The present article is based on research into the process of working-class formation in Rio de Janeiro in the period between the end of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. It explores the significant shared experiences of workers subjected to slavery and “free” workers in the process of working-class formation, and aims to demonstrate that the history of that process in Brazil began while slavery still existed, and that through shared work and life experience in Rio de Janeiro, as in other Brazilian cities where slavery was strong during the nineteenth century, enslaved and “free” workers shared forms of organization and struggle, founding common values and expectations that were to have a central importance in later periods of class formation.

This article compares the Brazilian Labor Court, created in 1939, and the Italian Magistratura del Lavoro, instituted in 1926 by the government of Mussolini, to “harmonize” the conflicts between labor and capital through judicial means. The text problematizes the Brazilian intellectual tradition which sees the Labor Court either as a typically national product or as the transcription of an international model. It demonstrates that current polemics are fixed within the ambit of the “national problem” such as it was formulated in the 1930s. The approach adopted does not concentrate exclusively on the formal apparatus of juridical structure, but interrogates its functioning over time in different historical conjunctures. The main goal of the article is to understand the Labor Court as an institutional recourse historically appropriated by different subjects, in particular by workers, who gave the courts differentiated political meanings.

By combining archival research with the oral testimony of ex-industrial chaplains – and others with direct experience of industrial mission – this article explores a neglected dimension of religious outreach, and attempts to provide a nuanced interpretation of the interrelationship between de-industrialization and secularization in post-1960 Britain. By 1965, over 100 industrial chaplains operated throughout industrial Scotland across a range of industries. Functioning at the cutting edge of the Kirk’s efforts to halt what was clearly identified as a slide in faith, the chaplains were also perfectly placed to bear witness to Scotland’s traumatic and painful process of de-industrialization. Historians agree that the correlation between falling church attendances and religious belief is problematic, and this case study presents clear evidence that “discursive Christianity” remained significant in Scotland well into the 1980s. However, this research also highlights that institutional religion was far from passive in the face of secularization, and that the very presence of chaplains in the workplaces helped bolster the credibility of religion in a secularizing society.

This article deals with cash crop production and its impact on labour relations in postcolonial African peasant agriculture. The focus is on the Lilongwe Land Development Programme (1968–1981) in Malawi. The aim of the programme was to enable African farmers to increase yields and make them shift from the cultivation of tobacco and local maize to groundnuts and high-yielding varieties of maize. The programme failed to meet its goals, because of contradictory forces set in motion by the programme itself. The LLDP enabled a larger segment of farmers to engage in commercial agriculture, which caused a decline in supplies of local labourers ready to be employed on a casual or permanent basis. Increased commercial production was thus accompanied by a de-commercialization of labour relations, which hampered the scope for better-off farmers to increase yields by employing additional labourers. By using both written and oral sources, this article thus provides an empirical case that questions the conventional view that increased cash-crop production in twentieth-century rural Africa was accompanied by a commercialization of labour relations. It concludes that the history of rural labour relations cannot be grasped by simple linear models of historical change, but requires an understanding of local contexts, with a focus on farming systems and factors that determine the local supply of and demand for labour.

Dominated by the ideas of the “communist school”, the early history of the socialist and revolutionary syndicalist movement in South Africa has (until relatively recently) been largely overlooked by labour historians. From this approach emerged the view that the dominant voice of white workers in South Africa was British, and to a lesser extent Australian, and that their blend of class and racial consciousness resulted in the widespread support for the common ideology of white labourism. Indeed, support for this system of industrial and racial segregation was prevalent across the British Empire, was widely supported by the imperial working class, and in South Africa was never seriously challenged or confronted before 1914. Over recent years, however, South African labour historians have made efforts to rethink their national labour history by examining the early labour movement and the ideology of white labourism in a global context. This article adopts a similar approach and argues that the politics of white labourism was not uniformly embraced by the imperial working class, and that in South Africa there was a vocal and active non-racialist movement which sought to confront racism and segregation, dispute the operation of the “colour bar”, and challenge the white protectionist policies of the labour and trade-union movement. In conclusion, it will be argued that the campaign to confront white labourism was disproportionately influenced by radical left Scottish migrants who adhered firmly to the colour-blind principles of international socialism and revolutionary syndicalism.

