State–peasant movement relations and the politics of food sovereignty in Mexico and Ecuador

This contribution argues that the articulation between the state and peasant organizations’ internal structures – the class characteristics of their mass bases, their leaderships and the modes of interaction between the two – is critical for determining the nature of contemporary struggles guided by the discourse of food sovereignty. It will show that that counter-hegemonic demands are not synonymous with counter-hegemonic practice; rather than struggling to replace the neoliberal food regime, many peasant organizations employ the food sovereignty discourse as a political tool in their negotiations with the state in order to access resources from within the prevailing neoliberal model, not to transform it.     

Women's studies and the women's movement in Britain: origins and evolution, 1970–2000

The article is based on research carried out in 1998-99 which involved interviewing United Kingdom based women who had been responsible for introducing degree courses in women's studies into British universities and polytechnics. The interviews are records of the memories of those women as they look back on a political moment when they were engaged in collective attempts to transform the academic curriculum. Personal memories are placed alongside accounts and debates which appeared in printed sources, such as books and newsletters from the British Women's liberation movement from 1970 onwards. The article also reflects on the process in which past events and personal memoirs move from stories to histories, enter the archive, and begin to acquire the status of history.     

The women’s liberation movement,activism and therapy at the grassroots, 1968–1985

The women’s liberation movement was the impetus for the founding of new institutions of psychological and mental health care for women in the late 1970s and 1980s. This article draws upon the archive of one such site, based in Islington, North London, to explore the ways that members of the movement interacted with local politics and were attentive to racial and economic oppression. It demonstrates that consciousness-raising groups and feminist magazines made women’s distress visible and that this visibility led to the development of feminist critiques of mainstream psychiatric care. The critiques of mainstream provision laid the ground for grassroots interventions into women’s mental healthcare in the community.     

‘they’re talkin’ bout a revolution’: feminism,anarchism and the politics of social change in the global justice movement

Despite the proliferation of works on the ‘global justice movement’ (GJM) in recent years, surprisingly little has been written on the intersections between feminist and anarchist strands within this ‘movement of movements’. In an effort to rectify this gap in the literature, this article seeks to explore in what ways and to what extent anarchist and feminist renditions of revolution, within the context of the GJM, are conceptually compatible and thereby potentially politically reinforcing. In order to ascertain the degree of convergence between these two radical projects, in the first part of the article I examine what each camp is fighting for and against and whether their struggles for social justice are ideologically consonant. In the second part, I turn my attention to the types of practices being enacted and defended by these two activist constituencies and ask how they see their respective revolutions being brought about. What notions of social change are at work here and are their political practices, and the different temporalities sustaining them, reconcilable? After arguing in the first two parts of this article that anarchism and feminism are more compatible than is often acknowledged and that the considerable synergies between feminist notions of social justice and social change and anarchist conceptions of revolution merit far more attention than they currently receive, I end the piece by reflecting on some of the points of tension that still militate against merging their respective political imaginaries. I do so in an attempt to identify what I see as the conditions of possibility for a more integrated, mutually collaborative feminist anarchist revolutionary politics.     

Union labels and boycotts: Cooperation of the knights of labor and the cigar makers international union, 1885–6

Hard‐Rock Epic: Western Miners and the Industrial Revolution, 1860–1910. By Mark Wyman. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979. x, 331 pp. $15.95.

Wage‐Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900–1930. By Leslie Woodcock Tentler. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. 266 pp. $14.95.

Feigned Necessity: Hawaii's Attempts to Obtain Chinese Contract Labor, 1921–1923. By John E. Reinecke. San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, Inc., 1979. xvi, 697 pp., n.p.

Lumber and Politics: The Career of Mark E. Reed. By Robert E. Ficken. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979. xi, 276 pp. $14.95.

The Mess in Washington: Manpower Mobilization in World War II. By George Q. Flynn. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1979. xi, 294 pp. $17.95.

The Great Fear: The Anti‐Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower. By David Caute. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978. 638 pp. $14.95.

