For decades after the socialist revolution, people in rural China continued to wear homespun cloth, and millions of rural women continued to spend a large part of their waking hours producing cloth and clothing. This is puzzling because the state opposed manual cloth production as wasteful of labor and raw materials, and because state monopolies should have ensured that all cotton ended up in the hands of the state and that all rural people were supplied with rationed machine-made cloth. This article looks at the reasons for the long survival of handloom cloth. These include the ways in which manual cloth production was integrated with rural gender norms and with a gift economy that prescribed the exchange of cloth at major life cycle events, and the existence of interlocking scarcities (of grain, cash, cotton, and cloth) that forced rural people to sell their cloth rations and make their own cloth from whatever cotton they could scrape together.

The essays in this volume aim to explain the evolution and persistence of various practices of indirect labour recruitment. Labour intermediation is understood as a global phenomenon, present for many centuries in most countries of the world, and taking on a wide range of forms: varying from outright trafficking to job placement in the context of national employment policies. By focusing on the actual practices of different types of labour mediators in various regions of the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and by highlighting both the national as well as the international and translocal contexts of these practices, this volume intends to further a historically informed global perspective on the subject.

This article seeks to explore from a new angle the massacre associated with the slave ship Zong – that is, the murder of around 130 slaves at sea in 1781. Hitherto, the massacre has been looked at largely in terms of the law, particularly insurance law, and the commercial logic of the British slave trade. This article gives due weight to the overriding concerns of commerce in the Zong atrocity, but it also explains it in terms of the culture and context of the selection of captives for the slave trade, a process in which ships' surgeons were prominent. It argues that this process habituated surgeons and captains – the Master of the Zong was both – to the possibility of death (at the hands of African controllers) of the captives they deemed unfit for the Atlantic slave trade. The article proposes that in the slave trade, medical expertise became yoked to the fateful decision of whether or not to accord commodity value to the captive. Where the surgeons decided to deny commodity value to a captive in the trade, he or she suffered “commercial death”, which was all too often followed by death itself.

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.

With the expansion of its territory in India in the first half of the nineteenth century, the British East India Company increasingly felt the need to widen postal networks and speed up communications. This essay looks at the crucial role of the dauriya (mail runner) in the development of postal networks by exploring the narratives around popular images of this “traditional” communication worker. Accounts of the lives of mail runners were interwoven with stories of their extraordinary physical strength and the dangers they negotiated along the way, their encounters with tigers, and their commitment to carry the imperial mail through rain and flood. Behind such narratives lay a history of regulations, a story of the making of a “modern” postal system. This entailed an effort to rationalize the system, calculating the speed of running, ensuring regularity, projecting estimated times of travel, and enforcing contracts. This essay aims to understand the logic of these changes, and the implications of these regulations.

This article argues that despite the different contexts of the Ottoman peasant uprisings in Vidin, Canik, and Kisrawan during the mid-nineteenth century, the attitudes and actions of peasants in the three revolts were remarkably similar. The moral economy of the peasants played an important role in determining their attitudes to the upper classes and to the state. During agrarian conflicts, the peasants received no support from outside but were well organized, used violence selectively, refused to pay taxes they deemed unfair, tended to radicalize, and preferred to deal with central instead of local authorities. Their preference for dealing with central authorities stemmed not from any naive monarchism, but from their realistic assessment of the local balance of power and a pragmatic desire to bypass it; and from their wish to have recourse to the moral authority of the sultan. The article will conclude that the rebels did not rise up against the Tanzimat reforms, nor did they simply misunderstand them; rather, they endorsed the reform programme, reinterpreted it through rumour, and strove to radicalize it.

This article argues that during the formative years of the colonial state in Ghana, European employers established new collaborative mechanisms with African intermediaries for the purpose of expanding the modern mining sector. They were forced to do so on account of severe labour-market limitations, resulting primarily from the slow death of slavery and debt bondage. These intermediaries, or “headmen”, were engaged because of their apparent affluence and authority in their home villages, from which they recruited mineworkers. However, allegiances between them and managers in the Tarkwa gold mines considerably slowed the pace towards free labour. Indeed, a system in which managers reinforced economic coercion and repressive relationships of social dependency between Africans, allocating African labour contractors fixed positions of power, resulted from the institutionalization of purportedly traditional processes of labour recruitment into the modern market.

