Bücher der Reihe International Studies in Social History

This volume reassesses maternalism by providing critical reflections on prior usages of the concept, and by expanding its meaning to encompass geographical areas, political regimes, and cultural concerns that scholars have rarely addressed.

Planning Labour explores the early socialist industrialization and the implementation of central economic planning in Romania between 1945 and 1955. Centered on the city of Cluj, an ethnically mixed city in the northwestern part of Romania, this volume examines the deeply contradictory process required for achieving socialist accumulation.

Searching for a job has been an everyday affair in both modern and past societies, and employment a concern for both individuals and institutions. The case studies in this volume investigate job search and placement practices in European countries, Australia, and India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Beginning in the late 19th century, competing ideas about motherhood had a profound impact on the development and implementation of social welfare policies. Calls for programmes aimed at assisting and directing mothers emanated from all quarters of the globe, advanced by states and voluntary organizations, liberals and conservatives...

When discussing wages, historians have traditionally concentrated on the level of wages, much less on how people were paid for their work. Important aspects were thus ignored. Covering a wide geographical area, this volume offers fresh perspectives on such areas in social and economic history.

Categories in Context enriches our understanding of how cognitive categories such as status, law, and rights have been produced, comprehended, appropriated, and eventually transformed in France and Germany.

Together, the essays collected here explore themes such as work, unions, politics and migration in the Nordic states from the early modern period to the twenty-first century.

The Communist Party dictatorships in Hungary and East Germany sought to win over the "e;masses"e; with promises of providing for ever-increasing levels of consumption. This policy-successful at the outset-in the long-term proved to be detrimental for the regimes because it shifted working class political consciousness to the right while it effectively excluded leftist alternatives from the public sphere. This book argues that this policy can provide the key to understanding of the collapse of the regimes. It examines the case studies of two large factories, Carl Zeiss Jena (East Germany) and Rba in GyA r (Hungary), and demonstrates how the study of the formation of the relationship between the workers' state and the industrial working class can offer illuminating insights into the important issue of the legitimacy (and its eventual loss) of Communist regimes.

The issues around settlement, belonging, and poor relief have for too long been understood largely from the perspective of England and Wales. This volume offers a pan-European survey that encompasses Switzerland, Prussia, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain.

Sugar was the single most valuable bulk commodity traded internationally before oil became the world's prime resource. This book questions some major assumptions about the nexus between sugar production and colonial societies in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, especially in the second (post-1800) colonial era.

The story of the miners of Zonguldak presents a particularly graphic local lens through which to examine questions that have been of major concern to historians-most prominently, the development of the state, the emergence of capitalism, and the role of the working classes in these large processes. This book examines such major issues through the actual experiences of coal miners in the Ottoman Empire. The encounters of mine workers with state mining officials and private mine operators do not follow the expected patterns of labor-state-capital relations as predicted by the major explanatory paradigms of modernization or dependency. Indeed, as the author clearly shows, few of the outcomes are as predicted. The fate of these miners has much to offer both Ottoman and Middle East specialists as well as scholars of the developing world and, more generally, those interested in the connections between economic development and social and political change.

This volume offers a rich analysis of the situation in seven major European countries but also a comparison of the data found and an attempt to account for the differences established. It ends with some conclusions on the prospects of trade unions within the European Union, and on the lessons to be learned from the present analysis.

Why do people rebel? This is one of the most important questions historians and social scientists have been grappling with over the years. It is a question to which no satisfactory answer has been found, despite more than a century of research.

Much of the writing on charisma focuses on specific traits associated with exceptional leaders, a practice that has broadened the concept of charisma to such an extent that it loses its distinctiveness - and therefore its utility. More particularly, the concept's relevance to the study of social movements has not moved beyond generalizations.

World War II sparked a wave of decolonizations throughout the world. These transfers of sovereignty resulted in extensive, unforeseen movements of citizens and subjects to their former countries. Present-day Western Europe, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Portugal are home to six million first-generation postcolonial migrants.

What Is Work? offers a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding labor within the highly gendered realm of household economies.

The newly awakened interest in the lives of craftspeople in Turkey is highlighted in this collection, which uses archival documents to follow Ottoman artisans from the late 15th century to the beginning of the 20th. The authors examine historical changes in the lives of artisans, focusing on craft organizations (or guilds)...

Examining the 1930s and the different reactions to the crisis, this volume offers a global comparative perspective that includes a comparison across time to give insight into the contemporary global recession. The book offers no recipe for economic, social, or political action in today's recession, but it shows a wide range of reactions in the past

Sugar was the single most valuable bulk commodity traded internationally before oil became the world's prime resource. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, cane sugar production was pre-eminent in the Atlantic Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Subsequently, cane sugar industries in the Americas were transformed...

Escaping the traditional focus on Paris, the author examines the divergent political identities of two occupational groups in Lyon, metal and silk workers, who, despite having lived and worked in the same city, developed different patterns of political practices and bore distinct political identities. This book also examines in detail the way that gender relations influenced industrial change, skill, and political identity. Combining empirical data collected in French archives with social science theory and methods, this study argues that political identities were shaped by the intersection of the prevailing political climate with the social relations surrounding work in specific industrial settings.

