The view that class occupied a central place in the lives of nineteenth-century English workers has recently come under increasing criticism within the fields of labour and social history. Joyce (1980), Stedman Jones (1982 and 1983), Calhoun (1982) and Glen (1984) are prominent examples of scholars who have proclaimed, albeit to varying degrees and with different points of emphasis, that at various times during the nineteenth century workers were far less motivated by class than claimed by Edward and Dorothy Thompson, Hobsbawm and likeminded historians. Criticisms of this latter group of historians are, of course, not new. Nevertheless it may be suggested that the recent criticisms of class do possess two distinguishing characteristics. Firstly, they have surely gathered a momentum and a degree of influence within labour and social history which the criticisms of the 1960's (especially the positivist-based critiques of Edward Thompson's view of class) failed to achieve. (This change is, in part, related to the defeats and retreats suffered by the labour movement under Thatcherism, and the current intellectual and political re-assessment of the historical strength of class-consciousness within the British working class.) Secondly, the criticisms of the 1980's issue from a much wider range of theoretical perspectives than was the case during the 1960's.

Classic liberal conceptions of the public sphere generally miscast the public participation of popular sectors in the developing world as premodern, proto-political, or nonrational. The term “popular intellectual” is a useful corrective since it focuses attention on discourses and symbols that are consciously created and endure beyond the individuals and events which put them into play. The term “popular publics” – intentionally organized relational contexts in which specific networks of people from the popular classes seek to bridge to other networks, form coalitions, and expand the influence of their discourse – preserves this emphasis but also changes the unit of analysis from individual or collective actors to relational contexts. Here I use this concept to analyze two cases of popular public participation in late twentieth-century Caracas, Venezuela. In the first case we will look at a street protest, in which dislocated members of the informal economy work to make their private concerns into public issues. In the second case, we will look at plaza services, in which Pentecostal Christians address Venezuela's contemporary social and political reality through an alternative rationality. Each of these cases challenge classic liberal concepts of the public sphere.

This article investigates developments in and antecedents of socially mixed marriage in the rural Dutch province of Zeeland during the long nineteenth century, taking individual and family histories, community contexts, and temporal influences into account. A government report of the 1850s said of Zeeland that farmers and workers lived “in indifference together”. However, our analysis of about 163,000 marriage certificates reveals that 30 to 40 per cent of these rural inhabitants continued to marry outside their original social class. Multivariate logistic regressions show that heterogamous marriages can be explained first and foremost by the life-course experiences of grooms and brides prior to marriage. Previous transitions in their occupational careers (especially to non-rural occupations for grooms, and to service for brides), in their migration trajectories (particularly moves to urban areas), and changes in the sphere of personal relationships (entering widowhood, ageing) are crucial in understanding marriage mobility.

At one time, the region of the Ruhr was one of the most important areas for coal, iron, and steel production in Europe. This is no longer the case. The once abundant production of coal and steel found in this region is steadily dwindling, and what remains of the industry can fairly be considered antiquated. On the whole, the region has already undergone economic structural change, although some problems connected with it still need to be resolved. A few abandoned industrial areas need to be redeveloped and not all economic structures in the region are trend-setting; there are deficits in the infrastructure, such as in the transportation system; and the level of unemployment is clearly above the average of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and of the Land North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). In light of the degree to which industrial jobs have been lost, the region has survived structural change better than other old industrial regions, albeit with an obvious variation in the rate of success within the region.

The main reason for the decline of craft guilds in Antwerp should not be sought in the labour market but rather in the product market. Apprenticeship systems, master pieces, and trademarks were conducive to a labour market monopsony but at the same time to the representation of product quality. On the one hand, product quality was legitimized through the superior manual skills of masters; on the other, it was objectified through the attribution of quality marks to the characteristics of the raw material used. This strategy was successful for the sale of the durable, expensive, luxury products Antwerp was renowned for until the first half of the seventeenth century, but economic elites and customers stopped favouring corporative regulations when demand shifted towards less expensive and more fashionable products. As guild-based skills were not necessarily superior in reality, and consumer loyalty ultimately depended upon the masters' trustworthiness, the craft guilds were bound to lose credibility.

In August 1992 Brazil was swept by a series of protest demonstrations to demand the impeachment on corruption charges of the country's first elected president in thirty years. The principal protagonists of the rallies were high school and college students who turned out in massive numbers for exuberant, hastily organized marches that closed down the principal avenues of Brazil's major cities. The rallies joined heterogeneous sectors of young people, many with no prior experience of political activism, who became known as the caras pintadas (painted faces) for the improvised, carnavelesque gesture of painting their faces with the colors of the Brazilian flag. In the words of Lindberg Farias, president of the National Union of Students (UNE), “Our faces were diverse. From those wearing Che Guevara T-shirts to the frequenters of shopping centers. Student researchers on scholarships, together with heavy metal fans and skateboarders”.

