The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that during the age of revolution (1760s–1840s) most sectors of the maritime industries experienced higher levels of unrest than is usually recognized. Ranging across global contexts including the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans as well as the Caribbean, Andaman, and South China Seas, and exploring the actions of sailors, laborers, convicts, and slaves, this collection offers a fresh, sea-centered way of seeing the confluence between space, agency, and political economy during this crucial period. In this introduction we contend that the radicalism of the age of revolution can best be viewed as a geographically connected process, and that the maritime world was central to its multiple eruptions and global character. Mutiny therefore can be seen as part of something bigger and broader: what we have chosen to call maritime radicalism, a term as well as a concept that has had virtually no presence in the literature on the revolutionary era until now.

Using a comparative methodology, this essay examines how and why longshore workers in both the San Francisco Bay area and Durban demonstrate a robust sense of working-class internationalism and solidarity. Longshore workers are more inclined than most to see their immediate, local struggles in larger, even global, contexts. Literally for decades, workers in both ports used their power to advocate for racial justice at home and in solidarity with social movements globally. While such notions might seem outdated in the twenty-first century, as unions have been on the decline for some decades, longshore workers grounded their ideals in the reality that they still occupied a central position in global trade. Hence, they combined their leftist and anti-racist ideological beliefs with a pragmatic understanding of their central role in the global economy. While not the norm, these longshore workers’ attitudes and actions demand attention, as they challenge the notion that workers in recent decades are powerless to shape their world.

This article introduces a bottom-up perspective to the history of the Revolution of 1908 in the Ottoman Empire by focusing on the experiences of workers in the Imperial Naval Arsenal (Tersâne-i Âmire) in Istanbul. Drawing mainly on primary documents, the article explores, from a class-formation perspective, the struggles and relations of Arsenal workers from the second half of the nineteenth century until the revolution. The Arsenal workers’ involvement in the revolution was rooted in their class solidarity, which was revealed in a number of ways throughout this period. The workers’ immediate embrace of the revolution was spurred by their radicalization against the state; such radicalization stemmed from the state's failure to solve the workers’ persistent economic problems, and its attempts to discharge them and replace them with military labor. The case of the Arsenal workers thus points to the role of working-class discontent in the history of the revolution, a dimension that has thus far been only minimally addressed in Ottoman historiography.

This article reconsiders the life of Ellen Wilkinson (1891–1947) – British Minister of Education from 1945 to 1947 and leader of the Jarrow Crusade of 1936 – by exploring the transnational aspect of her politics. It seeks to establish the significance of her transnational orientation and how this can allow us to complement and deepen existing understandings of her. Drawing on the literature on transnational activist networks, it outlines the complexity of transnational networks and her repertoire of transnational political practice. Without serious attention to this global dimension of her politics, our understanding of Wilkinson is attenuated and distorted. Crucially, the heroic construction of “Red Ellen” in both labourist and socialist-feminist narratives has obscured her second radicalization (1932–1936) and the sharpness of her metamorphosis into a mainstream Labour Party figure in 1939–1940.

Through a study of private security guards in urban India, this paper investigates emerging labour processes in the increasingly dominant private corporate sector of Third World rising economies, in the wake of economic liberalization and globalization. To meet the escalating need for labour in interactive services, a vast cadre of low-paid, casual workers has emerged, working under a regime of organized informality. Recruitment and training here are systematically institutionalized and formalized by private agencies, with the imprimatur of the state, but employment relations remain informal and insecure. The paper examines forms of labour subordination and a culture of servility at the workplace, as well as embodied work and emotional labour that characterize low-end service jobs. The paper shows how workers’ political subjectivity and their perception of class difference and social identity are shaped by cultural and social interaction at work and how these relate to wider democratic politics and citizenship.

