Two remarkable people have stepped down as editors of this journal. Their long association with its development, content, and ambitions has proved wise and constitutive. If the study of institutions, in vogue these days, risks understating the importance of leadership, no one affiliated with ILWCH could make this mistake.

Recent interpretations of World War Two have stressed the decisive role of economics in the success of the Allies and especially in the failure of the Axis. Yet the place of labor in the war remains under-appreciated. ILWCH commissioned several essays for a special issue on wartime labor mobilization, forced and free. This introduction briefly compares Nazi Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and highlights the implications of the differing wartime labor regimes for the postwar period.

In 1944, more than eight million foreign forced laborers were employed in the German war economy inside the Reich. This essay investigates the origins, character, and effects of the employment of foreigners on the German war economy. The principle characteristic of this employment of foreigners was the contradiction between the economic interest in exploiting as many foreigners as possible and the ideological principles of National Socialism, which sought to protect the Volk from mixing with “foreign blood.” From this contradiction there developed a rigidly hierarchical racist system for the treatment of forced laborers. Without the use of foreign labor, the agricultural and industrial production of Germany would have collapsed in 1942 at the latest. The German war economy therefore had no choice but to depend on the employment of millions of forced laborers. The second part of this essay traces the history of the refusal to offer compensation to the former forced laborers from 1945 to 1999. Two factors are most important in explaining this refusal. First, the German government tried to represent forced labor as an atypical Nazi injustice and thus to avoid compensation. Second, the West, above all the United States, opposed allowing any payments to the states of the eastern bloc during the Cold War. With the reunification of Germany and the Two-Plus-Four Accord, these efforts and interests collapsed.

Japan's war in Asia and the Pacific would have ground to a halt long before 1945 without the labor of millions of foreign workers, most of them mobilized against their will. For example, production of coal (then Japan's primary energy source) depended in large part on coerced labor from Korea, a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945. Throughout Japan's wartime empire, at least fifteen million Asians were put to work, often under brutally exploitative conditions, constructing roads, bridges, and air fields; digging minerals; and building boats, among many other projects. Untold thousands died because of harsh treatment, inadequate food and medical care, and poor planning. Many surviving workers, some of whom were left permanently disabled, are still waiting today for the wages they were promised. Such a large, destructive enterprise naturally had consequences that outlived the war. Coercive labor mobilization tore families and communities apart and sharpened class resentments, contributing to revolutionary upheavals after August 1945 in Korea and Indonesia, for example. In Japan itself, where mobilization took place on a relatively small scale and with comparatively little coercion, it left a complex, contradictory legacy, invigorating the labor movement in some ways and strengthening the hand of capital in others. Unlike the situation in Germany, where corporations have recently agreed to compensate wartime forced workers, both the state and corporations in Japan have refused to consider compensation for the foreign workers who kept Japan's war machine running from 1939 to 1945.

The Soviet Union, in its drive to mobilize its every resource to turn back the German invaders, used a unique institution: the Gulag, a forced-labor, detention, and exile system isolating millions of citizens from the body politic.While the term “Gulag,” an acronym of “Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei” (Main Administration of Camps), properly notes a specific, time-limited administrative institution tasked with oversight of the Soviet detention system, I use the term here and throughout in its more common usage since the publication of Solzhenitsyn's works to refer to the entire Soviet penal system. This essay seeks to understand the wartime Gulag both as a microcosm of the Soviet home front and as an integral participant in the campaigns to mobilize Soviet labor power in support of the war effort and to cleanse that very labor force of real and potential enemies of the Soviet state. Focusing on the institutions and population, economic production, political education, and the rigidification of detention of those defined as “especially dangerous,” the essay explores the relationship between the Gulag and the larger Soviet polity. Although in economic and administrative terms the Gulag emerged as a burden to the Soviet state during the war, the Soviet leadership never even entertained the notion of dismantling the system. The Gulag was a pillar of the Soviet system, as important for its role in the battle to cleanse and shape the Soviet home front as for its role in military production.

The historiography of US labor during the Second World War has shifted away from New Left concerns with the fate of working-class militancy, becoming more attuned instead to the structure and development of the New Deal order. A quarter century ago, historians debated the extent to which the warfare state had emasculated working-class radicalism and constructed in its place a bureaucratized, corporate-liberal labor movement. Few scholars doubted that trade unions were a fixed and permanent feature of the postwar political economy. But in the decades following the presidency of Ronald Reagan, when the legal, ideological, and economic structures sustaining the institutional union movement are so weak, the agenda of most historians and social scientists has shifted to one that problematizes the rise, consolidation, and postwar devolution of the mid-century New Deal settlement. For US labor and other popular social movements, World War Two had a dichotomous character. In both politics and policy, war-era corporatist structures failed to win lasting institutional expressions, either during the war or in the decades following 1945. There was no “labor-management accord,” although labor's strength did generate a kind of armed truce in key oligopolistic sectors of the economy. Anti-New-Deal conservatives in Congress and the corporate hierarchy sought, above all, to divorce industrial relations issues from the larger political universe. This was the meaning of “free” collective bargaining in the years after 1947. But during the war and reconversion years right afterward, elite power at the top of the mobilization apparatus was repeatedly challenged by insurgencies from below that sought to take advantage of the unprecedented demand for labor while at the same time actualizing the pluralist, social-patriotic ethos that was the quasi-official ideology of the World War Two home front. These social movements were a dialectical product of the mobilizing bureaucracies—the War Labor Board, the Fair Employment Practice Com- mission, and the Office of Price Administration—that were among the most remarkable features of the wartime New Deal. Indeed, this increasingly contentious juxtaposition between a state apparatus drifting rightward and a well-organized working class represents the great paradox of the war, a dichotomy that would be resolved in the postwar years by a rapid, politically brutal divorce between popular aspirations and the state policies needed to fulfill them.