The wave of strikes that swept across the South Carolina rice fields in late 1876 offer rich material for revisiting the most compelling issues in the postwar Reconstruction of the US's former slave states. They expose sharp tensions between the Republican Party's black, working-class constituency and its mostly white, bourgeois leadership. Recent studies, based almost entirely on Northern published opinion, have made the case that Northern Republican elites were driven to “abandon the mid-century vision of an egalitarian free labor society” by assertive ex-slaves oblivious to the “mutual interests” that ostensibly bound them and their employers. This article, based on extensive archival research, asserts that similar fissures opened up between freedpeople and southern Republican officials. In a series of highly effective mobilizations against local planters and determined attempts to block party officials from betraying their interests, rice fieldhands demonstrated a clear understanding of the critical issues at stake during the months leading up to the collapse of Reconstruction. Their intervention contrasted not only with the feeble holding operation pursued by moderates in the upper levels of the Republican party, but also with the timidity of many locally rooted black officials nearer to the grassroots.

Formed as an anti-communist labour international, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) nevertheless experienced internal conflict over the appropriate approach to communism. The different perspectives of the two largest affiliates, the British TUC and the American AFL-CIO, caused disharmony and ultimately near organizational paralysis until it forced a change of leadership. Caught between these rival positions, the ICFTU secretariat's relations with the AFL-CIO were initially the most strained, but as the International extended its activity in Africa, in a bid to outflank communist organization among labour, relations with the TUC also deteriorated over the correct stance on nationalism and colonialism.

This article addresses from a multidisciplinary perspective key questions, trends, and debates that have determined how the history of the International Labour Organization (ILO) has been conceived over the past ninety years. ILO historiography has to be understood in relation to the historical development of the ILO as an institution; the international political, economic, and social context; and the developments within the scientific discipline, especially the fields of (a globalizing) labour history and international relations/organizations. A starting point for this survey essay is the central hypothesis that the scientific interest in the history of international organizations is very much related to the general importance attached to multilateral structures and the belief in the effectiveness of international cooperation. Based on this analysis of the past trends and the current state of the field, I conclude with comments on lacunae and possible paths for future research on ILO history.

This article discusses the Swedish discourse on futures studies in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It focuses on the futures discourse of the group appointed by the Prime Minister, Olof Palme, in 1967 under the chairmanship of Alva Myrdal. The Swedish futures discourse focused on futures studies as a democratic means of reform in defence of the Swedish model and “Swedish” values of solidarity and equality, in opposition to an international futurology dominated by the Cold War and dystopic narratives of global disaster. The article suggests that the creation of Swedish futures studies, culminating in a Swedish institute for futures studies, can be seen as a highpoint of postwar planning and the Swedish belief in the possibility of constructing a particularly Swedish future from a particularly Swedish past.

Henri Lefebvre famously seized upon the duality of the modern city: how for some it is a space of play and liberation, and for others a centre for power and repression. This article explores this duality through an analysis of the changing historical geography of Barcelona's Raval district, an inner-city working-class community and the birthplace of Catalan industrialization. From the 1920s onwards, elite groups and social commentators defined the Raval as Barcelona's “Chinatown”, an imagined geography that continues to influence historical representations of the area. Through a social history of the Raval, it is argued that the “Chinatown” myth served specific political ends, that it formed part of a cultural project to impose a slum myth on Barcelona's most important and most rebellious working class district. The article concludes with an analysis of how this “moral geography” culminated in far-reaching plans for the moral and physical reordering of the Raval for the benefit of urban elites.

In April 1793, France was waging war both inside and outside its borders. Over the previous year, the French government had taken up arms against Austria, Sardinia, Prussia, Great Britain, Holland and Spain. In its first seizure of new territory since the Revolution began in 1789, it had recently annexed the previously Austrian region we now call Belgium. Revolutionaries had dissolved the French monarchy in September 1792, then guillotined former king Louis XVI in January 1793. If France spawned violence in victory, it redoubled domestic bloodshed in defeat; a major French loss to Austrian forces at Neerwinden on 18 March 1793, followed by the defection of General Dumouriez, precipitated both a call for expanded military recruitment and a great struggle for control of the revolutionary state. April saw the formation of the Committee of Public Safety, fearsome instrument of organizational combat. France's domestic battle was to culminate in a Jacobin seizure of power.

