The roots of rural agitation in India, 1914–1947: A reply to Hardiman

This constitutes a reply to David Hardiman's recent criticism of my article on the middle peasant thesis and its applicability to late colonial India. It challenges Hardiman's notion of the middle peasantry as too narrow and not the indisputable Leninist definition. Further, it emphasizes the emergence of a more flexible agrarian economy and society which, whilst not necessarily ‘capitalist’, renders redundant the concept of a traditional middle peasantry. Finally, Hardiman's interpretation of the Bardoli campaign of 1928 and its implications for understanding rural agitations in British India are critically examined.     

White collars and labour history: the contractual regime in Italy from the Liberal to the Fascist era, 1919–1945

This article aims to re-examine the history of non-manual labour, beginning with an analysis of the evolution of general norms governing the contracts of private sector workers in Italy, from the post-First World War period up until the creation of the fascist corporate system in the 1930s. The starting point is the 1919 law that defined the specific characteristics of white-collar workers, expressed as a bond of trust and delegation on the part of employers, from whom legally established and binding guarantees were issued. These guarantees included the offer of permanent employment and the right to compensation should said employment be terminated. This law was reformed during the fascist era, but continued to influence the collective labour agreements stipulated by unions under the regime, contributing to the sustained social status of white-collar workers, particularly in comparison to manual labourers. This article will highlight the difficulties in applying these standards, and the legal and union disputes they generated, exploring an area rarely discussed by historians, while also, as a case study, scrutinizing the more advanced situation of employees in the banking sector – a sector which, from a regulatory and contractual point of view, represented the white-collar élite, as it would continue to do for a long time after the Second World War.     

Experiences of women estate workers during the apprenticeship period in St Vincent, 1834–38: the transition from slavery to freedom

In 1834, the British Government abolished slavery in the British Caribbean. In order to appease slave owners, the Government awarded them £20 million compensation money and initiated an apprenticeship period. The aim of the apprenticeship period was to provide a transition from slave to wage labour and tie the ex-slaves to their owners for a further six years. The apprenticeship period was marred by repressive acts by planters against their workers. Women were especially singled out for abuse and lost many of the rights they had gained during slavery. Apprenticeship was eventually abandoned in 1838. Stories of excessive cruelty convinced the colonial authorities that the working relationship between apprentices and managers within the sugar estates had not improved. This article examines the experiences of women apprentices in St Vincent to highlight the indignities that they faced. It also explores the actions that some women employed to improve their working conditions. Previous studies of the Caribbean have mainly focused on the slavery period or the twentieth century. There has so far been little attention paid to the lives of African-Caribbean women immediately after the abolition of slavery. This study helps to explain why so many women withdrew from estate work as soon as they were fully free and chose instead to concentrate on growing and marketing provision crops. During this transitionary period, it became clear to women that working conditions on the estates would not improve for them. The plantation managers' inability to adjust to free labour resulted in a significant withdrawal of female labourers after 1 August 1838.     

Redefining institutional identity: the YWCA challenge to extraterritoriality in China, 1925–30

This article explores how the May 30th, 1925 Incident forced American Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) Secretaries in China to rethink their relationship with imperialism and governmental power and to redefine, in collaboration with Chinese YWCA Secretaries, the Chinese National YWCA's institutional mission. It examines the American YWCA Secretaries’ efforts to challenge extraterritorial privileges granting foreign nationals immunity from Chinese laws, among a host of other ‘unequal,’ that is, non-reciprocal rights and prerogatives, claimed by the foreign governments and based on treaties signed with the Chinese Government. It restores the American YWCA Secretaries' voices to the historical narrative of the Western response to the May 30th Incident and reveals their agency and subjectivity. Although American YWCA Secretaries failed to achieve the goal that they defined for themselves when the May 30th Incident occurred – to reorder state-to-state relations between the USA and China on a more equitable, just and ‘moral’ basis – they nonetheless achieved some success in injecting their moral discourse into the US China policy debate. Moreover, their response to May 30th produced a significant feminist achievement: they dismantled the unequal and imperialist power relations within their own organization.     

