Over the past few decades the conceptual metaphors of time, space, and labor have been an organizing focus of the geohistorical discourse of social change. This essay explores the involvement of contested time and labor in shaping the fragmented social geographies of the late antebellum American South. The examination is focused on the intraregional differentiation of time and labor systems and on their ramifications for the development of agrarian capitalism in the context of southern plantations. The descriptive and analytical evidence supports the new staple theory. The physical character of staple crops such as cotton, sugar, tobacco and rice made determinant influences on cultivation methods, seasonal routines, labor organizations, mentalite, and the development of plantation capitalism.

The main concern of this paper is the issue of women workers' identity and class consciousness. This investigation is principally based on in-depth interviews with three generations of female factory workers. Extremely unequal power relations between capital and labour is insufficient to explain the more pronounced exploitation of female workers over males. In spite of these women having the potential for collective power, their factory lives have been characterized by treatment in constant violation of labour laws. Low-caste female workers have gone through a process of effeminization which has acted to curb their class identity and limit their scope of action. In the process of caste and class emancipation, the question of gender has been neglected by trade union leaders and politicians. The radicalism of males is built upon women's maintaining of the families – a reality which strongly contradicts hegemonic gender discourses and confuses gender identities.

On 31 December 1870, the Swiss philosopher, Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881), petitioned the municipal authorities of Geneva on behalf of his neighbours and himself. They lived in a street called the Rue des Belles Filles (“beautiful girls' street”) and wanted to have the name of their street changed because it alluded to prostitutes. This is just one among a multitude of historical facts that have come down to us because humble (or not so humble) suppliants put them on paper in the form of a petition, and the authorities to which these petitions were addressed took care to preserve them. Writing petitions was a common human experience. “Everybody is free to write petitions and have a drink of water”, as a traditional German saying would have it. However, as opposed to drinking water, writing petitions is an act which produces historical sources, many of which have survived. The aim of this volume is to give an overview of their importance as sources for social history.

Naval dockyards have been largely neglected by labour historians, a surprising omission given their importance as industrial workplaces with a distinct culture of labour and labour relations. This article considers labour politics in Karlskrona dockyard, Sweden, in the light of a growing body of research on work and labour relations in the British and other European dockyards. Evidence from Karlskrona suggests that, rather than being repressed by military discipline or bought off by generous state benefits, the dockyard workforce drew on aspects of its unique relationship with the national state to improve working conditions. Particular attention is given to the role of the dockyard trade union in creating a sense of workforce identity as state employees. This is in contrast to the British dockyards where unionism was founded on the rigid division of labour in the shipbuilding industry.

This article compares the racially heterogeneous, privately-owned American telephone industry, and the relatively homogeneous, publicly-owned British system, to examine how race and gender constructions implicit in the national identities of the two countries influence employment opportunities. For all the differences in the histories of the two telephone industries and variations in the construction of racial, national, and gender identities, blacks in the United States and Britain had remarkably similar experiences in obtaining employment as telephone operators. This leads to the conclusion that the power of national identity in the workplace is strongly based on “whiteness”. Despite their limited access to national identity, white women experienced advantages that were denied to black women, which illustrates how race modified the impact of gender on the privileges of national identity.

This essay looks at the patterns of pawning in Germany in the decades preceding the First World War. It tries to present pawning and thus also the economy of nineteenth-century working-class households in a new light. Contrary to the generally accepted view of social historians, it is unlikely that pawning served to secure the proletarian household in periods of real hardship. There is much evidence that pawning was only considered when it seemed very likely that the borrower would be able to redeem the pledge in due course. It was therefore part of a rather stable economic situation. Insecurity of prospects persuaded people to refrain from pawning. Pawnshops thrived not on working-class destitution, but on the very modest “affluence” proletarian families were able to achieve in the era of industrialization. The striking differences between the patterns of pawning in Germany and in Great Britain therefore point to significant differences in proletarian standards of living between the two societies in question.

Social historians have quite frequently referred to the “silent masses” in history. They have thereby hinted at the problem that most preserved documents derive from a tiny elite. The great majority of the people, being illiterate, only very rarely left private letters, diaries, autobiographies and testaments, or official acts, charters, statistics, and reports. Besides the source problem, this view reflected concerns of structuralism and Marxism, both very fashionable among social historians up to the 1970s, who related the masses' interests to socioeconomic conditions. Ordinary people thus appeared rather as objects of economic structures than as subjects of historical processes. Though some German-speaking social historians integrated the anthropological category of “experience” into their studies in the 1980s, they assumed that ordinary people had interests in, and experiences of, but still no influence on historical processes. Merely local and reactive early modern social protest thus remained historically unimportant – in sharp contrast to the nineteenth-century working class movement. During the 1990s, studies of social conflict focused on the concept of agency and discussed the influence historical actors had on processes such as modernization.

This article looks at the effect of transoceanic migration on rural Sicilian families. The author focuses on the conflicts, stresses, and transformations experienced by members of transnational families. While the reality of migration rarely reflected the popular notion that emigration would ruin families, the experience did create deep divisions between migrant men and the women who remained behind. Even before men migrated, husbands and wives struggled over the initial decision to emigrate. From their differing positions within the family, men and women separately weighed the potential benefits and risks of migration. When women encouraged their husbands to work overseas, the experience of migration often created new dreams and opportunities that divided family members. This essay highlights the deeply gendered nature of transnational migration, and the role of the family in altering ideas of husband, wife, mother, and father.

