Working-Class History

Objectives: Despite subsisting on a low-cariogenic diet comprising virtually nothing more than potatoes and dairy products, poor oral health affected the quality of life for the poor of nineteenth-century Ireland. This study investigates potential biocultural reasons that may explain why this was the case. Material and Methods: A total of 6,860 teeth and 9,889 alveoli from 363 permanent dentitions from the skeletal remains of impoverished adult Irish males and females who died between 1847 and 1851 in the Kilkenny Union Workhouse were examined for evidence of dental caries, periodontal disease and ante-mortem tooth loss. Caries rates were quantified and assessed by crude prevalence, frequencies, corrected caries rates and a t-health index, and evaluated by sex and age groups. Results: A higher rate of caries was present among 18–25-year-old males than females, while the opposite relationship was evident for older age groups. The prevalence rates of periodontal disease and ante-mortem tooth loss increased with age. When assessed by corrected caries rates, tooth decay is observed at a lower rate compared to contemporaneous lower to upper-class population samples from London.

This article reviews the scholarly treatment of work and class in post-socialist states. It traces how the class discourses under socialism led to a lack of meaningful working-class studies in the post-socialist academy. It offers as an agenda for future research three points of departure: 1) greater confrontation of the one-sided discourse on class in these societies and the academy itself (a class blindness of research). 2) The value in studying postsocialist societies both comparatively to Global North and South, and as an intermediate positioning for worker exploitation and responses in global capitalism. 3) To achieve the first two agenda items a more grounded methodological approach proceeding from the lived experience of class and work is proposed.

Shorter-hour struggles are a key element in the historical study of organized labor. Little attention has been paid, however, to long-term changes in the rationale underlying demands for work time reductions. Comparing arguments formulated by German workers around 1900 with arguments put forward half a century later, this article detects a fundamental narrowing of discourse in twentieth-century labor disputes. While trade unions once drew on a strikingly broad rationale when demanding work time reductions, the post-WW II decades witnessed a strategic departure from arguments that had long constituted the bedrock of shorter-hour rhetoric. Analyzing a leading theoretical labor organ as well as the members’ publication of West Germany’s largest single-industry union, the article reveals that work time reductions were increasingly framed as a powerful measure to improve workers’ health and safety and to increase leisure and family time. In so doing, West German trade unions abandoned a crucial link between work time reductions and the vision for a more democratic and participatory society. The article thus shows how strategic bargaining decisions helped undermine the rich legacy of the historical struggle for shorter hours

Durant la Belle Époque se construit en France une économie de la consommation de masse qui passe par l’accès massif au crédit des classes populaires. Ce phénomène ne peut pourtant se comprendre comme un simple changement d’échelle, car il s’agit d’un véritable réagencement de l’ordre social du crédit, de l’identification économique aux processus de sanction. Ces différentes facettes de la relation de crédit sont abordées successivement à travers deux dossiers documentaires : l’organisation du crédit à destination des classes populaires mise en place par les Grands Magasins parisiens Dufayel et les réformes introduites par la loi du 12 janvier 1895 sur la saisie-arrêt des salaires des ouvriers. La réorganisation du système de crédit se traduit par l’apparition conjointe de nouvelles médiations et de nouvelles mises à distance, ainsi que par la multiplication des scènes sur lesquelles se joue la dette – entre espace commercial, tribunal et monde du travail.

This paper offers a critique of the existing historiography on the late apartheid period, arguing that white workers’ role in and experience of the unraveling of racial privilege in the labor arena has been obscured by a focus on the high politics of reform and on anti-apartheid resistance emanating from African labor and the broader black population. Reporting from the archive, it discusses two under-utilized archival collections – that of the Commission of Inquiry into Labour Legislation and of the Mineworkers’ Union – as sources for starting to write white working-class organization, politics, identity, and experience into the history of reform and resistance, thereby adding a new dimension to South Africa’s broadly conceived struggle history.

