This article is concerned with the relationship which existed between Manchester's parliamentary candidates and their involvement with local charities. Both of these areas, “charity” and “parliamentary elections” formed distinct fields of activity, each with their own structures and each producing a particular set of dispositions. Success depended on the individual's habitus and having the right degree of personal or cultural capital. In the mid to late Victorian period parliamentary candidates were meant to possess the qualities of a local leader. The election field determined the need to prove fitness to represent the local community. Part of the criteria for this included involvement with local charities. This suggested moral worth and firm commitment to the area. The charity field provided a particular type of status for the individual. This article will explore the relationship between the two fields of activity and how entering the election field determined the need to also enter the charity field to provide the individual with its vital dispositions.

On 15 June 1999 our colleague and friend Leo van Rossum died of the consequences of a heart attack. Leo had – often unbeknownst to readers – played a major role in the development of the International Review of Social History. As a member of the Editorial Board for over three decades (from 1964 to 1995), he enhanced the journal's quality immeasurably through his stimulating suggestions and meticulous critiques of texts.

As a staff member of Amsterdam's International Institute of Social History (which issues the Review), Leo van Rossum ran the east-European activities for many years. He collected archives, arranged scholarly publications and advised countless researchers who approached him. His impressive command of languages (in addition to Dutch, French, German, English, and Spanish, he knew Russian, Polish, Serbo-Croat, Czech, Romanian, and Bulgarian), his vast knowledge of east-European social history, and his considerable charm repeatedly left a deep impression.

The rescue of east-European archives may have been Leo's greatest achievement. Over time he preserved many documents that might otherwise have been lost, especially of left-wing opposition movements and persons. After the changes of 1989–1990 Leo was deeply involved in the fate of archives in danger of being neglected.

This article challenges the view that the English East India Company was unable effectively to dominate society in the colonial metropolis of Madras before the end of the eighteenth century. Instead it is argued that colonial interventions, even into the social organization of labour, were persistent in goals and methods and acquired institutional forms in the latter half of the century. Hence an early colonial labour policy is clearly discernible. The ruling block's strategies concerning the regulation of labour were not based on laissez-faire ideas but rather on a paternalistic brand of contemporary English social theory. This ideological disposition found practical expression in interventions into the city's labour relations by means of various “police committees”. Moreover, British legal techniques were used to regulate labour relations in Madras. On the whole, early colonial labour policy was distinguished from contemporary practices in Britain by a far higher level of coercion.

This article examines the ways in which working practices and workloads changed in the course of British industrialization by tracing the experience of one group of skilled workers: iron forgemen. A well-established historiographical tradition assumes that workers were subjected to a more burdensome discipline during the Industrial Revolution. However, empirical studies of workplace practice in early industrial Britain are scarce, and those few studies that have been attempted stress the continuity of workers' experience. But this study argues for discontinuity, exploiting a range of data on the output levels achieved by individual forge crews c. 1750–c. 1850 to identify substantial increases in the burdens imposed upon forgemen.

Since 1981, nuptiality has been identified as the main driver of rapid eighteenth-century English population growth. Over the course of the long eighteenth century, “national” rates of female non-marriage declined while female age at first marriage fell by roughly three years, reaching 22–23 years by the 1820s. The cumulative impact of more and earlier marriage on fertility is believed to have greatly outweighed the effect of falling mortality in generating aggregate population growth. Such a perspective has not gone unchallenged. There have been persistent calls for the re-examination of the place of urban demography within this framework. Concern has also been voiced over the sources which underpin the family reconstitutions on which calculations of marriage ages are based, the technique of family reconstitution itself, and over the representativeness of the marriage samples which family reconstitution yields. However, the most recent work of the Cambridge Group, based upon twenty-six family reconstitutions, appears to confirm the centrality of marriage ages to the English demographic system. Percentile distributions of marriage ages suggest that over the course of the eighteenth century there was an important decline in the proportion of marriages undertaken by women in their late twenties and thirties, more than balanced by the development of an early marrying group in their late teens.

International migration has flowed and ebbed in two long waves over the last two hundred years. The major determinants of international migration have been the economy and the state. The economic forces impinging on migration are demography, technology, the level of wages, and geographical proximity, transportation, and communications. The state is the confluence of social and political forces within countries which define, encourage or curtail, and regulate movement across borders. The lesson of the nineteenth-century migration system is that states created it or allowed it to happen. They also always had the power to end it, and they eventually did. The huge break in the history of migration which accompanied the era of the world wars points to the decisive power of the state to control migration and, by extension, the direction of economic development itself. The present article reviews the major phases of the history of modern migration in order to put the present crossroads in perspective.