Who were the people at the cutting edge of social reform in Europe between 1840 and 1880, and how were they connected? This article proposes a method to locate a transnational community of experts involved in social reform and focuses on the ways in which these experts shared and spread their knowledge across borders. After a discussion of the concepts of social reform, transnationalization, and transfer, we show how we built a database of visitors to social reform congresses in the period 1840–1880, and explain how we extracted a core group of experts from this database. This “congress elite” is the focus of the second part of this article, in which we discuss their travels, congress visits, publications, correspondence, and membership of learned and professional organizations. We argue that individual members of our elite, leaning on the prestige of their international contacts, shaped reform debates in their home countries. We conclude by calling for further research into the influence that the transnational elite were able to exert on concrete social reforms in different national frameworks in order to assess to what extent they can be regarded as an “epistemic community in the making”.

The Mexican state's drive toward industrialization during World War II and the post-war years required the cooperation of organized labor. Central to this policy was the role played by American trade unions, which cooperated with US government agencies in providing financial and logistical support for Mexican trade unionists who complied with state development policy. The interests of American labor leaders, US policymakers and Mexican modernizing elites converged in an attempt to eradicate radical unionism and promote US hegemony in the western hemisphere. This study builds upon works that treat the earlier activities of US labor in Mexico.

This paper investigates social differences in mortality on the basis of information provided by the registers of two Berlin parishes. The life expectancy of the lower classes was half as long again as that of the upper classes. This gap is smaller than that documented by Perrenoud for Geneva in the seventeenth century, but larger than that documented for contemporary small towns and medium-size cities.

Particularly infants and small children were the victims of “social inequality before death”, adults were only marginally affected. Nor did the major epidemics and diseases contribute much to this inequality. Although neither the use of animal milk for feeding nor leaving children with wetnurses in the country were common in Berlin at this time, conditions in this early-industrial city contributed to extremely high levels of infant mortality for specific sections of the population.

In this essay, we consider family history as a common field of substantive and theoretical interest shaped by contacts among several disciplines. These disciplines obviously include social history and population studies, but also – and rather prominently – social anthropology. One major component of the growth of family history has been the increasing amount of attention that historians pay to topics such as marriage, kinship, and the family, which have long been of central significance in the anthropological investigation of social structure. On the other hand, anthropologists have become aware of the serious limitations of synchronic, present-oriented field research, and most of them now probably agree that historical analysis is essential if they are to understand social and cultural processes. This realization has gradually changed many anthropologists from reluctant consumers of historical work into active and often quite enthusiastic producers.

The decades between the Great Railway Strike of 1877 and the post-World- War-II institutionalization of organized labor in the US have been impressionistically characterized by labor scholars as the most violent and bloody to be found in any Western, democratic nation. A variety of different forms of labor repression have been identified and studied. Yet because of a lack of systematic data, none have been able to examine directly the incidence and contours of the ultimate form of violent repression in collective contention. We create the conceptual space for pursuing bloodshed and a new data set featuring deaths resulting from labor strikes as a new and promising direction in the American exceptionalism debate and in studies of comparative strikes. Through a painstaking search of the historical record, we produce the first systematic quantitative gauge of striking deaths between 1870 and 1970. These data permit a mapping of fatalities resulting from labor strikes across time, geographical region, and industry. After describing configurations of strike-based mortality, we suggest what these patterned variations may mean and identify additional questions that these data may help resolve in subsequent studies. We urge comparable data collections in other countries that would permit direct comparative-historical assessments of the magnitude and role of bloodshed in different labor movements.

Between 1924 and 1961 elite Africans in Southern Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe) waged a protracted political struggle for the right legally to drink “European” liquor, which had been banned to colonized Africans under the Brussels Treaty of 1890. Refusing to be lumped with the black masses and basing their claim on the notion that there should be “equal rights for all civilized men”, elite Africans argued that they had attained a cultural level comparable to that of the dominant European settlers and should therefore be exempt from the liquor ban. This struggle, which ended successfully in 1961, also highlights other important themes in the history of the emergent African elite in Southern Rhodesia, most notably its political tactics and consciousness. The quest for European liquor helped to hone political skills as well, as a number of individuals who participated in it later became important African nationalist leaders.

Seven factors that may have contributed to the national integration of the working classes in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia 1871–1914 are explored: the national process of capital accumulation, the international prestige of the nation, the coming of interregional connections, compulsory education, suffrage, the role of the army, and the introduction of social insurance systems. The (provisional) results of this exploration show a clustering of integration-promoting factors in Britain, Germany and France, which is to a certain extent lacking in Italy and Russia.