This article scrutinizes election district and inspection district reports written by the deputies of the Turkish single-party government and the role of these reports in state decision making. Underscoring social discontent and the fragile hegemony of the new regime—both of which motivated the republican elite to monitor state and party administrations and public opinion—the article argues that the practice of reporting was neither a project of social engineering nor a practice peculiar to the Turkish state but rather a requirement of a polity concerned with the opinion of its citizens. In the absence of direct political participation of the people in government, the reports mediated between the state and society. Contrary to conventional accounts of the single-party period, the article argues that the republican elite did not govern the country through top-down decrees but instead sought to ascertain public opinion and its own administrative defects so as to consolidate its fragile hegemony. Based on these findings, I propose that we redefine the early republican state as a flexible authoritarian regime that was not detached from the society.

A gang of historians has gunned down the "romantic West." They have dismissed the notion of the West as a frontier of opportunity for all comers. The American West has been redefined as an arena of struggle involving complex relations of class, gender, ethnicity, and race. Western work camps and company towns existed as extensions of a global economy centered on the eastern United States. From the mid-19th century through the first decades of the 20th century, capital and people flowed into the West from Europe, Asia, and Mexico. In this internal periphery of U.S. capitalism, workers experienced the same type of exploitation and engaged in the same struggles as their brethren in other parts of the United States. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the coalfields of Colorado. The work camps and company towns that archaeologists excavate were loci of struggle, and historians cannot claim to understand them without considering these conflicts.

Housing shortages in Yugoslav cities were a perennial concern for authorities and citizens alike. They disproportionately affected Yugoslav workers who as a consequence were the demographic most likely to independently construct a family home. This article explores how informal builders justified home construction in moral terms, legitimizing it on the basis of physical labour that was invested in home construction. This was couched in both the language register of Yugoslav socialism and patriarchal custom (according to which a male-headed household should enjoy the right to a family home). Construction was also conditioned by the opportunities and constraints of late socialist temporalities.

Available open access:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2017.1340279

In 1973, in the deindustrializing, impoverished Montreal neighbourhood of Pointe-Saint-Charles, neighbourhood activists-normally preoccupied with jobs, housing, and food security-made the fate of a 82-year-old fire station their top concern. Pointe-Saint-Charles was the proposed site for a new highway construction: le Projet Georges-Vanier. If built, this artery would have sliced the working-class community in half, destroying the fire station as well as a much-loved public park, and displacing about 140 families in turn. In their organized resistance to this plan, Comité Action-Boulevard recognized and mobilized around the fire station as the keystone without which the plan could not proceed. This article situates an important but under-studied moment in Montreal's preservation struggles in the pivotal early 1970s. It proposes this story as a powerful illustration of the idea that heritage is not an object but rather a social, cultural, and political process, and considers the fragility of collective memory about how this building was saved. Part of that fragility arises from a conundrum: the women who were largely behind this action worked collectively under organizations rather than under their own names, as individuals. The action to save the fire station coincided with a period in the neighbourhood's history in which women were gradually emerging from restrictive gender norms. In searching for the complete story of how the community of Pointe-Saint-Charles saved their fire station, I have encountered a partial, but compelling story of how the women of an impoverished neighbourhood took power over their own built environment, activating what Iain J.M. Robertson calls a "heritage from below."

While critical histories of international law on the interwar period have focused primarily on nationalism, early conceptions of the right to self-determination, and the dynamic of cultural difference, this article brings to bear another dimension that shaped interwar governmentality of legal institutions, namely class subjectivity. How did international institutions manage 'class' in a colonial context and at the height of the 'self-determination talk' of the interwar period? Through this inquiry, I study the details of the concrete practices of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in one of its earlier missions sent to Egypt in the 1930s. The claimed success of the ILO's intervention hinged upon shaping a new politics of expertise through law that divided a fluid and hybrid sphere of social activity into rigid and separate domains: the technical and the political.

