International Review of Social History最新文献

This article reflects on the pitfalls of the combined search for big and better data and argues for more attention to everyday experiences and incidental evidence. It proposes that including spatial aspects, perspectives from cultural, colonial, and women’s history, as well as widening the source base helps to remedy these challenges, and encourages historians to abandon their hesitations and embrace the uncertainties in doing so. It draws on the results of a research project at the University of Amsterdam that utilizes incidental evidence to enhance our understanding of gendered spatial patterns in premodern cities.

This article examines the role of cooperatives and mutual aid societies in shaping the political agency of skilled workers in Second Empire France, with a particular focus on the reports drafted by Parisian trade delegates at the 1867 Universal Exposition. Moving beyond the historiographical dichotomy between respectability and resistance, the study posits that workers articulated a distinctive politics of dignity, an assertion of self-worth rooted in collective moral and social values rather than mere assimilation into the norms promoted by the dominant classes. The trade delegates placed strong emphasis on morality in their reports. However, this language was not just a strategy for social acceptance. Rather, it served as a means through which workers asserted an alternative hierarchy of values and challenged dominant power structures. In a context where the Second Empire sought to promote industrial capitalism and threatened customary trade regulations, workers’ associationism became a crucial vehicle for identity formation and collective action. As the economic and social landscape rapidly evolved, cooperatives and mutual aid societies, alongside civil rights advocacy and trade unionism, developed as interconnected strategies to secure spaces of autonomy and envision an alternative order where workers could lead dignified lives.

Nationalist historiography portrays interwar protest in South Asia as predominantly Gandhian, non-militaristic, and non-violent. This portrayal is at odds with the experience of other parts of the world, which were shaped by a “violent peace” in the form of small wars, armed insurgencies, the mobilization of paramilitaries, and the increased prominence of the army in the public sphere in a context of the mass demobilization of military personnel. This article asks how South Asia’s interwar labour movement was shaped by a world marked by the experience of World War I and its aftermath. Through a study of labour “volunteer movements” or paramilitaries and military-related claims-making by labour leaders on the colonial state, it argues that “militarization” was an important aspect of labour politics in interwar South Asia. Volunteer movements were a widespread form of mobilization deployed by labouring populations. Labouring communities with historical connections to military service made claims on the colonial state’s patronage during industrial conflict by appealing to their past military service or official status as “martial races”. While this article studies these phenomena among Bombay’s textile and Dalit workers, it references analogous processes that occurred elsewhere on the subcontinent. Using a unique source base of the speeches and writings of labour leaders, publications of volunteer movements, workers’ court depositions, Marathi-language memoirs, strike enquiry committees, and newspaper material, it unearths a world of militaristic ideas and action seldom explored in the context of interwar South Asian labour.

The World of Sugar by Ulbe Bosma offers an ambitious and sweeping account of the global history of sugar. Readers interested in sugar’s role in shaping economies, environments, and societies will find it a captivating synthesis of its past and present trajectories. In this commentary, I engage critically with the book, focusing on the areas most closely aligned with my own research on the Brazilian sugar industry. I highlight key points related to labour, race, and resistance in order to broaden the debate on the sugar frontier.

Ulbe Bosma’s book on the global history of sugar offers fundamentally new insights into the nexus of technology, corporate capital, government policies, and ideologies of progress in the making of commodity frontiers. From the perspective of historical materialist anthropology, it is important to broaden the research agenda even further. With reference to Maussian historical personae in the making of global capitalism, for example, a long history of raiders of state budgets emerges from Bosma’s work. Incorporating Sidney Mintz’s work on Sweetness and Power on a critical extension of world-system theory reveals, for the case of colonial and postcolonial Mauritius, that economic subsystems and local responses to slavery and indenture have a permanence for kinship structures, social policies, real estate markets, trade union legislations, and postcolonial development policies in special economic zones. Such a widened focus allows for the incorporation of the Caribbean Plantation School theorists into our analysis of sugar commodity chains within a comprehensive world systems perspective beyond the commodity frontiers agenda.