This 1999 Supplement of the International Review of Social History focuses on complicating central concepts in the understanding of economic and social history: class, gender, race and ethnicity. In concentrating on industrial workers, their politics, and institutions, labor and working-class history had tended to ignore gender, race, and ethnicity as discursive and material forces. It discussed the woman or black or immigrant worker as a subset of worker, assumed to be male, white, and of the dominant national or ethnic group. Only during recent years have historians began to ask how gender, race, and ethnicity as categories of analysis change narratives of class formation and working-class experience. This question has become particularly salient as the European Union and the United States seek to grapple with the human consequences of colonial and imperialist legacies both within and beyond national boundaries in an increasingly global economy.

“No nation is supposed to be so advanced as the British nation, no race so progressive as the white”, declared Cotton's Weekly, the newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Canada. “BUT HERE IN TORONTO NO CHINESE, NO HINDOOS, NO JAPS, NO INDIANS, NO BLACKS, NO FOREIGNERS NEED BE IMPORTED. WHITE GIRLS AND MEN OF BRITISH BIRTH BREAK THE STRIKES.” It was 1911. The newspaper was commenting on strike-breaking by “white” workers during a strike at a Toronto garment factory where male and female Jews had walked out. The newspaper compared this with cases out West: “In British Columbia when miners rise up in rebellion against the shameful conditions, Chinese are brought into the mines. In this and other western provinces, Japs, Hindoos, and Indians fill the places of the white toilers because they live on cheaper food and under such intolerable conditions no white people can stand it.”

When Dr Johnson made his famous eighteenth-century remark about second marriages being a triumph of hope over experience, his wit could easily have been directed toward the unions that Steven King has illuminated. It is never entirely clear why people marry or choose to marry the people they do, a situation that is as frustrating to historians as to friends and family. Marriage remains one of life's great mysteries, perhaps the last great mystery left to us. It fascinates and absorbs us, providing an inexhaustible audience for daytime soap operas and evening situation comedies. Romance novels top the fiction charts; and Hollywood returns to the theme time and again.

Marriage fascinates precisely because it is so unpredictable, so much beyond our control. One would think that the riskiness of the lottery of love would frighten, even repel, us, but instead we are drawn to it as a gambler is drawn to the slots or the track. Love is, like gambling, a form of “deep play”, which reveals things about ourselves that we can only discover when we move from the world of choice to the realm of chance. Today, marriage is often the central episode in the stories we tell when we try to explain ourselves to ourselves and to others. It is the most elaborately celebrated and ritualized of all the events of the adult life course, the source of our most precious images and memories. Marriage is simply enchanting.

This article examines the use of information by British trade unions to react to occupational change. Using a case study of the response to welding by the Boilermakers' Society, it looks at the barriers that prevented the use of information. It then examines the rise of trade union research departments. This leads to an outline of a framework for looking at the ways in which trade unions used information, based on their attitude towards their environment. The article suggests that an “information perspective” is a useful supplement to existing ways of examining trade union history which may shed new light on their development.

For at least the past twenty years, historians of pre-colonial Africa have studied gender and ethnic relations, but have focused on either gender or ethnicity without making reference to the other. This essay redresses this neglect by demonstrating that changes in gender and ethnic relations within pre-colonial Africa so profoundly influenced each other that it is impossible to understand one without also taking into consideration the other. Documenting this intersection requires more than simply reconstructing how ethnic groups (in their efforts to compete with others for social and political status) altered gender relations within their societies by handling differentially the affairs of their female and male members. It involves more than analyzing how those disadvantaged because of their gender used the prevailing ethnic relations to ameliorate their own situations, and how these actions in turn altered ethnic relations in the societies in which they lived. It requires as well that we reconceptualize the very definition of ethnicity.

This paper explores the relationship between social mobility and class formation in a working-class industrial suburb. By establishing the degree of class closure in three periods we can identify the relationship between the country's political history, dominated by the rise of a left-wing Labour Party, and the changing levels of closure. Labour established itself during a period of low mobility then stalled when mobility increased sharply in the 1920s. Comparison with the mobility rates for cities in other countries allows further analysis of the relationship between social structure and political behaviour. Our evidence indicates that voters were not unconscious of the shifting patterns of class rigidity.

On 1 August 1893, already feeling the pinch of economic downturn, management at the Pray, Small & Co. shoe factory in Auburn, Maine, posted new wages for its employees. Twelve days later, facing their first lower pay checks, female stitchers in the factory walked off their jobs. The union which represented the stitchers declared the shop non-union a week later and called for all of its members to join the stitchers' strike. Only about a dozen male workers answered this call, as the two most highly-skilled groups of male workers, the lasters and the shoe cutters, remained on the job. These workers belonged to their own separate unions, which had either already agreed to the new wage list (the cutters) or were in the middle of negotiations over it with the company (the lasters). It took the cutters another week before they decided to join the stitchers' action; it would take the lasters a month and a half and a citywide expansion of the strike to make the same decision.