The ‘middle peasant thesis’ and the roots of rural agitation in India, 1914–1947

Peasant agitations during the last decades of British rule in India are now receiving increasing attention. Despite a diversity of arguments concerning their origins within the peasantry, one popular model is that developed by Wolf and Alavi of the potential radicalism of a landowning subsistence middle peasantry. The thesis is here examined both in terms of its general analytical value for India and by studying one particular movement, the campaign in Bardoli, Gujarat in 1928. From this, some conclusions are suggested about the nature of successful peasant political action in India and other parts of Asia.     

Agrarian reform and the transition to socialism in Chile, 1970–1973

The purpose of this article is to examine Popular Unity's agrarian policy in the light of the failure of the revolutionary forces to capture power and initiate a transition to socialism in Chile. We argue that Popular Unity's agrarian policy reflects the limitations and contradictions of its strategy to power. Although Allende's agrarian reform was extensive, drastic and rapidly executed, it nevertheless limited the peasantry's contribution to the revolutionary struggle for power. In the first part we briefly examine the agrarian legacy left by the Christian Democrat government of Frei to the Popular Unity and present the agrarian programme of Allende's government. We proceed in the second part with an analysis of peasant mobilisation and organisation, focusing on land seizures and peasant councils. In the third part we devote our attention to the organisation and functioning of the expropriated latifundia, which constituted the reformed sector, and examine why socialist relations of production failed to develop. Finally, in the fourth part, we attempt an assessment of Popular Unity's agrarian policy from the viewpoint of the accumulation of revolutionary forces in the rural sector by highlighting some of its contradictions.     

‘Our conception of non-partisanship means a partisan non-partisanship’: the search for political identity in the American Federation of Labor, 1947–1955

This article reconsiders the evolution of political action in the American Federation of Labor between 1947 and 1955 by examining the American Federation of Labor's (AFL's) first overtly political arm, Labor's League for Political Education. It argues that the key dynamic shaping labor's political activities in this crucial period was the tension between a tradition of non-partisanship and the imperatives of an evolving political landscape that made meaningful neutrality impossible. By 1952, decentralization, local autonomy, and non-partisanship had given way to a political identity marked by centralization, national coordination, and partisan alliances.     

Spatially strong: Dead Sea Works Ltd. and the building up of the southeast of Israel, 1948–1964

This is the story of the formative years of one of Israel’s big corporations – the Dead Sea Works Ltd. (DSW). It concerns the interrelations between space and labor, told through an account of four transitions: (1) The transfer of the company from England to Israel with its establishment in 1952; (2) The move of its central office from Jerusalem to Be’er Sheva; (3) The dismantling of the original workers’ camp near the factory (in Sodom) and the move of the workers’ dwellings to three different towns; and (4) The transfer of representation from Tel Aviv to Be’er Sheva. The case of the DSW, I argue, is a ‘geohistory’ of labor that exemplifies the construction of the northeastern Negev’s social space, especially the making of scale. This ‘scale-making’ was an ongoing process of scaling up (from the local to the regional) and scaling down (from the global to the state level, and from the center to the periphery). Through this process of scale-making, the workers of the DSW gained a great deal of power and became spatially strong.     

"No More Pressing Task than Organization in Southeast Asia": The AFL‐CIO Approaches the Vietnam War, 1947–64

A retrospective analysis of the employee purchase of the Weirton Steelworkers by 11,000 union workers brings into relief the critical role collective bargaining agreements had in motivating the original parent corporation, National Steel, to seek an alternative to closing the plant and subsequently to enabling employees to balance their desires for secure incomes and pensions with the company's financial obligations. There are three critical lessons from Weirton's experience. First, labor progressives created a political context that enabled the union leadership to leverage concessions from National Steel. Second, democratic practices instituted by the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) and the Independent Steelworkers Union's collective bargaining agreements enabled worker-owners to secure incomes and pensions. Third, collective action and collective interests created and sustained majority support for the ESOP. Had employees acted individually it is unlikely they would have sustained employment and pensions for twenty years.     

