nineteenth century. This emphasis is, in my view, correct: the behaviour and consciousness of working people cannot be explained without some such concept of divisions within the working class. But this proposition has too often been allowed to conclude, rather than to commence the enquiry. The fragmentation of the manual working class into different strata and sub-cultures may take several forms, and is bound to have local and industrial variations. In approaching the problem it is necessary to draw a clear distinction between differences in the class situation of various groups of workers, and the formation of separate working class strata – a cultural and political process. Three main levels of analysis are relevant to this problem: the stratification within the working class, in terms of class situations (relative earnings, security, prospects and opportunities, position of subordination or autonomy in the workplace, and so on); the extent to which various strata of manual workers were distinguished by the cultivation of particular styles of life, and by commitment to particular sets of norms and values; and the consequences of these for institutions embodying the interest of manual workers as a class (unions, parties, etc.) and for the patterning of conflict and consensus in the society.

This article takes a global-historical perspective on all slaveries and slave trades (and contraband trading of human bodies) in relation to today's state of capitalist accumulation. It follows the different “national” schools of slavery research in different imperial traditions, as well as the sections of historical thinking stimulated through slavery research. Although legal ownership over humans does not exist any more, more women and men are in conditions of slavery today than in any other period of history since 1200. Against this background, the article criticizes the concentration in historiography on “hegemonic” slaveries (antique, Islamic, and American plantation slaveries) and proposes a focus on smaller “slaveries” all over the world (first of all of women and children), and on the agency of slaves and slave women, rather than on “great” slavery in a tradition of “Roman Law”.

To one familiar with the attitude of “near devotion” accorded the monarchy by the majority of Englishmen today, it may come as a shock to discover a lack of this devotion in mid-Victorian England. A sampling of comments from the radical press is a striking example. The regular arrival of Victoria's progeny evoked this impious suggestion in the Northern Star: That, rather than reciting national prayers of thanksgiving, congregations should sing “hymns of despair for their misfortune in being saddled with another addition to the brood of royal Cormorants.” The National Reformer referred to “our good kind, and dear Queen, who…could easily dispense with the allowance which her loyal subjects make her…unless she desires to be the last of England's monarchs…”

This article examines the civil war in central Uganda between guerrillas of the National Resistance Army and the government of Milton Obote between 1981 and 1986. Its central focus is the wartime experience of guerrilla fighters – men, women, and children. The material for the article has been collected through interviews with participants about their experiences. The interview partners described their motives and expectations as guerrillas as well as their perception of the reality of war “in the bush”. Their narratives differ from the victorious guerrilla's official history of the war and the guerrilla myth cultivated in that history, as they lack the subsequent certainty of victory and emphasize the fighters' disappointments and suffering. In this way, the method of oral history provides important points of departure for a social history of this war and allows us, at the same time, to differentiate and correct our current understanding of it in significant ways.

Worker resistance and employer conservatism in Britain are said to have combined to retard British economic development and frustrate the emergence of modern managerial structures based on Taylorism and/or Fordism. However, the notion of worker resistance is a deeply unsatisfactory one because it fails to distinguish different forms of resistance and their implications for the labour process. And if British employers were slow to abandon older tools and techniques, they nevertheless did so. Worker resistance secured better terms and conditions of employment but was incapable of altering in any fundamental way the new methods of organizing work and managing production.

In this paper we explore the hypothesis that monthly variation in white mob violence against blacks in the American South was affected by seasonal variation in the demand for labor in southern agriculture. Using monthly data on black lynchings that occurred between 1882 and 1930 we find that mob violence was more frequent during times of stronger labor demand than during slack periods. While the manifest function of lynchings might well have been to rid the white community of offending blacks who violated the moral order, we suggest that the latent function was to tighten the reins of control over the black population, especially during times when whites most needed black labor to work fields of cotton or tobacco.

Labour brokerage and its salient role in the mobility of workers across borders in Asia has been the subject of recent debate on the continuing usefulness of intermediaries in labour mobility and migration processes. Some researchers believe that labour brokerage will decline with the expansion of migrant networks, resulting in reduced transaction costs and a better deal for migrant workers. From an economic standpoint, however, reliance on brokers does not appear to have a “use-by date” in south-east Asia. Labour brokers have played an important role in organizing and facilitating officially authorized migration, particularly during the contemporary period. They undertake marketing and recruitment tasks, finance migrant workers’ travel, and enable transnational labour migration to take place. Consequently, both sending and destination states have been able to concentrate on their role as regulatory “agencies”, managing migration and ensuring compliance with state regulatory standards and providing labour protection. Private recruitment firms have simultaneously focused on handling the actual recruitment and placement of migrant workers. Notwithstanding this, the division of responsibilities in the migration regimes has also led to uncontrolled migration and necessitated intervention by the state during both periods. These interventions mirror the ethos of the times and are essential for understanding past and present political environments and transnational labour migration in south-east Asia.