This article explores some of the visual imagery that has emerged from the process of deindustrialisation. It seeks to understand the similarities and differences between photography of industrial decline collected in book format in both North America and Europe and the critics of this genre. It makes sense of the value and meaning of this publishing trend and what it says about its market. While it would be easy to dismiss this material as ‘simply nostalgic’, representing another manifestation of ‘smokestack nostalgia’ this article suggests that we need a more nuanced account which asks questions about the continuing desire to reflect back and find value in the industrial past. In so doing it makes a contribution to a wider critical account of the role of cultural approaches in interpreting industrial change and working class history.
Key Words: deindustrialization; nostalgia; industrial work; representation; working class culture

This article is an analysis of minority political invention in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Against the tendency in recent social and cultural theory to dichotomize class and difference, it argues that it was in and throughthe IWW’s formulation of class that minority political and cultural inventionoccurred. Using the framework of Deleuze and Guattari’s minor politics, thearticle shows how the IWW’s composition in the simultaneously diffuse and cramped plane of work operated against the major political identities and subjects of worker, immigrant, American, citizen and ‘people’, and towards thecreation of minority political knowledges, tactics and cultural styles premised on the condition that ‘the people are missing’. Seeking to understand the IWW’smodes and techniques of invention, the article explores the general plane of IWW composition, its particular political and cultural expressions (in songs,manifestos, cartoons and tactics), and its minor mode of authorship. The articlefocuses in particular on two aspects of IWW minority composition, the itinerant worker, or hobo, and the politics of sabotage.

This article examines the dynamics of women's participation in the Communist Party of Uruguay (PCU) from the 1920s to the 1960s. Despite its commitment to women's emancipation and to equality between men and women, the PCU's attitudes towards gender equality were often contradictory and its messages were ambiguous. Though it promoted women's participation, the Party oscillated between seeking to overcome social prejudices, upholding principled and dogmatic positions, and accommodating the conservative habits prevalent among the working class. Women were encouraged to take part in activities but not to assume leadership positions. The 1960s, ironically a period characterised by openness and political success, was a decade of regression in gender equality that stood in contrast to the Uruguayan Communists' long trajectory concerning women's rights.

Este artículo examina la dinámica de la participación de mujeres en el Partido Comunista del Uruguay (PCU) desde los años 1920 a los 1960. A pesar de su compromiso con la emancipación femenina y la igualdad entre hombres y mujeres, las actitudes del PCU hacia la equidad de género fueron frecuentemente contradictorias y sus mensajes ambiguos. Aunque promovió la participación de las mujeres, el partido osciló entre buscar superar los prejuicios sociales, sostener posiciones principistas y dogmáticas, y acomodarse a los hábitos conservadores prevalentes en la clase obrera. Las mujeres fueron alentadas a tomar parte en las actividades pero no a asumir posiciones de liderazgo. Los años 1960s, irónicamente un periodo caracterizado por la apertura y el éxito político, fue una década de regresión en cuanto a la igualdad de género, lo que contrastó con la larga trayectoria comunista uruguaya en relación a los derechos de las mujeres.

During the Belle Époque, widespread access to credit for the working classes led to the establishment of an economy of mass consumption. This phenomenon, however, represented more than a simple shift in scale, completely transforming the social order of the credit system, from economic identification to the authorization process. This article examines various aspects of the credit relationship through two documented cases: the credit organization created by the Parisian department store Dufayel for the working classes and reforms introduced by the January 12, 1895 law regarding workers’ garnishment. The transformation of the credit system resulted in the joint emergence of new forms of mediation and distantiation in addition to new arenas in which debt figured—whether in commerce, court or the workplace.

The following discussion is focused on performances by the Orfeón Socialista de Madrid (OSM, 1900–1936). As they created and appropriated acoustic territories in the city, these performances contributed to the making of local political identities in Madrid in ways that offset the prevalence of journalistic and political discourse, which served primarily middle-class interests. The OSM’s performances lend themselves to being analyzed through
the prism of studies on noise because, in order to advance the cause of socialism, they challenged the binary opposition between sound and noise that structured the politics of sound hygiene in Madrid. The latter depended on the ability to manipulate and capitalize on the perception that certain sounds
are more acceptable, agreeable and “hygienic” than others, which were in turn perceived as “polluting”, disruptive and unpleasant. The examples discussed here show how, by using noise as a productive force, the OSM tried to resist a well-established tendency to marginalize and persecute those social groups whose sounds or musical practices were tagged as discordant or unharmonious. The likelihood of the OSM’s performances being perceived as “noise” increased as the workers’ movement and its supporting ideologies (socialism and anarchism) came to be seen as a fundamental threat to social order. In this context the OSM used their performances to counter negative biases, raise
awareness and negotiate their presence in Madrid’s public space. Analysis of the OSM and other workers’ choral societies can thus offer a unique insight into the ways in which the affective force and transformative potential of choral singing empowered disadvantaged social groups.

