In the wake of the Great Depression, in the early 1930s the Turkish state decided to undertake an ambitious project of industrialization. Though state factories were presented and celebrated as model institutions of national modernity, their operations were characterized from the outset by serious and chronic problems of inefficiency and low productivity. To secure technical and managerial know-how on the shop floor, the Turkish state approached knowledgeable German industrial managers to organize its industrial production rationally, hoping to take advantage of the increasingly repressive political climate in Germany, which was driving leading experts into exile. This article analyses the transfer of scientific management from the German industrial context, with its craft control of the labour process and predominance of skilled labour with a strong labour movement, to Turkey, with its army of unskilled, cheap, and unorganized labour and where industrial development was in its infancy.

Carpet production in the late Ottoman Empire developed during the second half of the nineteenth century in a context of growing trade with Western markets, until, by the turn of the century, carpets had become the empire's leading manufacturing export. This article examines the expansion of oriental carpet production in Armenian communities affected by violence in the mid-1890s and in 1909, and its role in their recovery. It shows that output of oriental carpets rose and production was moved into regions with limited or no “pre-violence” experience of carpet production. We shall see that the increases in production were firmly linked to market-based efforts to reconstruct those communities. Different actors, including local and regional merchant-entrepreneurs and multinational companies as well as individual transnational actors such as missionaries, all began to involve themselves in Armenian communities, both to promote trade in carpets and to offer the production of them as a solution to the post-violence ills. As a result, Armenian women and children in post-violence communities became an integral part of the global market in oriental carpets as a vulnerable, organizationally weak but cost-efficient workforce. The whole process was justified in the name of assistance to the needy and was closely associated with changing definitions of the work ethic and morality in the late Ottoman Empire.

From 1919 to 1923, Barcelona experienced unprecedented levels of social conflict. The growth of the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (CNT) had awakened the spectre of social revolution among the city's conservative classes, and a broad constellation of reactionary forces lined up against it, the Sindicatos Libres (free trade unions) being the most formidable among them. Created in 1919 by Catholic workers, the Sindicatos Libres were able to capitalize on the exhaustion that had set in among certain working-class groups who had grown wary of reckless strike action. Using violence to fight back against the CNT, the Libres could claim 175,000 members by mid-1922. They mobilized the religious, corporatist, and regionalist sentiments harboured by sectors of the city's workforce and, by adopting a modern repertoire of action, they bypassed the traditional aversion to mass mobilization that had characterized the Catholic labour movement and Spanish conservative parties until then. In many ways, the ideology and tactics of the Libres adumbrated fascism, but their success was short-lived. In late 1922, an upswing in strike action and an abatement of state repression allowed the CNT to recover at the expense of the Libres. This article explores the rise and fall of an organization the study of which has been neglected, situating it in a European context of political polarization whereby the traditional right attempted to modernize its tactics and adapt them to a rising challenge from the revolutionary left. It will also serve as a window through which to examine the complex relationship between workers’ trade union affiliations and their political and cultural identity.

Widespread belief in economic liberalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, combined with the development of safer, faster, and cheaper transportation, paved the way for huge migration to occur. Between 1850 and 1914, 55 million people departed Europe, with the vast majority heading to the Americas during what Hatton and Williamson term “the age of mass migration”. According to McKeown, something similar in scale and duration took place at approximately the same time – albeit enduring for slightly longer – involving Indians and southern Chinese moving to Southeast Asia and people from north-eastern Asia and Russia to North Asia. However, “the booming of the guns of August 1914 brought to a sudden close the era during which foreigners were relatively free to traverse borders”, according to John Torpey. States in Europe and North America, in particular, reintroduced passport controls with vigour during World War I and instead of lifting these bellicose measures at the end of the conflict, they generally reinforced them. The United States led the way in introducing such restrictions. Following on from the imposition of the 1917 Literacy Act came the 1921 and 1924 US Immigration Acts, which limited arrivals by introducing quotas for countries. The development in much of Europe of the modern welfare state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century simultaneously gave rise to more restrictive immigration policies in Europe, thereby leading to an even greater distinction between citizens and non-citizens.