Observant readers of ILWCH will have already noticed some recent changes in the ranks of our editors. They reflect a larger goal of moving towards a periodic rotation which we believe is the best way to bring fresh ideas and approaches and wider regional expertise to the journal.

Labor and working class historians, whether explicitly Marxist or not, have tended to use models of class and class formation that privilege urban industrial workers, depicting their lived experience as, somehow, hermetically sealed off from the countryside. Despite an awareness of the intertwined and overlapping nature of rural and urban economies, most historians have treated rural workers as either peasants or slaves, and therefore fitting subjects for separate fields of historical inquiry, or as individuals on the cusp of proletarianization, would-be or about-to-be industrial workers. Indeed, even studies focused on recent history have viewed the rural sector as a “backward” one and constructed the industrial setting as “modern.” Thus, even if few labor historians have dismissed agricultural workers with the condescension of Marx's “sack of potatoes,” as a collectivity we have paid them insufficient attention and our field is weaker as a result.

In contrast to the US, scholars of Latin America have not been shy about viewing agrarian life through a class lens. To the contrary, Latin Americanists have often seen class formation as a primarily rural process. This paper examines the uneven nature of and relationship between class formation, “industrialization,” and “urbanization” by tracing the history of a single family: the Alvaros. It is a narrative that provides an interesting window into the central processes, forces, struggles, and events that have defined Ecuadorian as well as much of Latin American history during the twentieth century. It is, at the same time, a history that highlights the problematic nature of any analysis of class formation that (a) focuses solely on urban or rural life, (b) posits a smooth transition from one to the other (i.e. rural to urban), or (c) privileges the solitary male worker so familiar to labor studies. It is not simply the fact that members of the Alvaro family moved back and forth between city and country, a trait they share with many of their counterparts in the non-Western world. The reproduction of the family has, and continues to be, dependent on the relationships between family members living in small rural towns, regional centers, and Guayaquil, Ecuador's largest and most industrialized city-port. The family as a whole has always been—and needed to be in order to survive—simultaneously rural and urban. Like the Alvaro family, those of us interested in understanding class formation need to inhabit these multiple worlds simultaneously.

Class in contemporary South Africa is undergoing an identity crisis. The demographic decline of the industrial working class, and the terrible predicament of the unemployed, especially in the countryside, lends support to the argument that we should, as Geoff Eley and Keith Neald have recently suggested in the pages of this journal, reconsider the class-centered theory that has dominated social history since the early 1970s. This paper examines the recent labor history of the coastal center of Durban, the urban epicenter of the contemporary disease and subsistence crisis in South Africa. Three distinct, ethnically defined, working-class groups have made the journey to this city from Zululand, Mozambique and India. And the histories of each of these groups suggest that class-centered histories in South Africa have been methodologically promiscuous, considering themes, problems and narratives that have no obvious connection to the industrial lives of the working class. The wide-ranging scope of South African labor history and its tremendous explanatory power in fields far from the industrial workplace follow directly from the effort to explore the rural roots of the working class. In following the paths that migrant workers have used to come to the city, historians have strayed into fields of social life—sex, marriage, identity, desire, witchcraft, nationalism—that have much greater significance today than the old working-class politics. Yet these studies never lose sight of the real powers of local, regional and imperial states and the capitalist institutions that harnessed them. The study of class has been recast in South Africa by the search for rural culture. Class may not be the most useful tool for understanding South Africa today, but it has proved extremely powerful as a means of understanding how we got here.

This essay examines seasonal rural work as part of the survival strategies of rural and urban households and individuals in the Midwestern United States. Using workers' memoirs and data from government investigations, the lives of so-called “hobo” workers are examined in relation to communities, labor markets, gender and sexuality, and class formation. “Hobo” was a colloquial term for seasonal migrant workers; most were young, immigrant and US-born men of European ancestry employed in crop harvesting, logging, mining, railroad construction, and other short-term jobs. The seasonal labor market drew together a heterogeneous workforce including farm owners, farm laborers, displaced industrial workers, and young men seeking adventure, as well as criminals, marginally employable drunkards, and disabled men. The essay traces the lives of individual workers, explains labor market structures, and places the mostly-male seasonal workforce in the context of families and communities. The history of rural work in the Midwestern US confounds notions of class formation that posit a one-way trip from peasant to worker, and suggests the ways in which theories of class formation have leaned too heavily on an unexamined image of rural life.