Following recent calls for a more self-aware and historically sensitive sociology this article reflects on the concept of deindustrialisation and industrial change in this spirit. Using EP Thompson's classic The Making of the English Working Class and his examination of industrialising culture with its stress on experience, the article asks how these insights might be of value in understanding contemporary processes of deindustrialisation and work. Drawing on a range of sociological, cultural and literary studies it conceptualises the differences and similarities between two historic moments of industrial change and loss. In particular it draws on the literary concept of the 'half-life of deindustrialisation' to explore these periods. The article has important implications for how we think about contemporary and historical industrial decline.

Abstract :
The 25th of August 1891 the workers of Elvetica, a mechanical factory of Milan, decided to call a strike. The protest expanded quickly in a few days and the 30 th of August the general strike of the Milanese mechanical labour force was declared. On order from the prefect, Giovanni Codronchi Argeli, more than 1500 soldiers were employed in public security duties. The prefectural documents, kept in the archive of Giovanni Codronchi Argeli in the municipal library of Imola, and those of the police headquarters of Milan, found in the Archivio di Stato of Milan, have given the author the opportunity to analyse the relationship between civil and military authorities. In fact, the collaboration between the Prefettura and the head of the III Corpo d'Armata was difficult and their disagreements often caused confusions and incomprehension.

Italiano: Il 25 agosto 1891 gli operai dello stabilimento Elvetica, officina meccanica di proprietà di Ernesto Breda, proclamarono lo sciopero. L'agitazione si estese in breve tempo e il 30 agosto venne proclamato lo sciopero generale di categoria. Su ordine del prefetto, Giovanni Codronchi Argeli, diverse compagnie della Divisione militare della città vennero impiegate in servizio di pubblica sicurezza. Entro la fine dello sciopero più di 1500 soldati avrebbero prestato servizio a Milano. L'analisi delle carte della Prefettura, conservate nell'archivio di Giovanni Codronchi Argeli presso la Biblioteca comunale di Imola, e della Questura, conservate presso l'Archivio di Stato di Milano, ha permesso all'autore di osservare da vicino, al livello delle pratiche concrete di impiego delle truppe in servizio di pubblica sicurezza, i rapporti tra autorità civili e autorità militari. Emerge il dissidio tra Prefettura e Comando del III Corpo d'Armata e una difficile collaborazione fatta, talvolta, di confusioni e incomprensioni.

"The point of departure of this article is the analysis of the inedited personal archive of Catalan politician and composer Josep Anselm Clavé (1824-1874), in particular his correspondance and manuscripts, that is to say documents that we attribute to the private sphere and that most of the time are deemed to contain the «authentic voices of the past,» an affirmation that the article questions. From there, I draw a theory that reveals the private archive not as a symbol of spontaneous authenticity, but as the place where letters and works were written and compiled for a future use. The article questions the
mythological discourse built around Clavé’s figure, and the analysis of the inedited documents permits to reveal how the composer was controlling very closely his archive construction as a way and desire to handle his own inscription in the archive memory of Catalan cultural history. The article defines the personal proto-archive as the set of strategies that serve to construct the conduit between private and public, and between
past and present."

This article considers the case of Archie Hill (1928–1986), the near-forgotten novelist, journalist and BBC television presenter. Using scant archive material, interviews and some speculative theorising, this study hopes to recount something of Hill’s life and assess his place in the canon of English literature with particular focus on A Cage of Shadows (1973), the account of his impoverished upbringing in the Black Country.

