“You know what Victor Hugo say?” asked José Vega Díaz. Thus began a lengthy recitation, the product of decades of labor agitation, listening to Les Miserables, and rolling cigars. He had been asked to explain the influence of el lector (the reader) on the lives of cigar workers. The answer filtered through ninety-five years of experience in Cuba and Florida.“You know what Victor Hugo say? In all the towns, in every place, they have a schoolteacher. And in every town, the schoolteacher is the light. He lights the candle. But in every town they try to blow away the light. The preachers, the priests. That's why they [the church, the owner] don't want the reader. The reader lights the candle. It was a good thing.”

When, on June 5, 1873, the Lalla Rookh docked in Fort Nieuw Amsterdam, Suriname, 399 indentured British Indian immigrants had almost reached their destination: the colonial plantations. The timing was no coincidence. On July 1, 1863, the Dutch government had abolished slavery in its Caribean colonies. During a ten-year transition period the former slave were to work for employers of their own choice under the supervision of the state.Three weeks before this mandatory “apprenticeship” period was over, the Lalla Rookh arrived. The immigrants aboard had signed a contract obliging them to work for five years on a plantation in Suriname yet to be assigned. The labor contract and additional local ordinances specified the rights and duties of the indentured workers and forced them to commit their labor power to the unspecified demands of their employers at specified times. Fundamental to the system was the penal sanction, which gave employers the right to press criminal charges against indentured workers who, according to them, neglected their duty or refused to work. Thus the penal sanction allowed planters to impose their own conception of work discipline.

The decline of coalmining has been a worldwide phenomenon in recent years. In Great Britain, both Labour and Conservative governments have steadily closed down state-owned mines, provoking economic devolution in parts of the north of England and South Wales. European Community nations have collaborated to recovert declining European coal basins in the decades since the 1970s. In the Soviet Union coalminers played a crucial role in galvanzing support behind Mikhail Gorbachev.Nevertheless, despite miners' political importance and union strength, they have been unable to arrest the industrial decline of the Donbass region of the Ukraine.1 A long-term process of substitution among fossil fuels has had a major impact on developed economies over the course of the twentiethcentury. Economic and population shifts have been central features of this broader process. By focusing on the internal migration that accompanied the decline of anthracite coalmining in northeastern Pennsylvania, this article examines an American manifestation of this phenomenon of economicand social transformation. It argues for the importance of viewing working people as conscious actors in this larger process. While working people are certainly affected by economic forces beyond their control, they actively make choices that shape both their own lives and the broader process of economic transformation.2 Examination of the experiences of members of mining families in the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania in the years since World War Two demonstrates the ways in which strong kinship, family, and ethnic networks have led residents in mining communities to resist an entirely economic calculus in responding to the region's economic decline.

Debates over the significance of immigration and demands for its restriction in industrialized nations have been a major feature of political life in the 1980s and 1990s. There are several reasons for this heightened concern. In Western Europe, the 1990s have been a decade of slower growth, particularly compared with the halcyon decades of the 1950s and 1960s when mass migration, severely restricted during the interwar years, again became a routine aspect of European life.Even more persistent and troubling has been the declining position of less skilled workers in the economies of industrial nations. The International Monetary Fund notes that, beginning in the 1970s or the early 1980s, “labor markets in the advanced economies have been characterized by marked increases in wage inequality in some countries between the more skilled and less skilled, and in other countriesby rises in unemployment among the less skilled.” Many less skilled workers believe that migrants are responsible for their declining wages and unemployment.

In Towards the Abolition of Whiteness David Roediger tells the story of Covington Hall, the editor of a newsletter published by the Brotherhood of Timber Workers in Louisiana in 1913 and 1914. Roediger deftly analyzes efforts by Hall and other white writers in the brotherhood to construct cross-racial unity within an otherwise racially torn working class. He shows how Hall redrew the lines of solidarity: On one side were the degraded, of any race.On the other were enlightened workers who eschewed racial divisions, racist language, and stereotypes. “There are white men, Negro men, and Mexican men in this union, but no niggers, greasers or white trash,” proclaimed Ed Lehman, a soapbox speaker for the Brotherhood. A headline in the newsletter similarly asked readers to choose, “SLAVES OR MEN, WHICH?” Still more graphically, a cartoon commanded, “Let all white MEN and Negro MEN get on the same side of this rotten log.”

How do organized workers take advantage of political transitions to gain ground for their movements, and conversely, in what ways do these transitions shape workers' tactics and agendas? This essay compares popular responses to political opportunities in three countries in the throes of deep crises. Exploring the routes to divergent outcomes from a common juncture during and after the First World War draws attention to the possibilities of and constraints on working-class imprints on constitutional development.