International & comparative social history – serie

In the late nineteenth century in a number of continental European countries Christian associations of workers arose: Christian trade unions, workers’ cooperatives, political leagues, workers’ youth movements and cultural associations, sometimes separately for men and women. In some countries they formed a unified Christian labour movement, which sometimes also belonged to a broader Christian subculture or pillar, encompassing all social classes. In traditional labour history Christian workers’ organizations were solely represented as dividing the working class and weakening the class struggle. However, from the 1980s onwards a considerable amount of studies have been devoted to Christian workers’ organizations that adopted a more nuanced approach. This book takes stock of this new historiography. To broaden the analysis, each contribution compares the development in at least two countries, thus generating new comparative insights.This volume assesses the development of Christian workers’ organizations in Europe from a broad historical and comparative perspective. The contributions focus on the collective identity of the Christian workers’ organization, their denominational and working-class allegiances and how these are expressed in ideology, organization and practice. Among the themes discussed are relations with churches and Christian Democracy, secularization, the development of the Welfare State, industrial relations and the contribution to working-class culture. This volume is the result of a joint intellectual enterprise of the International Institute of Social History (IISG) in Amsterdam (Netherlands) and a group of scholars linked to the KADOC – Documentation and Research Centre for Religion, Culture and Society of the KU Leuven (Catholic University Leuven-Belgium).

During the last decade studies have indicated that migration has been a normal, structural element of human societies throughout history. Progress in migration and settlement studies under this new paradigm has been so substantial that a new state of the art is needed. This book presents a reconsideration of current theoretical perspectives encompassing enlightened insights in diverging specialisms in the field of migration history, such as slavery studies, ethnic history, macro-economic migration studies, and gypsy studies. The seventeen essays in this volume, written by leading scholars in the field, collectively represent a pioneering effort in migration and settlement studies. They address the problems of ongoing specialization (and hence the need for synthesis) and the difficulties of integrating the consequences of this new paradigm into general histories.

The recent wave of globalization has a profound impact on labour. Consequently, research in the field of labour and working-class history has become less Eurocentric and more global over the last twenty years. Outstanding specialists take stock of the globalization of the field in eighteen essays. Two introductory essays discuss the theoretical consequences of this development as well as the early historiography of labour and working-class history. Next, ten essays provide an exceptionally complete coverage of recent historiographical trends in the labour history of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, North America, South America, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, China, Japan, and Australasia. Finally, six case studies research worldwide and comparative aspects of global labour history, developing best practices in this new and difficult field. They include a wide variety of occupations and economic sectors: agricultural labour, domestic labour, brick making, coal mining and the work done in the docks and on the railways on different continents.

This volume brings together the latest work in Russian labour history, based on exciting materials from previously closed archives and collections. Sixteen essays, focusing on peasants and workers, explore the lives and struggles of working people. Ranging over a century of dramatic upheaval, from the late 1800s to the present, the essays are organized around three broad themes: workers’ politics, incentives and coercion within industrial and rural workplaces, and household strategies. The volume explores the relationship between the peasantry and the working class, a nexus that has been central to state policy, oppositional politics, economic development, and household configuration. It profiles a working class rent by divisions and defined not only by its relationship to the workplace or the state, but also by its household strategies for daily survival. The essays explore many topics accessible for the first time, including the motivations of women workers, roots of revolutionary activism, the revolutionary movement outside the great cities, socialist opposition to the Soviet regime, reactions of workers to Stalinist terror, socialist tourism, peasant families in forced exile, and work discipline on the collective farms.