This article examines the emigration of impoverished Azoreans and Madeirans to Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and the British West Indies (BWI), especially British Guiana, in the nineteenth century, driven by the demand for labour following the prohibition of the slave trade in Brazil and emancipation in the BWI. It explores the shared causes of these migratory flows, migrants’ living and working conditions, and the efforts of Portuguese authorities to distinguish their labourers from other colonized peoples. Drawing on Brazilian and Portuguese archives, as well as secondary sources on the Portuguese in the British West Indies, this transnational study situates Portuguese islanders within the broader labour experiments of the nineteenth century.

This article examines the relationship of the Argentine Socialist Party (PS) with international socialist organizations between 1889 and 1940. During this period, the PS emerged as the leading Latin American social-democratic organization and one of the few non-European members of both the Second International and the Labour and Socialist International. The article argues that the PS’s unique trajectory is best understood through the concept of “peripheral inter-nationalism”. This framework analyses how a socialist party in a non-colonial state built by mass European immigration engaged in a competitive nation-building project. The PS sought to construct its own version of the nation for a largely immigrant working class while simultaneously confronting the official nationalism being forged by the Argentine state. By analysing this dual challenge, the article complicates existing understandings of socialist “inter-nationalism”, revealing a distinct path to reconciling national and international loyalties. Drawing on archival research on the PS and the Internationals, the article shows how Argentine socialists actively translated and contested European norms, ultimately contributing to the historiography of international socialism by addressing the underexplored role of non-European parties.

This article critically examines George Woodcock’s travel writings on India between 1961 and 1981, exploring the tensions between his anarchist anti-imperialism and the cultural frameworks inherited from his upbringing in the heart of empire. While Woodcock admired Gandhi and sought to understand India through a lens of philosophical anarchism, his engagement was shaped by elite literary connections and orientalist tropes that complicated his vision. The article traces how Woodcock’s political ideals, literary influences, and charitable efforts intersected with postcolonial realities, revealing the paradoxes of Western radicalism in a decolonizing world. Drawing on archival sources and offering a close reading of his three major texts on India – Faces of India, Kerala: A Portrait of the Malabar Coast, and TheWalls of India – it highlights how Woodcock’s attempts to critique empire often carried unconscious cultural assumptions. Ultimately, it argues that Woodcock’s India writings offer a valuable case study in the complexities of cross-cultural intellectual encounter in the enduring shadows of imperial discourse.

This article reassesses the history of reparations after World War I from the perspective of organized labour in early Weimar Germany. It does so by investigating trade union proposals to send German construction workers to Northern France in an effort to rebuild French villages damaged or destroyed in the war. The article argues that organized workers in early Weimar Germany rallied behind these proposals not only because they hoped that sending fellow workers abroad would contribute to international reconciliation, ease the overall reparations burden, and create employment opportunities, as previous research has suggested. Rather, it shows that Weimar’s “free” (that is, socialist) trade union movement supported the idea of “reparation through labour power” because its members were convinced that it would prevent the rebuilding of Northern France from becoming a playground for private builders. Analysing various German trade union sources, the article suggests that, by involving the country’s nascent Bauhütten movement, a network of building companies owned and controlled by organized labour, trade union functionaries hoped to turn Northern France into a laboratory for non-profit construction. In doing so, they sought to advance a broader transformation of the building sector from a profit-seeking industry benefiting a few wealthy builders into a public service that promoted the interests of workers and the wider community alike. By exploring these trade union proposals for the reconstruction of Northern France, the article also sheds light on a neglected episode in transnational labour history that witnessed the first timid attempts at trade union representation across borders.

The urban authorities of early modern Dutch cities employed a broad variety of public servants to manage the urban administration and provide public services relating to health, security, education, and entertainment. Neither part of the governing elite nor members of the guilds, these urban officials are of interest to historians of both work and governance. This article demonstrates that studying these public servants might yield valuable insights into premodern attitudes to work, especially public work. Using applications for employment in public office as well as petitions for improved remuneration, we analyse the value public servants of early modern Dutch cities attached to their professional activities. The town of Zwolle (c.1550–1700) serves as a case study, shedding light on the conditions under which people decided to work in urban public services. In their competition for the town’s salaried offices, candidates demonstrated considerable individual initiative, ranging from unsolicited applications to proposals concerning their personal value for the civic community. Similarly, officeholders demanded proper remuneration befitting the value of their work and their services for the town’s common good.

The two books discussed in this review essay speak to issues of projections implied in Western political thinking in the distinction between the “West” and the “East”. This includes a tradition in “Western” discourse to project features with negative connotations, such as “despotism”, onto a construed “Eastern other”, thus obliterating comparable structures of hierarchy in the “own”, and it is also linked to the heavy ideological load that concepts of “East” carry when it comes to geopolitical projections of otherness, and often enmity. In Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Mobilizing, Jie-Hyun Lim undertakes a sweeping critique of the projections just mentioned and links this with a critique of nationalism as well as current mass politics. In Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism, Kolja Lindner is concerned with reconciling postcolonial perspectives with at least some of Karl Marx’s work, insofar as it has been criticized for Orientalist and modernist bias.