This essay explores changing trends in the post-1989 historiography of both eastern and western postwar Europe. It suggests that one major development is a shift toward themes in social and cultural history that see the late 1940s in the context of wartime experience. Another is the wresting of issues such as the imposition of communist power in eastern Europe from political science by historians. Shortcomings visible in these new trends include a tendency to divorce the history of representations and images from older concerns with power and the state. On the whole, however, common issues are emerging in the historiography of the two-halves of the continent that make it easier to envisage a more unified approach to their joint postwar history.

Japanese labor-management relations and production systems, as typified in large manufacturing firms, have long provoked contrary assessments. To this day, the debate is framed by the names and practices of two Americans who attained prominence in the 1910s: Fredrick Taylor and scientific management and Henry Ford and mass production. There are those who emphasize the participatory role of Japanese workers in production processes (most importantly through foremen-led quality circles), at odds with the Taylorist centralization of production control in the hands of management. Others regard the Japanese system as an intensification of Fordist mass production, facilitated by the weakness of Japanese enterprise unions. These recent books provide histories of the contested evolution of labor-management relations in twentieth-century Japan. In taking a longer historical view, the best of these books aim to reconcile the seeming contrariness of contemporary Japanese industrial relations.

The cash-indemnity health insurance system that emerged in the United States after 1945 represented but one trajectory among many. The late 1930s and early 1940s marked a period of innovation and creative experimentation in voluntarist health care programs. Spurred by the Social Security Act of 1935 and the New Deal's legitimization of the politics of security, unions, consumers, employers, and doctors began developing a range of health care programs that enabled patients to pool the risks and costs of sickness and injury, thus bringing medical care within the reach of more people. Employers and private insurers, too, acceded to the pervasive ideology of security. Invoking the New Deal language of security, life insurance companies competed with community and nonprofit organizations to meet a burgeoning market—the market for prepaid health services. While organized labor advocated noninsurance models, commercial insurance companies, aligning with large employers, dramatically expanded their reach during the 1940s, bringing in large groups of subscribers. By the time substantive collective bargaining over health benefits commenced between unions and management in 1950, commercial group health insurance had become well entrenched in many workplaces, and, as a result of this growth, had undercut the competitive and political conditions that enabled other, more equitable, communal-based health insurance alternatives to thrive.

Pakistan, at its independence in 1947, inherited only nine percent of the total industrial establishment of British India. The fragmented and low concentration of industrial capital was mirrored by the weakness of organized labor. The nascent Pakistan government followed an import substitution model to rapidly industrialize the economy. Within these policy parameters, labor was continuously asked to play its “proper and subordinate” role in relation to industrial growth.

From December 10–11, 1999, the Department of History of the University of Salzburg, Austria, hosted around forty scholars to reflect on the combination of women, work, and the breadwinner ideology. The conference was cofinanced by the Austrian government. This can be called a significant gesture in a country where the extreme right-wing politician Jorg Haider recently proposed in his victorious election campaign to increase the child allowance for Austrian couples if the mother opted to stay at home. Should Haider's proposal be carried out, it would constitute yet another example of successful breadwinner ideology in practice. Indeed, western European society seems to have been trapped for centuries in set ideas on the division of work, care, and income between the sexes. But could this be an illusion?

The novelty of the new millennium proved too tempting for most to pass without offering some reflections on the waning century or speculations for the future, and the 114th annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) was no exception. The tone was set early by the announced theme of the conference (“History for the Twenty-First Century: Continuity and Change”) and its opening panel, which promised to consign the twentieth century to history. There were also sessions on “Scholarly Publishing in the Twenty-First Century” and “Interviewing in the Job Market in the New Millennium.” By my count there were no less than eight panels at the conference that adopted an explicitly millennial theme. Not to be outdone, labor historians added their musings with a roundtable entitled “Labor History at the Millennium: International Capitalism and the Comparative Historical Dimension.”

The ninety-third annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) took place in St. Louis, Missouri, from March 30 to April 2, 2000. Surprisingly, few panels addressed labor history at the OAH, but those that did proposed new and exciting ways of rethinking the field, emphasizing new narratives for the history of labor in the United States and the inclusion of new areas of investigation.

