The article deals with an outstanding example of transnational trade union cooperation in the transport industry. It analyses the attempts of trade unions organized in the International Transportworkers' Federation (ITF) to establish a system of multinational industrial relations and collective bargaining in the flags-of-convenience shipping, which integrated national trade unions and their politics in international problematic interdependencies. Although based on egoistic national special interests and without formal restrictions on national sovereignty the cooperation leads to an international regime. It regulates the rights to organize and represent crews on ships of convenience in industrial relations, it lays down minimum standards for working conditions and incomes, and procedures for the multinational decision-making process and management of conflicts. The trade unions succeeded in regulating about 29 per cent of flags-of-convenience shipping and in establishing a multinational control of national collective bargaining, which is integrated in a system of international governance in the trade union sphere of activities. It is based on an imbalance of power between trade union organizations of industrialized and developing countries within the ITF and on specific conditions in transport industry, and therefore not transferable to other industries.

For most of the nineteenth and twentieth century, universal conscription has been by far the predominant system of military recruitment, but the phenomenon has received surprisingly little attention from social historians. This lack of attention is all the more surprising if one considers the interesting position occupied by conscription at the crossroads of wage and non-wage labour and free and unfree labour.

The following articles by Khaled Fahmy, Erik Jan Zürcher and Stephanie Cronin deal with the spread of the conscription system in one specific area (the Middle East) where it has been the most prominent feature of the establishment of increased and centralized state control over societies which, until relatively recent times, consisted of largely self-sufficient agrarian communities with very little contact with the outside world. The introduction of universal conscription confronted both states and populations with entirely new demands and problems.

“Could a Nation, in any true sense of the word, really be born without war?” Such was the question raised by Michael Howard, the eminent Oxford military historian in a public lecture delivered on the topic of “War and the Nation State”. Looking generally at European history in the past two centuries he argued that war was indeed central for the appearance of the modern nation-state and that modern armies are somehow intimately linked to the rise of nationalism. During the first half of the nineteenth century this argument could very well be applied to Egypt. Having been incorporated in the Ottoman Empire for more than two and a half centuries, Egypt, by the beginning the nineteenth century and mostly through an unprecedented war effort that was concurrent and often synonymous with state-building, had come to play an increasingly independent role on the international plane.

The introduction of conscription in the Ottoman Empire of course was closely linked to the introduction of a European-style army, but it did not coincide with it.

As is well known, the first attempt to create an army which was trained, equipped and dressed in the contemporary European fashion, was made by Sultan Selim III in 1792. His Nizam-i Cedid (New Order) army by all accounts was quite an impressive achievement in itself. Starting from a strength of about 2,500, the corps had 22,685 men and 1,590 officers in 1806, half of them stationed in the capital, the rest in provincial centres in Anatolia. When pressure against him and his new army on the part of the old army establishment, primarily the Janissaries, mounted, however, the Sultan succumbed without any attempt to use the considerable strength of his new army and disbanded the corps in 1808.

The Nizam troops constituted a professional army. They were not recruited on the basis of universal conscription, but rather in a fashion which is reminiscent of the system introduced by Peter the Great in Russia or the Bunichah system in Persia. Governors and notables in Anatolia (not in the Balkans or the Arab provinces) were required to send contingents of peasant boys to Istanbul for training. Those enrolled in the corps remained under arms for an unspecified period.

For the nationalist regimes of the inter-war Middle East, Riza Shah's Iran, Mustafa Kemal's Turkey and Hashemite Iraq, the construction of a strong national army based on universal military service was an essential element of state-building and nation-formation. Yet although conscription was ardently advocated by the nationalist intelligentsia, wherever it was actually imposed it aroused intense resentment. Nonetheless, although enforced conscription was almost universally unpopular, mass, collective and organized resistance was comparatively rare. In Iran such resistance occurred in three waves in the late 1920s. Uniquely in the Middle East, opposition in Iran was most sustained not in the rural areas but in the towns, in Isfahan and Shiraz in 1927 and in Tabriz in 1928, where it was led by the guilds and the ulama, although violent opposition was also manifested by the tribes in 1929. Riza Shah was irrevocably committed to conscription, which was a central pillar of his programme of modernization and secularization, and although prepared to temporize, was ultimately determined to crush collective resistance. By 1930 he had largely succeeded in so doing. The subsequent implementation of the policy was aided by a deliberate decision to defuse popular anger by tolerating, even encouraging, individual strategies of avoidance, in particular by allowing the manipulation of the exemptions system through bribery. As the 1930s progressed, conscription became established as an indelible feature of the new Iran.

Three articles on Latin American history published by the International Review of Social History have recently won US-American academic prizes.

Sigrid Koch-Baumgarten. Formation d'un régime syndical dans les conditions de la mondialisation dans le secteur du transport: tentatives d'une réglementation syndicale multinationale de la navigation sous pavillon de complaisance

Sigrid Koch-Baumgarten Gewerkschaftliche Regimebildung unter den Bedingungen der Globalisierung im Transportsektor. Versuche einer transnationalen gewerkschaftlichen Regulierung der Schattenflaggenschiffahrt

Sigrid Koch-Baumgarten. Formación de un régimen sindical bajo las condiciones de globalización en el sector del transporte: intentos de reglamentación sindical internacional de navegación de bandera de conveniencia