This 1999 Supplement of the International Review of Social History focuses on complicating central concepts in the understanding of economic and social history: class, gender, race and ethnicity. In concentrating on industrial workers, their politics, and institutions, labor and working-class history had tended to ignore gender, race, and ethnicity as discursive and material forces. It discussed the woman or black or immigrant worker as a subset of worker, assumed to be male, white, and of the dominant national or ethnic group. Only during recent years have historians began to ask how gender, race, and ethnicity as categories of analysis change narratives of class formation and working-class experience. This question has become particularly salient as the European Union and the United States seek to grapple with the human consequences of colonial and imperialist legacies both within and beyond national boundaries in an increasingly global economy.

For at least the past twenty years, historians of pre-colonial Africa have studied gender and ethnic relations, but have focused on either gender or ethnicity without making reference to the other. This essay redresses this neglect by demonstrating that changes in gender and ethnic relations within pre-colonial Africa so profoundly influenced each other that it is impossible to understand one without also taking into consideration the other. Documenting this intersection requires more than simply reconstructing how ethnic groups (in their efforts to compete with others for social and political status) altered gender relations within their societies by handling differentially the affairs of their female and male members. It involves more than analyzing how those disadvantaged because of their gender used the prevailing ethnic relations to ameliorate their own situations, and how these actions in turn altered ethnic relations in the societies in which they lived. It requires as well that we reconceptualize the very definition of ethnicity.

On 1 August 1893, already feeling the pinch of economic downturn, management at the Pray, Small & Co. shoe factory in Auburn, Maine, posted new wages for its employees. Twelve days later, facing their first lower pay checks, female stitchers in the factory walked off their jobs. The union which represented the stitchers declared the shop non-union a week later and called for all of its members to join the stitchers' strike. Only about a dozen male workers answered this call, as the two most highly-skilled groups of male workers, the lasters and the shoe cutters, remained on the job. These workers belonged to their own separate unions, which had either already agreed to the new wage list (the cutters) or were in the middle of negotiations over it with the company (the lasters). It took the cutters another week before they decided to join the stitchers' action; it would take the lasters a month and a half and a citywide expansion of the strike to make the same decision.

Introduction of the Women's Reservation Bill was stalled in Lok Sabha on Monday amid unprecedented scenes of snatching of papers from the Speaker and the law minister and the virtual coming to blows of members […]. As the shell shocked minister stood rooted to the spot, the member tore the papers with relish and flung them in the air provoking members from the treasury benches to storm the well. By this time, the well of the Lok Sabha looked like a veritable battle field with members from both sides preparing for a scuffle as the Speaker adjourned the House for the day.

The history of prostitution, defined as the commercial exchange of sexual services, provides a fertile ground for the study of the intersections between gender, race and class. Obviously, the sale of sexual labour has implications for constructions of gender, although the specific implications may change with time. Commercial sex offers particularly sharp insights into the ways in which gender considerations intersect with class and race because of the physical intimacy and potential for procreation involved in the sex act. Prostitution literally forces societies to come face to face with their assumptions about and attitudes to class and race hierarchies and relationships. The Australian case is especially useful for studying these relationships because of the imbalance in the ratio of men to women which has characterized colonial society generally and certain types of communities in particular, and the ways in which this imbalance affected some classes and ethnic groups more than others. Colonial Australia also provides a complex tapestry of ethnic/racial issues because it included divisions not just between “white” settlers and indigenous Aborigines, but also between both of these groups and various groups of immigrant, “coloured” workers. In the twentieth century, when demographic patterns became more balanced in gender terms and more homogenous in racial terms, the international sex industry continued to be important because it played a part in Australia's quest for recognition as an independent member of the community of “civilized”, white, nations. Finally, the process of reassessing Australia's place in the world was intimately connected to a reassessment of Australia's domestic policies, both in relation to prostitution generally and to the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women.

In the years before and immediately after World War I, gendered and racialized bodies at work became the focus of debate and discussion in France amongst an informal alliance of engineers, doctors, scientists, employers, workers, and the state. Seduced by the promise of “modernity”, and the seemingly endless possibilities of science and mechanization, the state attempted to modernize public services and employers sought new ways to discipline labor for greater productivity. Both mobilized rationalization – Taylorism and work science – in the service of greater efficiency and in an effort to identify the allegedly “natural” qualities that made gendered and racialized workers suitable for certain kinds of jobs and would exclude them from others. A not insignificant dimension of this project lay in how French work scientists began to envision the potential uses of gendered French and colonial labor. The development of the French North-African and Indochinese colonial empires around the turn of the century heightened attention to racialized difference. World War I had opened the opportunity to use racialized colonial bodies, both on the military front and in the factory. Thinking about race and gender characteristics continued to influence work science and its applications in the 1920s and 1930s. Work scientists' experiments to ascertain the physical endurance of colonial male workers and white workers underscored the durability of gender meanings i n dealing with white French workers and the instability of those meanings in assessing the abilities of workers of color.

The 1999 plan of the Social Democratic government to adjust Germany's 1913 nationality law has generated an intensely emotional debate. In an unprecedented action, the opposition Christian Democrats managed to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures against the adjustment that would have granted citizenship to second generation “immigrants” born in Germany. At the end of the twentieth century, Germans still strongly cling to the principle of jus sanguinis. The idea that nationality is not connected ot place of birth or culture but rather to a “national essence” tJiat is somehow incorporated in the subject's blood has been strong in Germany since the early nineteenth century and has been especially decisive for the country's twentieth-century history.