It wasn't quite the WTO in Seattle, but controversy did enliven the forty-sixth annual meeting of the Business History Conference at Palo Alto, California, March 10–12, 2000. Organized around the theme of “Enterprise in Society,” it boasted panels on work, science and technology, banking, social stakeholders and corporations, gender, the environment, and consumption. Participants came from many fields, and the event's interdisciplinarity sparked lively discussions as to whether particular papers even belonged at the conference. One commentator, Youssef Cassis (University of Grenoble, II), for example, asked if studies of working-class bank customers should be included in panels on banking, or whether such papers, however well done, are social or working-class history, and consequently outside the domain of business history? His question sparked a direct response from audience member Pamela Laird (University of Colorado-Denver) who suggested that this was precisely the direction that business history should be heading.

The twenty-first annual North American Labor History Conference took place in Detroit, Michigan, at Wayne State University on October 21–23, 1999. Within the conference's overarching theme of “Class and Politics in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” panels addressed subjects as varied as labor in postwar Japan, masculinity and class formation, the impact of deindustrialization on class consciousness, migration and citizenship, and US labor law in the late eighteenth century.

For many years the history of women workers in France focused on the “heroic period” of economic transformation, the rise of the labor movement, and the emergence of socialist politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to World War One, mirroring the scholarship on French working-class history generally. More recently, scholars have challenged the unitary story of French working class formation by examining how cultural and historical meanings of sexual difference shaped workers' experiences and inflected the process of class formation. Now historians are turning their attention to the history of working-class women and gender after World War One, and are investigating how gender relations at work were affected by the war and the developments of the 1920s and 1930s. Catherine Omnès's meticulously researched Ouvrières Parisiennes contributes to this latter body of literature on the interwar period. Omnès's book, focused largely on women (rather than gender) in the metalworking, pharmaceutical, garment, and food processing industries of the Paris region, constitutes a major departure from some of the recent interpretations of women's work experience between the wars. Relying principally on the retirement dossiers of the Institution de retraite nationale interprofessionnel des salariés (IRNIS), the internship reports of women factory superintendents in training, and the personnel dossiers of a selection of Parisian firms (including the Compagnie française des téléphones, Thompson-Houston, La société Thibaud-Gibbs, and Panhard et Levasseur among others), Omnès produces a detailed and solidly crafted study of professional mobility and labor markets. Her study focuses on structures, institutions, and market forces as the prime movers of women's professional trajectories. In contrast to studies that have emphasized how gender difference negatively affected women's occupational mobility or their opportunities for learning new skills, Omnès offers a more positive account of women's experience both during World War One and World War Two.

John J. Johnson's Political Change in Latin America: The Emergence of the Middle Sectors (Stanford, 1958) concluded that the “middle sectors” would guide Latin Americans into a “golden age.” The golden age failed to materialize and in the process the Latin American middle classes came to be seen as anything but agents of progress. In particular, much of the Left saw the middle class as a dependent and reactionary force. In the 1980s, the continent's “lost decade,” reports of the middle class's imminent demise became common currency as hyperinflation and currency depreciation eroded already meager incomes. Today the middle class in Latin America continues to perfect its ability to survive against considerable economic odds. Until recently, social historians had paid little attention to the Latin American middle class. D. S. Parker's The Idea of the Middle Class and Brian P. Owensby's Intimate Ironies are timely and welcome studies of the much maligned yet little understood middle classes of Peru and Brazil, respectively. Both Owensby and Parker's studies concentrate on the first half of the twentieth century and on large metropolises: Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, and Lima. Parker roots his analysis in a detailed study of Lima's commercial employees, although he does not restrict it to them. Owensby's middle class is more encompassing and ranges from nonelite doctors and lawyers to clerks.

Scholars have historically characterized miners as among the most militant industrial workers due to their tightknit communities, difficult working conditions, and relative geographic isolation. These two new works on copper miners move beyond this classic, if one-dimensional, image to focus on miners' contradictory class/political identities, the gendered construction of working-class men and women, and mining companies' physical and ideological organization of mining communities. They examine a crucial commodity—copper—that was historically central to the economic development, politics, and labor movements of Chile and the United States Southwest.

Doug Yarrington's A Coffee Frontier, a new study of class formation and agrarian change in Venezuela, forms part of a small but important body of research on peasant producers of export crops in Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most work on the history of commercial agriculture in Latin America has addressed issues related to the plantation and its expansion at the expense of peasant communities. But a growing number of scholars, Yarrington among them, are looking at the experiences of small cultivators who grew crops such as coffee, tobacco, or cacao for export—frequently in frontier areas. This important research adds nuance to our understanding of commercial agriculture, class structure in the countryside, and the behavior of social groups known as small farmers by some and precipitate peasantries by others.

Do not be misled by the title of this book. While it does describe a strike carried out by sugar-cane workers, its reach and implications are much broader than that focus might suggest. Masayo Duus has succeeded in telling the microhistory of this strike and a murky, perhaps related episode of a dynamite explosion at a plantation supervisor's home, while at the same time making some important points about the history of Japanese immigration to Hawaii and California, the response of haole (white) elites in Hawaii and mainstream politicians on the mainland, and global connections in the history of labor politics.