This article focuses on the intellectual efforts made by a South African activist named Alice Kinloch, one of the first people to openly criticize the violence perpetrated against black mineworkers in Kimberley's compound system, at the end of nineteenth century. In the first section, we focus on Alice Kinloch's early life, her involvement in early Pan-Africanism in Britain, and the beginning of her efforts to denounce the compound system. In section two, we shift our analysis to the interaction between missionaries working in the compounds, and the colonialist discourse on “civilizing the natives”. As representatives of the Christian faith, in which Alice Kinloch also was brought up, missionaries play a central role in her critique, which takes aim at their collaboration, as Christians, with a system of racist violence that, in Kinloch's eyes, had nothing to do with the “civilization” it claimed to bring. The conclusions Alice Kinloch drew on observing the compound system were published in Manchester in 1897. In the third section we dive into her pamphlet Are South African Diamonds Worth Their Cost?, in which she condemned the hypocrisy inherent in the compound system and laments its effects on the black mineworkers subjected to a horrible regime.

Socialist Yugoslavia and Zambia became dynamic Cold War partners in the Non-Aligned Movement, with extensive cooperation in economic development, national defence, and international diplomacy. This article explores the roots of this “East–South” cooperation by looking at the pioneering contacts between North Rhodesian and Yugoslav trade unions in the late 1950s and early 1960s, showing how Yugoslav trade union officials opened up new perspectives for the Yugoslav organized labour movement as it reached out to the “global” at a time of rising decolonization and incipient non-alignment. Further, it offers a nuanced perspective on Cold War trade union internationalism and sheds new light on the politicization of the Zambian labour movement. The article shows that the national trade union federations and their officials on both sides were proactive sociopolitical actors, paving the way for future diplomatic contacts akin to “workers’ proto-diplomacy”.

In the 1920s, Eastern European Jewish immigrants settled in Antwerp and became economically active in the diamond industry. While historians have focused on the role of Jewish commerce and the development of the diamond industry in Antwerp, the role of Jewish labour has been paid only scant attention. The current article focuses on the specific economic position of Eastern European Jewish immigrant diamond workers in Antwerp. It sheds light on the social and working conditions under which Jewish immigrants laboured. The reaction of Belgian diamond workers and their union towards the arrival of Jewish immigrants in the industry is also discussed. Special interest is accorded to the attempts of Jewish political parties and the Diamantbewerkersbond van België (ADB, General Diamond Workers Union of Belgium) to unionize the new arrivals. In this way, the article aims to contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics between immigrant labour, union organization, and (imported) political ideologies in the attempts to integrate foreign workers within the industry.

Power at Work: A Global Perspective on Control and Resistance, edited by Marcel van der Linden and Nicole Mayer-Ahuja, marks an important moment in the trajectory of labour history over the last half century. Writings on labour have seen a shift from a focus on institutional history to social history in the 1960s, to the cultural and linguistic turn of the 1980s, and, over the last decade or so, a move to reclaim the material in new ways.1 In the 1970s, the labour process and shopfloor politics was an important theme in writings on labour – Marxist and non-Marxist – but these were often framed in reductive and teleological narratives derived from the experience of the Global North.2 Recent writings demonstrate a renewed interest in workplace politics from fresh perspectives that look at the relationship between the production process and cultural transformation in complex ways.

In the past twenty years or so, the Nordic countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland) have seen a “renewal” in labour history. Thanks to exchanges outside the Nordic sphere and the “global turn” in labour history, new questions have been raised and topics addressed. Increased attention has been paid to the variations of labour and labour relations (including coerced labour), to working lives and the workplace, and to gender. The studies under review in this essay testify to the ongoing evolution of labour movement history in the Nordic countries in recent years.