Technological convergence in the international sugar economy began in the 1830s and was substantially complete by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. By the end of the nineteenth century, the industrialized sugar factory was a global phenomenon like the steamship and the railway engine (to which key aspects ofits innards were closely related). We will argue that the single most importantfact about nineteenth-century sugar industries was the degree of technological convergence that came to characterize their manufacturing sectors, regardless of the type of labour involved. A revisiting of the literature of the past twenty-five years, both in the New and Old Worlds, suggests that historians have yet fully to come to terms with the global character of this convergence and with the question of why convergence in the factory had no parallel in the field, where there continued to be a striking global divergence between the means and modes by which the industry was supplied with raw material. This problem in the recent historiography of the subject also highlights issues relating to the “proletarianization” of labour and the assumption that industrial capitalist modernity was inextricably associated with the development of “free labour”. More specifically, it draws attention to major flaws in the terms of reference of the now classic debate about the nexus between technological change and the predominant forms of labour in the Caribbean production area. In so doing, it underlines the need for a global rather than simply regional approach to the dynamics of change in the international sugar industry of the late colonial era. The latter part of our article outlines the broad historical parameters of this divergence in the sugar-cane field, and suggests the need for exploring the political economies surrounding the sugar producing areas and their mechanisms of ethnic segmentation of the labour force in particular.

This article uses the only surviving working diary of an English female Poor Law guardian in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to explore two interrelated bodies of historiography. First, it engages with an historiography of the New Poor Law which has by and large seen the late nineteenth century as a period of atrophication. Second, it engages with a literature on female Poor Law guardians which has on balance questioned their achievements and seen such women as subject to all sorts of conflict and discrimination. The article argues that both perspectives may be questioned where we focus on local Poor Law policies and local women. Using the example of Bolton, in England, it is argued that the boards of Poor Law unions were riven by fracture lines more important than gender. Within this context, women of relatively high social status were able to manipulate the Poor Law agenda to make substantial changes to the policy and fabric of the late Victorian Poor Law. Rather than conflict, we often see a warm appreciation of the pioneering work of female Poor Law guardians.

This study explores the role and political impact of soldiers' wives in three Volga provinces of Russia: Nizhnii Novgorod, Kazan, and Tambov between February and October 1917. Despite relatively low levels of formal organization, soldiers' wives made a significant mark on revolutionary politics at a local level. Common grievances, which centred on the inadequacy of state support in the context of rising food prices and shortages, were the defining feature of soldiers' wives as a group. Though they secured little direct representation in government, and did not affiliate with any political parties, they operated collectively to address their grievances, both in petitions and in public demonstrations. Their demands continued to escalate in 1917, and the government was unable to cushion them from Russia's profound economic crisis. Soldiers' wives rejected both Soviet and provisional government leadership as a result, and their alienation contributed to the sense of political crisis that pervaded 1917.

The growth of white-collar unionism and its impact on British trade unions in the postwar period has received little attention from social historians. Radical critics have noted the failure of Clive Jenkins to provide a clear lead in defending workers' conditions, while mainstream, institutionalist commentators more often stress the diversity of specific interests served by such unions. Recent research has called into question earlier models of union governance, though there remain few studies of the history of officer relations within trade unions. This article examines the leadership of ASTMS in the decade after its formation. It is argued that the strategies pursued by Jenkins, including the recruitment, training, and deployment of fieldworkers, were guided by accumulated knowledge and culture (as well as brilliant opportunism) rather than by the structure of the union or the composition of the membership. In offering educated officers a career structure, ASTMS increased its capacity for expertise and effective communication without descending into the political sectarianism of the postwar years. The charismatic, capricious style adopted by Jenkins, as well as the difficulties of absorbing a diverse membership in this period of rapid growth, contributed to the tensions which culminated in a series of struggles between the union and its bargainers during the 1970s.

In 2001, Doug McAdam, Sydney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly published Dynamics of Contention. In this jointly written volume, they aim to identify “similarities and differences, pathways and trajectories across a wide range of contentious politics – not only revolutions, but also strike waves, wars, social movements, ethnic mobilizations, democratization, and nationalism”. Thereby, they set out to develop the foundations for a general programme for the study of contentious episodes wherever and whenever they occur.

As Dynamics of Contention is an ambitious work in the field of historical sociology and social history, we have invited comments by Knut Kjeldstadli, Dilip Simeon, and Thomas Welskopp – scholars from different research traditions. Charles Tilly responds.

The plan of Dynamics of Contention embraces several goals. The first is to revitalize social-movement theory, to make it more dynamic, to transcend sharp distinctions between (for example) actors and trajectories. The second is to tear down the barriers between subdisciplines in social science such as social-movement theory and the study of nationalisms. These are conventional demarcations which the authors see as arbitrary and counterproductive to new insights that may be gained within a broader field of contentious politics. Finally the centrepiece: the authors aim to develop an explanatory strategy that avoids two pitfalls – particularistic history and sweeping generalizations in the tradition of Carl Hempel's covering law model. They propose the following solution. First, identify a number (not too large) of causal mechanisms that are at work in different times and places. Secondly, examine whether these mechanisms link regularly, whether they concatenate into what the authors call “robust processes”, i.e. processes that may be identified in a number of different historical “episodes”. An “episode” is something unique and circumscribed, not something ephemeral. On the other hand, an episode of nation-building may last for years. The authors' ambition seems to be to offer lean and muscular, but not parsimonious, explanations. To use their own words, their programme aims to “uncover recurring sets of mechanisms that combine into robust processes which, in turn, recur over a surprising number and broad range of episodes” (p. 314).

Dynamics of Contention purports to show how social movements, revolutions, strike waves, nationalism, democratization, and other types of contention result from “similar mechanisms and processes”, and claim that more may be learned by comparative studies than through singular topical study. The authors aim to discover “recurring causal sequences of contentious politics” (p. 4), and to breach topical boundaries as well as the demarcation between institutionalized and noninstitutionalized politics. They define contentious politics as “episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims and (b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants”. (“Interest” is uninterrogated). They go on to say, “roughly translated, the definition refers to collective political struggle” (p. 5).

Comparative social history is still grappling with the problems raised in the debate about history's “cultural turn”. And while a new “social turn” seems imminent at the moment, this means a new departure into an actor-oriented analysis of institutions (including social movements and all forms of contentious politics) beyond the “cultural turn”, incorporating a host of compelling insights into the cultural constitution of social reality – and not a return to the old simplistic views of the “modernization era”.

Aristotle's vigorous vindication of rhetoric pairs it with dialectic. Dialectic, for Aristotle, combines logical propositions with induction from rigorous evidence in an effort to prove a case beyond doubt. Rhetoric parallels dialectic, but combines arguments with examples in an effort to persuade. Neither one amounts to science, which for Aristotle requires irrefutable establishment of general principles.

1. political: arguing for or against a proposed course of action;

2. forensic: attacking or defending someone;

3. ceremonial: praising or condemning someone.