White workers and white working-class politics have been neglected in the historiography of South Africa during the second half of the twentieth century. This article seeks to
extricate white workers from this historiographical neglect and fracture homogenizing
representations of white, specifically Afrikaner, experiences of democratization. It does so by reintroducing class to a debate dominated by race. Employing a discursive analysis sensitive to issues of class, it shows that white workers were confronted with
democratizing change and disempowerment more than a decade before the end of apartheid and suggests that class politics continue to inform white responses in post-apartheid South Africa. In this way, it argues for a historical, discursive approach to uncovering the power dynamics of class and the complex intersection of working-class and racial identities in the late twentieth century.

Unlikely encounters happened in the great social unrest that the end of the 1960s represented. They were part of a long tradition in which intellectuals were anxious to meet the common people, principally manual workers. But they intensified in a number of gatherings in the early 1960s. In May-June 1968, as the social space was being decompartmentalized, these unlikely meetings took form in three main groups that gathered around the workers: first students, then technicians and managers, and lastly peasants. These meetings went on in the following years, principally in the great conflicts such as Lip and Larzac. However, these encounters went against union strategies, that of the CGT mainly, and were limited by some factors: social mixing did not work in the zones that did not take part in May-June 1968, and it was also difficult when these encounters exposed people’s most intimate dimensions, principally their conception of the body.

This paper examines discourses on citizenship and nation at shop floor
level through Bakırköy Cloth Factory – a state-owned factory in Istanbul,
Turkey. Founded as a private enterprise in 1850, Bakırköy became the
State Industrial Office’s property in 1932 and of Sümerbank, the young
Turkish state’s bank and industrial holding company in charge of textile
production in 1933. Having survived such a drastic regime change, the
factory’s first two decades under Sümerbank were shaped by the ruling
classes’ zealous and simultaneous efforts of nation-building and industrialization.
In the ruling classes’ popular projection, the alleged conversion
of an unproductive industrial relic of the imperial past into an
example of Republican hard work and patriotism provided opportunities
for workers to repay their debt to the nation and its forefathers. In the
context of the displacement and mediation of class conflict via nationalist
discourses, this study explores how this industrial national space became
the site of discursive struggles on national belonging and citizenship.
Material from parliamentary debates and media coverage is linked with
workers’ files to offer a micro-historical perspective on the interactions
between class and nation.

Bourdieu’s theories enable us to conceptualise and understand why some people participate in higher education and some do not. Focussing on the working class as the marginalised social group in HE, Bourdieu demonstrated how education perpetuates inequality and lack of opportunity. The theories or ‘thinking tools’ as he called them, provide an explanation for why the working class do not participate in HE on the same scale as the middle and upper classes. Habitus, for example, enables us to understand that we have ‘a sense of one’s place which leads one to exclude oneself from places from which one is excluded’ (Bourdieu 1984, 471). I examine the theories in the context of my own research, and explore my participants’ experiences of HE using Bourdieu’s theoretical framework. However, my research findings do not support an uncritical application of Bourdieu’s theories; rather that one’s habitus can change to accommodate new practices, and once that change has occurred, it is socially reproduced. The findings of the research are based on interviews with ten participants, all of whom are or have been mature working class students in higher education.

This article focuses on a form of online photo-sharing practice largely overlooked in recent literature: the sharing of personal collections of “old” analogue photographs retrieved from family albums, suitcases and cupboards. Recent scholarship on digital photography and online photo-sharing has argued that the widespread adoption of digital technologies and
network infrastructures for image capture, storage, transmission and display have led to an “ontological reorientation” of popular photography away from preservation and memory. The article discusses two Facebook groups devoted to sharing photos and memories relating
to Salford in North West England. The fate of Salford’s postwar working class neighbourhoods, vanguard spaces of creative destruction, and the relative scarcity of personal photographs of vanished streets are discussed as context for understanding photo-sharing as a popular collective memory practice.