An examination of the diverse patterns of women's migration challenges abiding stereotypes of Indian history: the urban worker as a male “peasant-proletariat” and women as inhabiting a timeless rural past. When men opted for circulation between town and country, wives and children undertook the actual labor of cultivation for the survival of “peasant-proletariat” households. Men retained their status as heads of the family and, even though absent for long periods, their proprietary interests in the village. Yet towards the end of the nineteenth century, many unhappy, deserted, and barren wives, widows, and other women were able to escape to the burgeoning cities of Calcutta and Bombay and the coal mines, where they experienced new processes of social and economic marginalization.

Much attention has been given to women's migration to overseas colonies and the Assam teagardens. Such migration has been seen as doubly negative, not only harnessing women to the exploitative contract regimes, but also subjecting them to sexual violation. A general assumption is that women were deceived, decoyed and even “kidnapped,” since there was no possibility of “voluntary” migration by women. Such a view of women's recruitment was produced by a variety of interests opposed to women's, especially married women's, migration, and eventually influenced the colonial state to legally prohibit, in 1901, women's “voluntary” migration to Assam plantations. This provision was an explicit endorsement of male claims on women's labor within the family.

During the English Civil War period, parliament freed apprentices who had left their masters to serve in parliament's armed forces, thereby nullifying the postwar efforts of companies to force disbanded soldiers to return and finish their seven years of training. In effect, legislation favoring apprentices undid the traditional cooperative relationship between the English state and the guilds. By freeing apprentices who had yet to complete labor contracts, parliament made more common the practice of renegade apprentices abandoning their masters to set up shop, a problem that had plagued the guild system since its inception. The many Civil War apprentices who took advantage of these innovative state benefits can remind us that we have been too inclined to associate the unraveling of the guild system and the rise of capitalism with the bourgeoisie rather than with the laboring classes.

For a few years after its foundation in 1920 the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) attempted, energetically prompted by the Comintern, to work in solidarity with anticolonial movements in the British Empire. But after the Nazi victory in Germany the Comintern's principal concern was to defend the Soviet Union and the liberal democracies against the threat of fascism. British communists criticized the British Government for failing to defend the Empire against the threat from its imperial rivals. After the entry of the Soviet Union into the war in 1941 they vigorously supported the British war effort, including the defense of Empire. This was not though simply a manifestation of chauvinism. British communists believed that imperialism was suffering a strategic defeat by “progressive” forces and that colonial freedom would follow the defeat of fascism. These chimerical notions were greatly strengthened by the allies' promises of postwar peace, prosperity and international cooperation. In the last year or so of war British communists were clearly worried that these promises would not be redeemed, but nevertheless supported British reassertion of power in such places as Greece, Burma and Malaya. For the great majority of British communists, these were secondary matters when seen in the context of Labour's election victory of 1945 and its promised program of social-imperialist reform.

Labor historians from Europe and North America frequently assert that their discipline is not in a healthy state. Such a picture is a distortion, however, for the world does not stop at the equator: in various regions of Latin America, Africa and Asia the historiography of workers and labor movements has made great strides in the last twenty to thirty years. Labor history's “globalization” calls for a new type of historiography, which transcends old-style labor history from North America and Europe by incorporating its findings in a new globally-orientated approach. This article discusses some of the main issues involved: problems of a general theoretical nature, of conceptualization, multidisciplinarity, and sources. The article also identifies a few research desiderata.

Between February 28 and March 1, 2003, an interdisciplinary group of scholars gathered at the University of California, Santa Barbara to consider the evolution of Americans' thinking about capitalism in the last half of the twentieth century. The conference, organized by Nelson Lichtenstein (University of California, Santa Barbara) and entitled “Capitalism and Its Culture: Rethinking Twentieth-Century American Social Thought,” focused on the years between 1938 and 1973, when capitalism as an idea and a system moved from a term of some contestation to an almost naturalized phenomenon that equated the market with progress, democracy, and civil society. In these mid-century decades, intellectuals increasingly substituted a discourse involving bureaucracy, modernization, and mass culture for earlier concerns over class conflict, social inequality, and the place of the large corporation in the democratic polity. The conference provided an opportunity for scholars of the family, academia, radicalism, feminism, and conservatism to explore the development of and challenges to capitalism and its culture.