Autobiographies and diaries have furnished many historians, including those who otherwise eschew qualitative data, with an apposite quote with which to launch their papers. Other historians select extracts from such sources to add colour to arguments advanced initially from the analysis of parish registers or court records. As a major source in their own right, diaries, autobiographies and letters provide the historian with valuable insights into the motivations, conscious or unconscious, of the authors. Such sources are less forthcoming on the perspectives and motivations of other persons whose activities feature in the written record as their motivations have to be teased out from the distorted and necessarily partial account of the author. Nor is it always easy to distinguish exceptional events in the life of a diarist from those which might have been experienced by persons of equivalent status or even more widely. The temptation is to overgeneralize on the basis of limited evidence.

Steven King in “Chance Encounters? Paths to Household Formation in Early Modern England”, has chosen to be particularly ambitious, selecting a limited number of diaries and autobiographies to challenge the applicability of the widely held association between the accumulation of economic resources and age at marriage and the claim that couples in deciding to marry assessed the state of their current resources and their future prospects. From this base Dr King launches a further set of hypotheses concerning the involvement of parents in the choice of their child's marriage partner, changes over time in the density and quality of contacts between kin and with neighbours, and the significance of these factors for the decline in the mean age at marriage in England over the course of the eighteenth century.

In post-colonial India labour was given the connotation of work in industry. The labourer as a social figure became linked to the modern economy, a direction in which Indian society was to develop at a rapid rate. The agrarian–rural mode of life and work would soon fade away to be replaced by an industrial-urban order. The close association of labour economics with industrial employment was a logical consequence of this restructuring. The expectation of the transformation that was going to take place makes it understandable why authors of authoritative textbooks on the shape of the working class and the trade union movement were able more or less to ignore the non-industrial way of life of the large majority of the working population.

Rural–urban migration, which started long before Independence, has accelerated during the last half century. Only a small minority of that army of migrants has found work in the formal sector of the economy, however. The greater part of the urban population, both long-established and newcomers, are excluded from such employment. How, then, has this gradually increasing mass of people managed to earn a living? The answer is with work of very diverse character which provides very little stability taken over the year, even if continuous and full-time. The categorization of informal-sector employment is largely determined by the image evoked by Hart on launching the concept. Hart's description stressed the colourful cavalcade of petty trades and crafts that can be encountered while walking the streets of Third-World cities, including those of India: hawkers, rag-and-bone men, shoe cleaners, tinkers, tailors, market vendors, bearers and porters, drink sellers, barbers, refuse collectors, beggars, whores and pimps, pickpockets and other small-time crooks. In the 1970s and 1980s in particular, registration of this repertoire of work expanded enormously. A noticeable factor is that publications on the subject did not originate among conventional researchers into labour, who were interested mainly in formal-sector employment. The contents of leading professional journals, such as The Indian Journal of Industrial Relations and The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, show that, for the time being, that one-sided interest did not change.

Introduction of the Women's Reservation Bill was stalled in Lok Sabha on Monday amid unprecedented scenes of snatching of papers from the Speaker and the law minister and the virtual coming to blows of members […]. As the shell shocked minister stood rooted to the spot, the member tore the papers with relish and flung them in the air provoking members from the treasury benches to storm the well. By this time, the well of the Lok Sabha looked like a veritable battle field with members from both sides preparing for a scuffle as the Speaker adjourned the House for the day.

These two perceptive commentaries offer very different interpretations of the significance of the evidence presented in “Chance Encounters”. Crudely put, Richard Wall suggests that I have gone too far in placing chance, kinship and economic irrationality at the centre of my reconceptualization of marriage motivations. Individual calculation and economic motivation cannot be placed in the background of explanations of the individual or aggregate nuptiality experiences in an English context. By attempting to use autobiographical evidence to try and understand both the process of “getting married”and wider changes in marriage ages at the “national” level, I have written an article with two imperfectly related parts, and thus achieved neither end. Equally crudely put, John Gillis suggests that I have not gone far enough in my attempts at reinterpretation, and that I needed to talk more about the meaning of marriage ceremonies, contemporary understanding of the courtship process, and the role of Fortuna in the process of “getting married”. I shall consider all of these issues below. The one thing which unites the commentaries is a concern over sources, and it is apposite to use this question as a launch pad for restating and refining the analytical line opened in “Chance Encounters”.