“Those who think to do away with petitions would overthrow the entire system of the State”. This remark – taken from an anonymous eighteenth-century account of the political organization of the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza – describes well the importance attributed to complaints in the organization of the state. Through complaints, or petitions, it is generally possible to verify a number of fundamental forms and modes of communication between society and the institutions of the ancien regime, and to reconstruct the procedures of mediation, repression, acceptance, and agreement adopted by princes, sovereigns, or magistracies in response to social demands.

Partition, the break-up of colonial India in 1947, has been the subject of considerable serious historical research, but almost exclusively from two distinctive perspectives: as a macropolitical event; or as a cultural and personal disaster. Remarkably, very little is known about the socioeconomic impact of Partition on different localities and individuals. This exploratory essay considers how Partition affected working people's livelihood and labour relations. The essay focuses on the northeastern part of the subcontinent, where Partition created an international border separating East Bengal – which became East Pakistan, then Bangladesh – from West Bengal, Bihar, Assam, and other regions which joined the new state of India. Based largely on evidence contained in “low-level” state records, the author explores how labour relations for several categories of workers in the new borderland changed during the period of the late 1940s and 1950s.

This articles argues that it was primarily cash, rather than culture, that shaped employment decisions by Cornish miners in the mid-nineteenth century. Although their occupation cut their lives short, total lifetime earnings as a metal miner, at home or abroad, exceeded the probable income from readily available alternative employment, even over a longer working life. In economic terms, Cornish miners rationally sold part of their lives for both higher short- and long-term incomes.

At the World Fair in Philadelphia in 1876, the German goods on display were described as “cheap and nasty”, setting off a vigorous debate about the state of German industry. Social democrats attacked policies of increasing competitiveness of German exports through keeping wages low, and claimed that the quality of the goods produced by socialist workers was higher than those produced by others. An analysis of the debate shows the extent to which social democrats not only resorted to arguments stressing the “national interest”, but also the extent to which nominally Marxist socialists in this period were still attached to traditional artisanal values of pride in the quality of their work.

I regard the work of the past 20 years and of some years to come as the work of clearing the underbrush, so that we may build a more useful framework for social science.

Immanuel Wallerstein (1996)

In September 1976, the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations opened its doors at the State University of New York - Binghamton. The new institution made a flying start. After three months it presented its “Proposed Research Programs” in a substantial booklet. In the summer of 1977, the first issue of its journal, Review, came out. That same year, a section on the “Political Economy of World-Systems” (PEWS), inspired by the Braudel Center, was established within the American Sociological Association. The PEWS section has held annual conferences and published their proceedings ever since. Since 1979, the Center, together with the Maison des sciences de l'homme of Paris, has sponsored a book series called “Studies in Modern Capitalism”, published by Cambridge University Press.

There are very few sources available to historians which allow us to hear the voices of Anglo-American women. How can we understand what ordinary women believed were their responsibilities to their families and communities and the responsibilities of their government to them? Petitions provide historians with one of the few opportunities to “hear” non-elite women voice their concerns. In provincial New Hampshire, women regularly approached the royal government with individual requests. By viewing the rights associated with petitioning, the procedure involved, and the variety of applications for petition use, female agency in colonial society becomes more apparent. Through petitions, it is possible to understand under what circumstances women turned to the government for assistance, and under what circumstances the government granted their petitions.

Anticlericalism was a decisive trend in Spanish political, social, and cultural life from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the Spanish Civil War. It is true that anticlerical movements also existed in other European states, but the confrontations were much more intense in Spain. José M. Sánchez recalls this in a concise summary of the violence unleashed by these struggles: from 1822 to 1936, at least 235 members of the clergy were assassinated and around 500 churches and religious centres were burned. In addition, in the three years of the Civil War, almost 7,000 priests, monks and nuns suffered the same fate. Despite this, until a few years ago there were frequent complaints about the scant attention paid by Spanish historians to this trend. Julio de la Cueva Merino referred to this lack of research, and even to the ‘historiographic vacuum’, in a summary of publications on the subject which appeared in 1991. Three years later, Pilar Salomón mentioned the ‘absence of fruitful bibliographic production’, and, as recently as 1997, Rafael Cruz spoke of a ‘shortage of works’, or at least a very scarce production of monographs. Outside the field of history, anthropologists such as David Gilmore and Manuel Delgado have likewise criticized the lack of interest of their colleagues in the face of what Gilmore defined as ‘as powerful a social and ideological phenomenon as devotion’, and which should deserve the same intellectual consideration.

The cahiers de doléances of 1789 have generally been regarded as unique historical documents. In convening the Estates General, the royal government followed centuries-old precedent in asking the nation not only to elect representatives to an assembly, but to provide them with lists of the demands, wishes, and grievances of their constituents as well. One could hardly describe these documents as resources unknown to historians. Apart from a very few who have seen these documents essentially as fraudulent, historians have generally seen them as uniquely vox populi. Tocqueville, for example, described them as “an authentic account” of the ideas and feelings of the nation drawn up “in perfect freedom”. More recently, Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret saw them as “the truest sampling of opinion ever realized in the France of the Old Regime”.