Recent scholarship laments the growing fragmentation of the working class due to flexible labour regimes and unemployment. This paper examines an emerging effort in South Africa to counter this fragmentation: the United Front project, initiated and led by the National Union of Metalworkers South Africa (NUMSA). Drawing on 74 interviews conducted at two different NUMSA-led protests in Johannesburg, the analysis unpacks two sets of tensions. One set of tensions revolves around class politics, which pertain to the divide between unionized workers in relatively stable employment, and impoverished communities ravaged by unemployment. The other set of tensions revolves around party politics, including divisions with respect to the United Front’s opposition to the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC). Each dimension reveals both crucial sources of solidarity and potential obstacles, showing that forging a broad working-class unity in the current period is complex, but not impossible.

This article explores the use of the term "working class" in US political culture since the 1950s.  It finds that in the NEW YORK TIMES at least, authors began in the late 1960s to use the term especially when they wanted to identify as specifically as possible racist white people and when workers were down on their luck, defeated, struggling. The essay explains why so many observers attributed the election of Donald Trump to the working class.

Michael Billig's theory of banal nationalism involves the assumption that the absence of an explicit discourse on the nation should be interpreted as the unmindful presence of nationalism and that the mass media faithfully represent or reflect the discourses of ‘ordinary people’. Recent historical research of ‘national indifference’ in imperial Austria has inverted the correlation between the ubiquity of nationalist discourses and their impact in society. This article assesses these conflicting frameworks and refutes AD Smith's critique of everyday nationalism research as necessarily ahistorical and presentist. This case study of the rank‐and‐file of the social‐democratic Belgian Workers' Party at the close of the nineteenth century uses a unique source of working‐class voices: the so‐called ‘propaganda pence’ or ‘proletarian tweets’ from the Flemish‐speaking city of Ghent. Hot, explicit nationalism was absent from these sources, which begs the question: is this proof of banal nationalism or national indifference? A historically contextualized analysis of the absences shows that workers expressed national indifference towards Belgian, but not towards Flemish ethnicity. In Rogers Brubaker's terms: Flemish ethnicity was a relevant social category, but only in a very restricted number of social contexts could it become a basis for ‘groupness’ or political mobilisation in daily life.

In: Forrest, D. & Johnson, B. (eds.), Social Class and Television Drama in Contemporary Britain, Palgrave.

The self-conscious project of the BBC TV series Peaky Blinders (2013-) is apparent from its first episode. It opens amidst grimy tenement streets; a foreboding soundtrack anachronistically cites the ambiance of blues music; Chinese characters, their conversation subtitled, are summoned at the behest of a strikingly handsome and enigmatic man astride a white horse while the people of this abyss watch warily from doorways and behind dustbins and streetlamps. While the peak of a flat cap rather than Stetson shields the rider’s eyes, the aim is to pose a question about where and when this milieu might be. The answer comes in a caption: ‘Birmingham, 1919’.

Written by Stephen Knight and now in its second series, Peaky Blinders can be set alongside series such as Ripper Street (2012-), which makes the Victorian East End its milieu or, more directly, Downton Abbey (2010-). Katherine Byrne (2014) has argued that Downton Abbey offers a sanitized although insistently ‘authentic’, portrait of a historical period marked by instability and rapid change. The ‘post-heritage’ of this series draws its drama from the familiar iconography of the country home and the interplay of servant and employer, re-treading aspects of the 1970s BBC series Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-75). Peaky Blinders offers a different, and potentially radical political, historical and aesthetic perspective on the same period and nature of class relations, recalling political and social aspects of another 1970s series When the Boat Comes In (1976-81). The eponymous Peaky Blinders for instance comprise an illegal and violent bookmaking gang, tied by family loyalties and Gypsy identity. The central male characters are psychologically scarred by their experience of the Western Front while the women exhibit a strength and independence that comes from not simply being left to manage the home front. The city is akin to an inferno as industrial forges bellow flame into the street, a heat echoed in political reactions to communist agitation and IRA gunrunners managed by a brutal police force.

Peaky Blinders makes much of Birmingham’s place at the centre of a physical modernity as a means of installing it as a site for historical drama. David Stubbs has written in The Guardian that:

‘In 1919, Birmingham was the biggest industrial city in the world. Yet it has always been considered deeply unfashionable when it comes to settings for TV drama, while cities like Liverpool have been consecrated by the likes of Alan Bleasdale. "It is unfashionable," agrees Birmingham-born Knight. "In fact, it's almost invisible.’ (Stubbs, 2013).