During the four decades of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia a vast literature on working-class movements has been produced but it has hardly any value for today's scholarship. This remarkable study reopens the field. Based on Czech, Slovak, German and other sources, it focuses on the history of the multi-ethnic social democratic labor movement in Slovakia's capital Bratislava during the period 1867-1921, and on the process of national revolution during the years 1918-19 in particular. The study places the historic change of the former Pressburg into the modern Bratislava in the broader context of the development of multinational pre-1918 Hungary, the evolution of social, ethnic, and political relations in multi-ethnic Pressburg (a 'tri-national' city of Germans, Magyars, and Slovaks), and the development of the multinational labor movement in Hungary and the Habsburg Empire as a whole.

"Kevin Murphy has written an important book. It steers a course between the prevailing historical orthodoxy that dismisses the Russian Revolution of October 1917 as a disastrous aberration and the so-called ''revisionists'' who have portrayed Stalinism as a phenomenon with strong popular roots." --Alex Callinicos, Professor of European Studies, King''s College London and member of Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize Committee"Kevin Murphy has produced an outstanding and original work that is a must-read for all those interested in Soviet history.The judges of the annual Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize have fittingly chosen this book as their winner for 2005, for which they deserve congratulations." --Capital and Class"Murphy draws on an abundant, varied, and multilayered documentary evidence.a tremendous contribution.we all stand in his debt." --New Politics"The workers of the Hammer and Sickle factory come alive here in an exciting story of struggle, victory, and defeat. Their voices ring out to us across the years, as we join them in their meetings and on the shop floor, at the height of revolutionary hopes and the defeats of the Stalin years. Murphy offers an unprecedented view of dissent and accommodation at the grassroots level." --Wendy Goldman, Carnegie Mellon University"Murphy has given us an impeccably researched case study of the vicissitudes of workers politics on the shop floor, which charts the rise and fall of worker activism....This is not a monolithic working class of revolutionary heroes or atomized victims, but a politically and ideologically diverse and contradictory group whose daily struggles and internal battles Murphy charts with subtlety and precision." --Donald Filtzer, University of East London, UK"Kevin Murphy''s brilliant new study offers fresh insights into how the political struggle in Russia reverberated in the factories before, during, and after 1917. Significantly, it illuminates the many ways in which Stalinism was asserted on the shop floor." --Andrei Sokolov, The Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences"The archives have been open now for fifteen years and few historians of revolutionary Russia have tested previously held assumptions and interpretations of the past through systematic studies of primary source material as Murphy has achieved in this study. --The Russian ReviewWhy did the most unruly proletariat of the Twentieth Century come to tolerate the ascendancy of a political and economic system that, by every conceivable measure, proved antagonistic to working-class interests? Revolution and Counterrevolution is at the center of the ongoing discussion about class identities, the Russian Revolution, and early Soviet industrial relations. Based on exhaustive research in four factory-specific archives, it is unquestionably the most thorough investigation to date on working-class life during the revolutionary era. Focusing on class conflict and workers'' frequently changing response to management and state labor policies, the study also meticulously reconstructs everyday life: from leisure activities to domestic issues, the changing role of women, and popular religious belief. Its unparalleled immersion in an exceptional variety of sources at the factory level and its direct engagement with the major interpretive questions about the formation of the Stalinist system will force scholars to re-evaluate long-held assumptions about early Soviet society.Kevin Murphy teaches history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His current writing projects include A People''s History of the Russian Revolution and a study of the role of trade unions in Soviet society.

Focusing on organization, resistance and political culture, this collection covers topics ranging from socialism to anarchism, from the formation of the liberal state in the 19th century to the Civil War, and from women in the work place to the fate of the unions under Franco.

Exploring the changing meanings of the circulation of second-hand goods from the Renaissance, this volume examines the blurring of boundaries between market, gifts, and charity. It describes the actors of the market and also the subterranean circulation that develops around the need for money and that provides for numerous intermediaries.

As economic citizenship was a pre-condition of full citizenship, the lack of economic autonomy was an important motivation during the early stages of the women's movement. Independent of their class background, women had less access to not only financial resources but also social and cultural capital, i.e., member's commitment. Resources are therefore of particular interest from a gender perspective, and this book sheds light on the importance of resources for women's struggles for political rights. Highlighting the financial strategies of the first wave of Swedish middle-class and socialist women's movements and comparing them with similar organizations in Germany, England, and Canada, the authors show the importance of class, gender, age, and the national context, offering a valuable contribution to the discussion of resource mobilization theories in the context of social movements.

The number of studies discussing the labour relationship under industrial capitalism is overwhelming, but the literature on labour and its concrete, day-today shop-floor practices is much less abundant. How and by whom workers were supervised is one of the neglected aspects in the history of labour relations.

Apprenticeship or vocational training is a subject of lively debate. This book shows that research on apprenticeship and learning on the shop floor is associated with migration patterns, family economy and household strategies, gender perspectives, urban identities and general educational and pedagogical contexts.

Every society has a definition of what work is, and isn't. What Is Work? offers a multi-disciplinary overview of work as it applies to the highly gendered realm of household economies, drawing from scholarship on gender history, economic sociology, family history, civil law, and feminist economics.