Social movement scholarship has recently focused on “popular” media of protest; reading and singing provided a forceful communicative structure in semi-literate urban society, especially in Augsburg, the largest city of Reformation Germany. The case of Jakob Herbrot (1490/95–1564) combines the antagonisms of political, social, and religious movements; a rich Calvinist, he climbed the social ladder from a lowly regarded profession to the highest office of the imperial city in a precarious time of confessional armed conflict. Herbrot's conduct triggered a life-long series of accusations, polemics, satires, humorous ballads, and songs, material that allows a reassessment of the early modern discourse of Öffentlichkeit, as well as of urban laughter in the “public sphere” before its modern elevation to the central doctrine of bourgeois society. The sources suggest that humour was of essential importance to the public in the early modern city, a counter-public in the sense of an independent political arbiter.

In May 1928 The Watling Resident, a local newspaper directed at a readership among the inhabitants of a working-class estate created by the London County Council on the north-western outskirts of the city, published its first issue. It took the opportunity to represent what it saw as its readers' urgent and existential difficulties: “We have been torn up by the roots and rudely transplanted to foreign soil.” According to the newspaper, these painful feelings of displacement were voiced “over and over again” by people living on the new estate. These migrants and their mouthpiece spoke and wrote in terms that prefigure the pioneering historical work of Oscar Handlin or suggest they were of one mind with the Chicago School of sociology. In this light it is remarkable that these migrants were not recent arrivals from Poland, or even from Ireland or Scotland; rather they had moved to the estate from inner London, and more than half had previously lived a few miles away in the north London boroughs of St Pancras, Islington, Finsbury, and Paddington.

The mid-seventeenth century English social movement known as the Levellers was perhaps the first liberal-democratic social movement. Among their communicative strategies, to garner supporters while challenging the authorities, humor figured prominently. In this article, the nature of this levelling laughter is highlighted and juxtaposed against Puritan injunctions to mourning and objections against humor. Regarding the latter, four such objections are distinguished and elucidated: “damnable heresies”, “strange opinions”, “fearful divisions”, and “loosenesse of life and manners”. Finally, it is suggested that the Puritan repudiation of the Levellers highlights the need for social movements of democratic dissent against various aspects of the given status quo to use incongruous and relief humor to prompt reflection without relying too heavily on boorishly flouting social prohibitions for the sake of the pleasures of superiority and release. It also suggests that humor will do better in a culture already tolerant of pluralism, comfortable with a measure of non-literal ambiguity, and committed to democratic deliberation.

Recent historiography attempts increasingly to move beyond Eurocentrism. In the field of migration, Adam McKeown's article is a fine example of an attempt to put global migration in a non-Eurocentric perspective. Perhaps its most acute insight is in putting the paradigmatic European migration flows to the Americas in the nineteenth century at par with the mainly intra Asian (south/south-east Asian and north-east Asian) migration flows. McKeown's main target of attack is the unabashed “Euro-centrism” (or rather the “North Atlantic centrism”) of much of the migration literature on the so called age of mass migration. Eurocentrism appears, at least in the way that McKeown presents it, as a set of three interrelated propositions.

The age of mass migration that commenced in the 1840s has traditionally been conceived within the orbit of Atlantic history, and rendered as a narrative of modernity and industrialization. At an individual level the departure for the New World was propelled by rising expectations, which nicely fitted the macro-pattern of converging labour markets between North-America – as well as Australia for that matter – and Europe. Many of the assumptions that brought global migration under the aegis of modernization have been refuted, or at least seriously questioned. But that still leaves us with the important question whether there are alternative paradigms available that fit the realities both within and outside the North Atlantic world. Some have already answered the question negatively. According to Hatton and Williamson, it is impossible to find a unifying paradigm that would enable us to develop a global migration history. Their argument is too important not to be cited:

A small group within the German student movement of the 1960s expressed its critique of society in humorous protests that condensed the urge for a non-materialist, individualistic, and libertarian change. In the early phase of an emerging cycle of protest, Spassguerilla [fun guerrilla] contributed to shaping the face of the student movement, despite differences with the more traditional groups within that movement. In happenings, pamphlets, and judicial trials, humorous activists derided conventional ways of thinking and living. A responsive environment played a decisive role in shaping the image of the insurgents, thus reinforcing the impact of their actions and drawing in sympathizers.