‘If the Time is not Ripe,Then it is Your Job to Ripen the Time!’ The Transformation of the YWCA in the USA from Segregated Association to Interracial Organization, 1930–1965

This article explores the processes behind the transformation of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in the USA from a segregated organization in 1920 to an organization promoting racial equality, both within its ranks and in the wider community by 1965. Despite the continuation of segregated practices within some parts of the YWCA until the late 1960s, African‐American women were able to influence the YWCA within national divisions, notably the Negro Leadership Conference and the National Student Council. The influence of African‐American women within the national organisation made the YWCA’s toleration of segregation, both within its own association and in American society, untenable. The interracial friendships and relationships formed by women within the YWCA were crucial in breaking down the national organization’s acceptance of segregation and creating the will to overcome regional inertia, conservatism and hostility.     

Moving to the Gulf: an empirical analysis of the patterns and drivers of migration to the GCC countries, 1960–2013

The migration system in the Persian (Arabian) Gulf is among the largest such systems in the world. This article identifies the major interacting elements of this system, which primarily includes countries in South Asia and the Middle East, and discusses its generating forces and developments over the past five and a half decades. Departing from panel data from the World Bank and the UN’s population database, which hitherto have been largely under-analysed, we investigate the dynamics of migrations in the period 1960–2013. The panel data are combined with cross-sectional outlooks of contemporary trends and are related to political and economic developments in the region. It is suggested that the patterns of migrations in the Gulf may be explained with reference to the economic, political and demographic idiosyncrasies of the system, and to the migration policies of the GCC countries. In short, the key drivers of GCC migration patterns include: (1) socio-economic realities, in particular income differentials between migrant senders and migrant receivers as well as impressive growth rates in the Gulf region; (2) historical, cultural and institutional proximity among the constituent states in the system; and (3) the particularities of the Gulf states’ liberal labour-migrant regimes, which contrast starkly with their restrictive refugee and naturalisation policies.     

Gender,Culture and the Law: Approaches to ‘Honour Crimes’ in the UK

This article examines the debate on whether to analyse ‘honour crimes’ as gender-based violence, or as cultural tradition, and the effects of either stance on protection from and prevention of these crimes. In particular, the article argues that the categorisation of honour-related violence as primarily cultural ignores its position within the wider spectrum of gender violence, and may result in a number of unfortunate side-effects, including lesser protection of the rights of women within minority communities, and the stigmatisation of those communities. At the same time it is problematic to completely dismiss any cultural aspects of violence against women, and a nuanced approach is required which carefully balances the benefits and detriments of taking cultural factors into account. The article examines the issues within the context of the legal response to cases involving honour-related violence, arguing that although the judiciary has in a number of cases inclined towards viewing ‘honour’ as primarily cultural rather than patriarchal, in some cases they have begun to take a more gender-based or ‘mature multiculturalism’ approach.

Changes in peasant food production and food supply in relation to the historical development of commodity production in pre‐colonial and colonial Tanganyika∗

This paper explores the dynamic interaction between peasant food production and commodity production under conditions of the increasing penetration of capital and consequent erosion of pre‐capitalist modes of production in pre‐colonial and colonial Tanganyika (Tanzania). It is argued that while the law of value inherent in commodity production definitely served to effect more specialisation of labour in peasant production, nevertheless,it was bounded by the limits of labour productivity attainable in peasant household production units. Shortfalls in peasant food production appeared as the most glaring consequence of the labour productivity constraint. The role of the colonial state was critical, not merely in the sense of acting to increase peasant commodity production. The colonial state also intervened strategically to dispense famine relief in times of serious food shortfalls, which guaranteeing peasant subsistence, altered its character from that of unreliability to that of regularity. Since peasant subsistence formed the necessary base for peasant commodity production, state famine relief ensured the persistence of peasant commodity production but not its proliferation, the latter again being indicative of the labour productivity constraint.