The formal title of this three day public conference at the University of São Paulo, August 13–15, 2003, was “History and Perspectives of the Left,” but the infratext for this gathering of scholars, analysts and activists from four continents—Europe, Africa, North and South America—was what are the lessons from the experience of the Left in government elsewhere that the new leftist government in Brazil and its leading party—the Workers Party (PT)—should keep in mind? This was underscored in the formal introductions and welcomes of the sponsors: the PT's Fundação Perseo Abramo, the French Socialist party's Fundacion Jean Juares, the University of São Paulo and the office of the PT mayor of São Paulo, Marta Suplicy. As her secretary for international relations, Keld Jakobsen, stressed: this is the first time that the Brazilian left has the opportunity to govern their country and it is important that they do it well. For that reason, it is also important that they learn from other experiences of the left in government.

This international conference, the first of its kind to be organized in the UK, was held at the Manchester Metropolitan University and the International Centre for Labour Studies, the University of Manchester, on July 16–18, 2003. The conference organizers were Neville Kirk, MMU, on behalf of the Society for the Study of Labour History, Anne Morrow, on behalf of the International Centre for Labour Studies, and Greg Patmore, University of Sydney, for the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History. The aim was to bring together invited speakers in order to advance our knowledge and understanding of the labor history of Britain and Australia. Feedback received by the organizers suggests that this aim was successfully realized. However, attendance on the part of British colleagues was somewhat disappointing, perhaps a reflection of the minority interest among British labor historians in comparative history.

Except for historians of gender, mainstream labor history has neglected reproduction, the cluster of processes by which workers are born, recruited, raised, and educated. The central goal of this landmark collection is to restore the balance between production and reproduction in the study of class formation and collective action. Opening and concluding essays by Marcel van der Linden provide a focus for an outstanding collection of essays.

The Italian Communist Party (PCI) after 1943, writes Stephen Gundle, managed to construct “the last great left-wing subculture in Western Europe” (7). Given the unusual interest in “culture” in the broadest sense of the term exhibited by Palmiro Togliatti, the undisputed key figure in post-war Italian Communist politics, an English-language study of the PCI's cultural policies is thus highly welcome and long overdue. Stephen Gundle manages to present an informative and authoritative account, which is highly recommended for anyone interested in the politics of culture and the culture of politics within the European Left.

This is a very useful bibliographical tool produced by the efforts of the International Association of Labour History Institutions (IALHI). This association comprises more than one hundred archives, libraries and research centers all over the world, though the vast majority are located in Europe, and not all of them have the same importance, reflecting the geographical and political unevenness of socialism's history. This particular volume aims to list all the publications of the social-democratic internationals after 1914, i.e. from the time of the political split due to the support for World War I by most social-democratic parties. This means that the left-wing, beginning with the Kienthal-Zimmerwald movement during the war and leading to the “Communist International” from 1919 on, is not represented here. But also left-wing splits from social democracy in later years, as in the 1930s with the “London Bureau” of left-wing socialist parties (and also the Bureau's predecessors) are excluded here, as they openly campaigned against social democracy. Also, a few international workers' institutions (mainly in the cultural field) that had been founded before 1914, but tried to maintain their independence after 1914 faced with the political split, are therefore not listed as well.

From 1954 to 1985, Inge Lammel was the director of the Arbeiterliedarchiev (Labour and Working-Class Songs) at the Academy of the Arts in Berlin. Throughout its life, the Archive remained a small institution with few resources, but in the course of the thirty-five years leading up to 1990, it had collected considerable volumes of printed and unprinted material, scores, songbooks, memoirs, (long before “oral history” had been recognised as a special type of material), gramophone records, tapes, etc.—an effort led by Inge Lammel from the time when the Archive was first established. In 1990, the Archive was more or less closed down, despite the fact that at the time it was the centre of vigorous research activities, not just in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), but also in the Federal Republic of Germany. This component of research into labor and working-class evolution has now largely been discontinued; one of the aims behind this publication is to provide any emerging renewed interest with a point of departure.