Migration has been a central concern of many areas in the writing of European history, and even more so when dealing with the histories of the white settler colonies of North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In contrast, migration overseas constitutes a mere footnote (if it is mentioned at all) in densely populated China and India, where the total number of those who migrated out of the country in the last couple of centuries was a relatively small percentage of those who did not. In his thought-provoking and far-reaching essay, Adam McKeown challenges us to look beyond the normative model of “global” migration that focuses solely on European migration. Through innovative research and the compilation of range of data on China, India, central Asia, Japan, Siberia, south-east Asia that are seldom collated and analyzed together, McKeown demonstrates that Asian migration from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries was comparable in volume to the trans-oceanic migrations from Europe. The term “global” as the theme of McKeown's essay, used as an adjective, evocatively captures the migration patterns and circulations of the modern world. But the concept of global is also the definition of the process underlying the modern economic and political system that through its very logic of reproduction creates unequal and uneven terrains. My comments explore some aspects of this unequal terrain.

Since the birth of Solidarity twenty-five years ago, scholars have examined this unique Polish apparatus of defiance from nearly every institutional perspective known to the social sciences. Yet very little attention has been paid to the role of the human agency that gave rise to this powerful force of national resistance. Even less attention has been devoted to the influence of emotion, and of laughter in particular, in mobilizing this unprecedented scale of subversive activities against the Soviet empire. By deploying discursive devices offered through avant-garde performance, Solidarity's regional art student faction known as the “Orange Alternative” helped to dismantle Soviet aggression by unifying Poles under the rubric of culturally specific nostalgic humour. Low state capacity, recognition claims for optimizing human potential, and other microdynamics of oppositional consciousness are some of the factors discussed which enabled humour to strengthen the movement and prevent exogenous special interests from altering its objectives.

Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the Italian “1977 Movement” in its conflict with the grey, humourless political system was its use of irony to ridicule its opponents. Irony was central to the identity of the movement and its cultural and political break with the institutional old and vanguardist new lefts. Its use, particularly by the “Metropolitan Indians”, the transversalists and other “creatives”, marked a social revolt by mainly marginalized young people, who invented a new political counter-culture based on linguistic experimentation in circumstances far from the optimism of 1968. The paper, based directly on primary sources from the movement and on interviews with former participants, reassesses a movement usually characterized as “violent” by Italianist social history. It concludes that the movement's “ironic praxis” contributed to a fundamental change in Italian society in the late seventies and has influenced the political style of contemporary alter-globalist and anti-capitalist movements.

An insistence on the broad similarities and structural linkages of migrations across the globe since the 1840s is important because it can clear the ground for more effective comparisons. Only after questioning the a priori distinction that privileges “modern” transatlantic migrations as categorically distinct from those in the rest of the world can we begin to understand each migrant and migrant flow as emerging from a distinct nexus of global, regional, local, and historical processes. I think I am in agreement with all of the participants in this forum on this basic point. Rather than quibble over numbers and definitions, all of the contributions have attempted to refine our historical comparisons and question some of the interpretive frameworks that are rooted in depictions of the Atlantic migrations as a norm. Once this global foundation is established, we can engage in the detailed empirical and conceptual work that will better address the sticky problems of numbers and categories. Who and what is actually being counted and not counted? When and why should we distinguish between long and short distance, or between international and domestic migration? How should we deal with return and repeat migrations? What is revealed or obscured by taking individuals, families or more extended networks as the basic units of migration? What is the practical or discursive significance of “free” migration?