This article analyses the religious aspects of Spanish republicanism of the 1830s and 1840s. From the case of Catalonia, the most industrialized region of Spain, it is concluded that radical liberalism elaborated a synthesis of freedom and religion that was presented as an alternative to traditional religiosity. Re-elaborating old myths popular during the War of Independence of 1808–1814, in addition some liberals and republicans presented their political project in millenarianist terms. This millenarianism was due to the radicalism with which they interpreted the confrontation with political opponents, one of whom was the established Church. It follows that the religiosity and millenarianism exhibited by these republicans also involved a strong anti-clericalism. At the same time, in the political and cultural context of Spain, these proposals were not seen by their followers as a negation of divinity but as its truest expression.

This article examines the survival of artisan labour structures and their property of skill in a case where neither a guild nor a union was present. Both of these institutions have traditionally been given as explanations for the survival of artisan labour structures and their property of skill. By using a prosopographic analysis of a Finnish ironworks community, this article follows a locally monopolized property of skill from 1880 to 1950. This monopoly was based on an informal apprenticeship system and the control of human capital, and was tied tightly to a closed network of smiths and their families. It was able to function in full force without the backing of any formal institutions as long as favourable local circumstances and the means and motivation to maintain it existed. Family relationships and social networks of smiths, together with the acceptance of patronage, functioned as an alternative to trade unions and guilds as primary strategic resources resorted to by smith households.

In many histories of Native Americans it seems that the original inhabitants of the Americas have become obscured in the national mythology of colonization. People who do not fit into the liberal capitalist notion of individualism and economic development simply vanish from the annals of history. Even histories focused specifically on Native Americans cover relatively little of Indian responses to capitalist development. Yet, in the Pacific north-west, the story is not written so simply; Native Americans responded creatively and eagerly to new economic systems through participation in wage labor and the development of business ventures. This response allowed indigenous people in the region to prosper while protecting culture and tradition.

The “transnational turn” is one of the most discussed topics in historiography, yet it has inspired more theoretical tension than empirically saturated studies. This article combines both aspects by examining the transnational network formation of one of the most important social movements in late imperial Russia, the Jewish Labour Bund. It furthermore introduces into historiography one of the most fruitful theories in recent social sciences, “actor-network theory”. This opens the view on the steady recreation of a social movement and reveals how closely the history of the Bund in eastern Europe was interwoven with large socialist organizations in the New World. Based on a large number of sources, this contribution to migration and movement history captures the creation and the limits of global socialist networks. As a result, it shows that globalization did not only create economic or political networks but that it impacted the everyday lives of authors and journalists as well as those of tailors and shoemakers.

The article explores the intersection of history and politics in the works of French philosopher Jacques Rancière, by focusing on the collectively edited journal Les Révoltes logiques (1975–1985). It argues that the historiographic project of Les Révoltes logiques took up specific forms of counter-knowledge that were embedded in radical left-wing politics of their day. It further traces both the engagement with historiography and the role of history in Rancière's later work after the dissolution of the journal. Its conclusion looks at certain shared interests between some of Rancière's themes and some recent writing of social history.

The “Labour Question”, a well-known obsession pervading the archives of Africa, was posed by colonial rulers as a calculated question of scarcity and coercion. On the Spanish plantation island of Fernando Pó the shortage and coercive recruitment of labour was particularly intense. This article examines two distinct clandestine labour recruitment operations that took hold of Rio Muni and eastern Nigeria, on the east and the north of the Bight of Biafra. The trails of the recruitment networks were successfully constructed by the specifically aligned “mediators” of kinship, ethnicity, money, law, commodities, and administration. The conceptual focus on flat “mediators” follows Bruno Latour's sociology of associations and has been set against the concept of an “intermediary” that serves to join and uphold the structure/agency and global/local binaries.

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”.

This article examines how worker mediation to secure jobs for relatives and co-villagers in the nationalist textile industry influenced working-class formation in interwar Egypt. Mediation was conducted out of a sense of communal commitment or for commission, or indeed both. The fact that rank-and-file workers were able to intervene in the recruitment process reveals that workers were successfully able to manoeuvre in such a way as to balance their unjust work relations with the huge mill and to manipulate its system. On the other hand, this method of recruitment became a source of violence among workers when they fought one another, sometimes fatally, whenever one side failed to respect the terms of the financial arrangements agreed. In most cases it strengthened the communal solidarity based on kinship and geographical origin. In both cementing and distracting from working-class solidarity, worker interference in the recruitment processes was part of the developing sense of social transformation and bonding among a distinctive and connected professional community that hoarded its own bargaining power.