The aim of this paper then is to explore the project of Peaky Blinders as one which explores a distinct and insistently regional working-class life, agency and interiority in the context of a largely unexplored industrial environment. It assesses how, in addressing a televisual (and historical) absence, Knight delights in the imaginative possibilities of milieu and character in which fictional characters and historical figures interact. In encompassing a variety of reactions to the series’ historical fidelity and adequacy as a representation of a specific time, place – and class - further questions arise about the ambiguities of representations of working class life on British television.

Si la recherche dans les domaines institutionnel, juridique ou économique de l'évolution des Communautés européennes est abondante, force est de constater que les "Europe que dessinent les partis politiques" ne sont que très peu étudiées. Cet ouvrage se veut donc une contribution à l'étude des acteurs politiques face à la Communauté européenne et à leurs jeux d'influences réciproques. L'analyse offre, dans une perspective historique, un tableau de l'évolution du mouvement socialiste en Europe occidentale depuis 1945 et des rapports complexes de la social-démocratie à la construction européenne. Tant il est vrai qu'au-delà de leur internationalisme proclamé, le champ d'action privilégié des partis socialistes, au cours du vingtième siècle, a été l'espace national. L'édification des différents modèles d'Etat-providence s'est réalisée à cette échelle et les rapports de forces sur lesquels se sont appuyés les partis socialistes étaient également nationaux. Dans ces conditions, l'édification de la Communauté européenne s'est posée comme un défi.



A partir d'un examen minutieux des partis socialistes belge, français et du parti travailliste britannique, l'auteur examine, dans une approche comparative, les différences d'attitudes des socialistes face à la construction européenne, l'évolution des points de vue et les enjeux contemporains du positionnement des socialistes face à l'Union européenne.

The Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle) was an anarchist newspaper, known today for the views of editor Luigi Galleani, whose ideas are associated with multiple bombings carried out in the United States throughout the 1910s and 1920s, the First Red Scare and the executed anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. A broad reading of the Cronaca Sovversiva, which focusses on more than its connections to controversy, violence and repression, reveals how a periodical produced by a wide range of artists, writers and activists became central to how many Italian immigrants understood and engaged with industrial capitalism. This paper argues that the Cronaca Sovversiva built an audience over time by incorporating a wide range of perspectives, addressing local and global issues and linking readers with other forms of literature as well as community events and projects. Diverse works of radical literature, art and announcements in the periodical, set within the predictable, repetitious framework of a weekly community paper, allowed a germinating militant movement to develop throughout and outside the Cronaca Sovversiva's pages.

This article examines the impact that indigenization policies had on labor and on the cultures of work in postcolonial Nigeria. Scholars have studied indigenization in the context of nationalist politics, statecraft, and development in postcolonial Africa. However, we have little knowledge of how working classes experienced and interpreted indigenization schemes. Focusing on the indigenization of shipping, this article discusses both how Nigerian seamen anticipated the establishment of the Nigerian National Shipping Line and the actual impact of Nigerianization on their working lives. By taking a close look at changes in shipboard hierarchies, labor relations, and the culture of work on NNSL vessels, we can gain a deeper understanding of how broader political processes associated with decolonization and postindependence shaped working-class lives in postcolonial Nigeria.

This article explores land occupation by foreign immigrants in the region of Joinville, in the Brazilian province of Santa Catarina. We take issue with the theses that argue that what prevailed was a society that could be characterized as a homogenous ethnic and cultural community. Based on the list of emigrants who departed from Hamburg, Germany, reports from the Hamburg Settlement Society and numerous correspondence, we attempt to identify the vocational and professional profile of immigrants, and to discern the internal tensions arising amongst different subgroups of settlers. We then go on to demonstrate identity fractures and social conflicts resulting from immigrants' assimilation strategies, as linked to a project of control over modes of organizing material life.
Keywords:
professional identity, ethnicity, colonization, migration