This article argues that because of the perceived and real biological characteristics of the different species of the genus Eucalyptus, imperialists and settlers, and later governments and the elites of developing nations, planted eucalypts widely and created new socio-ecological systems that encouraged and reinforced divergent patterns of economic, social, and ecological development. Planting eucalypts changed local ecologies and encouraged a movement towards market-based capitalism that benefited settlers, large landowners, urban elites and middle classes, and capital-intensive industries at the expense of indigenous groups living in and near forests. This article analyses the globalization of eucalypts in four broad phases: first, an enthusiastic expansion and planting from 1850–1900; secondly, failure in the tropics from 1850–1960; thirdly, increased planting and success rates in the tropics from 1960–2000, and fourthly, a growing criticism of eucalypts that began in the late nineteenth century and blossomed in the 1980s during an intense period of planting in India and Thailand.

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”.

In his article in the current edition of International Review of Social History, the Scottish historian, Billy Kenefick, argues against my thesis that the labour force of the United Kingdom and the settler colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be understood as having constituted a linked “imperial working class” in which an ideology of racialized white labour protectionism predominated. Kenefick believes that in South Africa British socialists challenged white labourism, and that Scottish immigrants played a very prominent role in this anti-racist project. My reply traces the relationship between Scottish national identity, imperialism, and the labour movement. It then examines the evidence on the racial politics of Scottish trade unionists in South Africa and argues that, with a very few individual exceptions, they did buy into the ideas of white labourism. Finally, the article considers Scottish labour attitudes to race in the home country, and demonstrates that there was strong sympathy for the racial labour politics of the settler colonies.

The Iberian rediscovery of the mid-Atlantic islands in the late Middle Ages was accompanied by all kinds of utopian projections. However, within a hundred years, both human and animal populations were made extinct, and the rich forest cover was rapidly depleted for cash-cropping industries, primarily sugar. Historians view the migration of the international sugar industry from the mid-Atlantic islands to Brazil as an example of expanding economies of scale, but contemporary accounts indicate what now might be called widespread ecocide as a major contributing factor. This essay looks at the environmental ramifications of the sugar industry as well as other cultures, and assesses whether it is indeed appropriate to speak of ecocide in the context of the mid-Atlantic islands in the early modern period.

This paper examines contests over the intimate and global geographies of domestic hygiene advanced by the Kohler Company, a plumbing-ware manufacturer that promoted “American” standards living in its welfare-capitalist industrial village of Kohler, Wisconsin. Drawing from the approaches of labor history, cultural history, and critical geography, it demonstrates the value of combining these methodologies. The perspectives of Kohler workers on “American” living standards, it reveals, complicate cultural histories that cast such workers as uncritical audiences for imperializing claims about the superiority of American sanitation. The paper argues that workers who struggled to unionize the Kohler plant challenged company definitions of “American” standards and generated alternative, laborite maps of domestic hygiene and the labor associated with it among local immigrant workers and laborers elsewhere in the world. It considers the legacy of those maps in the context of the company’s changing global networks of production and consumption.

This paper explores new ways to write history that engages with the lives of animals. It offers a sample card of how social history can be enriched by focusing on history from an animal perspective – and equally, how the tools provided by social history reveals the historicity of animals. The case study is drawn from South African history and the focus is on horses. The paper firstly proposes that horses changed human history not only on the macro-level, but in the small, intimate arena of the bodily, following Febvre’s call for a sensory history. Secondly, this paper explores social history’s long-time concern with agency and with understanding socio-cultural experiences from the perspective of those who actually lived them – in this case, from an equine perspective. Thirdly, the paper asks how social history that takes animals seriously might be written and might offer a fresh dimension to our understanding, with examples from the most analysed event in southern African historiography, the South African War (1899–1902).