Even the most casual student of the French Revolution cannot fail to be struck by the variety and sheer quantity of political imagery produced during that era. Despite the revolutionaries' explicit distrust of visual images, which they associated with the idolatry of the Old Regime, politically inspired pictorial caricature, satire, and allegory poured forth from the presses, reaching ever-wider audiences, both literate and illiterate. Until twenty years ago, historians tended to dismiss this visual record as a holdover from the era of absolutist monarchy, focusing instead on the “foundational role of language and political discourse in accounting for the demise of the Old Regime” (6). Many of the revolutionary period's most prominent scholars, including Keith Michael Baker, François Furet, and Jürgen Habermas, have, as Joan Landes points out, effectively defined culture as “the sum of so many printed words on a page” (6). Landes does not exempt herself from this critique, confessing that in her earlier work, she too, “described the decisive historical passage from French absolutism to bourgeois society as an opposition ’between the iconic spectacularity of the Old Regime and the textual and legal order of the bourgeois public sphere'” (6). In Visualizing the Nation, Landes now follows in the path of scholars such as Antoine de Baecque, Lynn Hunt, Michel Vovelle, Madelyn Gutwirth, and Mona Ozouf in arguing for the importance of “images as vehicles for the exchange of ideas and the making of political arguments” (3).

Christian Chevandier's Cheminots en Greve is a social, political, and institutional history of railroad workers in France from 1848 to 2001. It is told from the standpoint of the role of strikes in forming the occupational identity of these workers, known in France as cheminots (Chevandier finds the earliest use of the expression dating back to 1898; by the 1930s the Academie Francaise officially recognized it as a French word). Cheminots belong to various crafts and trades. They drive the trains, repair locomotives and rolling stock in shops and factories, sell tickets in stations and collect them in trains. Although the book is largely structured around a chronological account of railway strikes, Chevandier looks beyond the strike for sources of cheminot identity. These include the evolving structure of the French railroad system from private companies to state ownership, the role of skill and technological change, and especially union strategies, structures, and above all divisions. Along the way he revisits earlier treatments of French labor and railworker history, and takes up old historiographical controversies debating, confirming, and refuting well-known scholars from Annie Kriegel to historians of a younger generation like George Ribeill and Atsushi Fukasawa.

In the last decade Donna R. Gabaccia has spearheaded American efforts to compare and theorize about Italian emigrant workers in the Americas and Europe. In the 1980s she published two monographs that followed village-outward methods to examine the culture and politics of Sicilians in the United States. Her two books under review here, one edited with Fraser Ottanelli, are bursting with insightful comparisons and reflections upon Italy's “many diasporas.” They illuminate Italians' diverse roles in nation-building processes, how international and national commitments mingled, reinforced, or qualified one another, and how emigration shaped the history of modern Italy. Italian Workers of the World, the fruit of a well-coordinated international research project about the Italian working class on three continents, brings together essays that speak to one another across historiographical and linguistic traditions thanks to Gabaccia's and Ottanelli's editorial discipline. Italy's Many Diasporas showcases Gabaccia's gifts as a synthesizer of literature from many languages, and as a careful and concise historiographer. Both books are timely contributions that add empirical weight and measured theorizing to studies of transnationalism and international history.

Scholars in both the US and Germany have studied the American occupation of Germany extensively. Until recently, however, much of that work focused on the emerging Cold War rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union to explain the rapid shift from an occupation intended to punish the Germans to one that increasingly included West Germans as partners and allies. While not dismissing the importance of the Cold War struggle in shaping US foreign policy, John Willoughby suggests that a more comprehensive understanding of how American power was projected during the Cold War is only possible if attention is shifted from the policy makers in Washington to the players on the ground. By exploring how the American military government dealt with the chaotic social and economic conditions within Germany, the widespread disciplinary problems of American GIs, and the pervasive racism within the military, Willoughby makes a compelling argument that US foreign policy and the “institutions of occupation” were transformed by the “more mundane problems of social control and organizational capability” (3). The American objectives in Germany changed, not because of the Cold War, but because financial pressures, personnel shortages, and economic disarray forced military authorities to hand over power to the Germans much sooner than envisioned by Washington. While Willoughby—by his own admission—does not provide new material to the professional historian of the era, his book nonetheless offers a fresh interpretation that draws on social and cultural history while also paying attention to race and gender.