Which Side Are You On? The Brookside Mine Strike in Harlan County, Kentucky. By Lynda Ann Ewen. Chicago: Vanguard Books, 1979. 139 pp. Appendix. $4.95.

A Ghetto Grows In Brooklyn. By Harold X. Connolly. New York: New York University Press, 1977. xv, 248 pp. $15.00.

Voices of Discord: Canadian Short Stories from the 1930's. Edited by Donna Phillips. Introduction by Kenneth J. Hughes. Toronto: New Hogtown Press, 1979. 220 pp. $7.95.

Popular Disturbances in England: 1700–1870. By John Stevenson. New York: Longman, 1979. vii, 374 pp. $24.00.

Before The Welfare State: Social Administration in Early Industrial Brit‐tain. By Ursula R. Q. Henriques. New York: Longman, 1979. 294 pp. $10.50.

Aristocracy and People: Britain 1815–1865. By Norman Gash. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. vii, 375 pp. $20.00.

Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth‐Century London: John Gast and His Times. By I. J. Prothero. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. 418 pp. $30.00.

The Edwardian Age: Conflict and Stability 1900–1914. Edited by Alan O'Day. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1979. 199 pp. $19.95.

Goodbye to the Working Class: A Study of 122 Former Grammar School Children from Dagenham. By Roy Greenslade. London: Marion Boyars, 1979. 192 pp. $ 5.95.

The Action Française and Revolutionary Syndicalism. By Paul Mazgaj. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1979. 281 pp. $24.95.

Paths To Authority: The Middle Class and the Industrial Labor Force in France, 1820–1848. By Peter N. Stearns. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. 222 pp. $12.95.

French Peasants in Revolt: The Insurrection of 1851. By Ted W. Marga‐dent. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. xxiv, 379 pp. $25.00.

The Service City: State and Townsmen In Russia, 1600–1800. By J. Michael Hittle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. viii, 297 pp. $20.00.

Karl Marx, Romantic Irony and the Proletariat: The Mythopoetic Origins of Marxism. By Leonard P. Wessell, Jr. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. 297 pp. $20.00.     

European capitalism and the effects of agricultural commercialization on slave labor in Tunisia, 1780s–1880s

Abstract

The paper argues that while the significance of Tunisian state economic and political reforms during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has reflected the changing patterns of the caravan slave trade in previous research, much of this research has not considered the role of slaves in the emergent Tunisian economy. Nowhere is this negligence more apparent than in the agricultural sector, which was predominantly responsible for strengthening economic growth from the late eighteenth century until its weakening as a result of encroaching European capitalism by the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing on Tunisian state population data known as the Majba Census and the extant economic literature, the paper addresses this gap by exploring the implications of the Tunisian state economic reforms on enslaved labor in the agricultural sector. Exploring this research gap will enable us to ascertain the extent to which enslaved labor contributed to Tunisia’s burgeoning agricultural sector in a manner that has dodged academics’ attention. After providing a historical context of European capital penetration and its implications on political and economic reforms from the Ottoman conquest through the Husaynid periods, the paper looks at how European capital infusion after the first quarter of the nineteenth century transformed the agricultural sector and examines the role of slave labor prior to the European capital infusion and commercialization of the agricultural sector. Using the Majba Census records’ regional distribution of blacks in the Regency the paper sheds light on the implications of the precarious economy engendered by agricultural commercialization under the aegis of European capitalism on the structure of enslaved labor.     

The choice of part-time employment in the United States and Canada, 1955–2000

Abstract

Part-time employment growth in the United States and Canada followed similar trends between 1955 and 1975, which then diverged when part-time employment (as a percent of total employment) stopped growing in the United States but continued to expand in Canada. This divergence in trend in the latter part of the twentieth century is not adequately explained by labor supply demographics, labor demand factors, or union effects. To the contrary, differences in public policy played a pivotal role in allowing Canadian workers to continue to view the choice of shorter hours as attractive, while US workers faced higher costs when choosing part-time employment.