The present article analyzes the crucial impact that artisan forms of organizing work had in the production of early cotton factories. By examining the case of the Sirés factory in Barcelona, this article argues that dividing work by gender and age and working with relatives, all traditional practices in an artisan shop, allowed eighteenth-century factory owners to face the challenges that production posed. The example of the Sirés factory also offers a picture of early industrialization that challenges the long-standing argument that artisan and factory forms of production were antagonistic. Factory owners organized their production and work in ways that replicated the way artisans had long produced and worked in their shops. Moreover, in shops and factories alike, production depended not just on the work of individuals, but also on that of their relatives. Parents and children, husbands and wives – all brought the flexibility of traditional artisan forms of organizing work to the new factories.

The purpose of this article is to question the notion of US labour's “exceptionalism” – of its “conservatism” and “closure” and difference from “class-conscious” and “socialist” British and European labour – with specific reference to the politics of the American Federation of Labour during the 1890s and 1900s. An approach rooted in the assumption of “norms” and “exceptions” is rejected in favour of one exploring differences and similarities. In terms of similarities, the article demonstrates the ways in which the AF of L consciously sought to model its “independent” (i.e. nonpartisan–party) politics upon the practice of the late-Victorian British TUC. With respect to differences, the article then proceeds to chart the challenges posed to the AF of L by the growing identification within British labour of political independence with independent partyism, as manifested especially in the TUC's official endorsement of the Labour Representation Committee (1900) and the Labour Party (1906). Resistant to the adoption of the new “British road”, the AF of L nevertheless defended its “traditional” form of political independence far more in terms of experiential US “peculiarities” than “exceptionalist” structural determinations.

The emphasis on ritual, political symbolism and public display at international socialist congresses highlights important cultural dimensions of the Second International that historians have, until now, left unexplored. From 1904 until the International Socialist Congress of Stuttgart in 1907, French and German socialists articulated – in both symbolic and discursive forms – a socialist nationalism within the framework of internationalism. The Stuttgart congress represented a public spectacle that served a cultural function for international socialism. The international performance at Stuttgart was, however, undermined by the inability of the SFIO and the SPD to reconcile their conflicting conceptions of “inter-nationalism”.

In the exciting new social history of the 1960s the concept of class struggle tended to underpin much of the work on the working class in general, and on various labour groups in particular. Historians sought to find faces in crowds and to rescue others from “the enormous condescension of posterity”. The police, however, when they appeared in this history, were usually as nameless and faceless as the crowds had been previously. They were also commonly portrayed as oppressors, and even in the more perceptive and ground-breaking attempts to explore the police themselves, they were seen through the refracted lens of their working-class critics as “blue locusts” and as a bourgeois instrument for controlling a new society. Parallel research conducted at roughly the same time by sociologists, social psychologists and others developed theoretical perspectives based on two assumptions: first, that certain kinds of authoritarian personality were attracted to police careers, and second, that policing roles had predictable effects on the behaviour and personality of policemen. Subsequent research has suggested these assumptions to be largely unfounded, yet in this respect also, historical explorations of policemen as workers remain few.