Between 1599 and the end of the 1650s, the French Crown sustained a policy of land reclamation at a large scale. It was led by the French aristocracy who were helped by representatives of the merchant elites of Amsterdam, such as Hieronimus van Uffelen and Jean Hoeufft. The works in both Arles (Provence) and Petit Poitou (Poitou) show that land reclamation involved a radical change in society, reinforced the authority of the Crown in the areas concerned, and disrupted the former social balances built around the marshes. Thus, land reclamation aroused several conflicts which revealed its deep impact on the environment. So, this article demonstrates how the making of the modern state, backed by the development of European trade and banking, caused ecological and social changes by connecting the political and financial powers on a European scale.

This article examines the relationship between Fordism and unfree labour in Nazi Germany. Fordism is understood here as a form of workplace rationalization (especially assembly-line production), but also as a “technology of domination” and an “exploitation innovation”. In contrast to the Weimar Republic, Fordism was established in broad sectors of German industry under Nazi rule in the form of “war Fordism”. In order to examine the connections between the specific historical variants of these two apparently contradictory production regimes – Fordism and forced labour – the article focuses on the “labour deployment” of the most severely terrorized and brutalized group of labourers in Nazi Germany: concentration camp prisoners. Surveying the existing literature, it explores the compatibilities and tensions between Fordism and the deployments of concentration camp prisoners in German industry. In closing, several theses are presented on how Fordism between 1941 and 1944 can be classified within an entire history of Fordism in Germany.

After the collapse of the communist system in eastern Europe, the development of the historiographies in the Czech and Slovak republics, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Federal Republic of Germany has been characterized by a broad spectrum of differences. This article offers an overview of the ways in which these differences have worked out for the history of the working class in the eastern European countries under communist rule, understood here as the social history of workers. It shows that cultural and political traditions and the “embedding” of historical research in the respective societies prior to 1989, the extent to which historiography after 1989 was able to connect to pre-1989 social-historical or sociological investigations, and the specific national political situation after 1989 make up for much of the differences in the ways that the history of the working class is dealt with in the countries concerned.

This article compares theories and social policies of social democrats and other representatives of the left-wing political spectrum in six European countries to explain why, in certain countries such as Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland, weak social groups became the target of illiberal and negative eugenic policy, especially isolation and sterilization, while elsewhere left-wing politicians and theorists were far less radical. One striking feature that emerges is the difference between a communitarian-organic and a class-bound form of socialism. Following Zygmunt Bauman, Michel Foucault, and James C. Scott, the article discerns a first variant of citizenship that is conditional and intended only for those with the right social attitude. Eugenics was perfectly consistent with such a view, since it offered a diagnosis and at the same time a cure. Prominent representatives of this approach were the Webbs in Britain and the Myrdals in Sweden. Such an organic-medical approach was less likely, however, in a more class-dependent variant of socialism embedded in a strong civil society. As long as social democrats and other leftist politicians believed social problems such as inequality and poverty were caused primarily by an unjust capitalist system, there was little cause for a eugenicist solution.

This essay examines the use of famine-plot rhetoric in the course of disputes over free trade in the French Atlantic during the late eighteenth century. Seeking to discredit officially sanctioned trade monopolies, French plantation owners frequently suggested that the control exercised by metropolitan merchants over transatlantic commerce was responsible for food shortages among the enslaved population of the colonies. In reality, the planters themselves bore primary responsibility for malnutrition in the French Caribbean, thanks to their reliance on the slave trade and support for the expansion of plantation agriculture. While proponents of the colonial famine plot accepted that plantation slavery had made it impossible for the resources available in the colonies to sustain the growing enslaved population, they remained committed to the plantation system. In advocating expanded free trade as the best means to ensure the continued growth of the colonies, French planters anticipated a response to the environmental problems caused by colonial expansion that became increasingly prevalent among proponents of European imperialism during the nineteenth century.