A prevailing image of the British trade-union movement is that it was insular and slow-moving. The Anglo-Russian Advisory Council of the mid-1920s is an episode apparently difficult to reconcile with this view. In the absence to date of any fully adequate explanation of its gestation, this article approaches the issue biographically, through the TUC's first full-time secretary, Fred Bramley (1874–1925). Themes emerging strongly from Bramley's longer history as a labour activist are, first, a pronouncedly latitudinarian conception of the Labour movement and, second, a forthright labour internationalism deeply rooted in Bramley's trade-union experience. In combining these commitments in the form of an inclusive trade-union internationalism, Bramley in 1924–1925 had the indispensable support of the TUC chairman, A.A. Purcell who, like him, was a former organizer in the small but militantly internationalist Furnishing Trades’ Association. With Bramley's early death and Purcell's marginalization, the Anglo-Russian Committee was to remain a largely anomalous episode in the interwar history of the TUC.

This essay explores the Amistad rebellion of 1839, in which fifty-three Africans seized a slave schooner, sailed it to Long Island, New York, made an alliance with American abolitionists, and won their freedom in a protracted legal battle. Asking how and why the rebels succeeded, it emphasizes the African background and experience, as well as the “fictive kinship” that grew out of many incarcerations, as sources of solidarity that made the uprising possible. The essay concludes by discussing the process of mutiny, suggesting a six-phase model for understanding the dynamics of shipboard revolt, and showing how such events can have powerful historical consequences.

The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor was the largest American labour organization of the nineteenth century. But while scholars have charted its history in North America they have largely failed to explore the Order's history elsewhere, even though the organization also boasted members in Europe, Australasia, and Africa. This article is designed as part of a wider “transnationalization” of American labour history, and analyses the reasons that drove the Order's leaders towards their international growth. The leaders of the Knights of Labor sent organizers around the world not only because of their attachment to the idea of Universal Brotherhood, but also as a way to limit immigration to the United States. This synthesis of seemingly incompatible ideas reflected their desire to “Americanize” the rest of the world, by protecting living standards at home, raising them elsewhere to American standards, and exporting American-style republican institutions abroad.

This article provides an analysis of the construction of labour regionalism between the 1920s and 1970s. By means of a comparative examination of the supranational labour structures in Europe and the Americas prior to World War II and of the decentralized structure of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), I attempt to defend the argument that regionalism was a labour leaders' construct that responded to three issues: the quest for power among the largest trade-union organizations within the international trade-union movement; mutual distrust between labour leaders of large, middle-sized, and small unions from different regions; and (real or imaginary) common interests among labour leaders from the same region. These push-and-pull factors led to the construction of regional labour identifications that emphasized “otherness” in the world of international labour. A regional labour identity was intended to supplement, not undermine, national identity. As such, this study fills a lacuna in the scholarly literature on international relations and labour internationalism, which has given only scant attention to the regional level of international labour organization.

In the early twentieth century, like many of their European counterparts, labour unions in the Netherlands established mutual unemployment insurance funds for their members. Various funds made agreements with labour unions in a number of European countries to recognize each other's insurance schemes, enabling union members to work in the Netherlands without losing their entitlement to benefits accumulated in their home countries, and vice versa. Whereas up until the 1930s some of the alliances between Dutch and foreign funds had flourished, in the 1930s the number of non-Dutch workers in the Netherlands making use of such agreements decreased drastically. This article analyses those transnational alliances and explores various causes for their demise, concluding that in the 1930s formal regulation of foreign labour by the Dutch government substantially reduced the number of potential foreign members of insurance funds while government interference in unemployment insurance abroad, and especially in Germany, made the transnational agreements effectively void.

The defeat of the Dutch armies by the French and the founding of the Batavian Republic in 1795 created confusion in the colonies and on overseas naval vessels about who was in power. The Stadtholder fled to England and ordered troops and colonial governments to surrender to the British, while the Batavian government demanded that they abjure the oath to the Stadtholder. The ensuing confusion gave those on board Dutch naval vessels overseas, and in its colonies, an opportunity to be actively involved in deciding which side they wished to be on. This article adds the mutinies on board the Ceres and Medea to the interplay between the Curaçao slave revolt of 1795 and the rise of the Curaçaoan Patriot movement in 1796. The mariners independently partook in the battle for the political direction of the island and debated which side they wished to be on in the fight between the French Revolution and the British Empire.

This article attempts to introduce readers to the impressive and influential historical and contemporary literature on South African labour. A literature with some earlier antecedents effectively applied classic sociological and historical themes to the specific conditions of South African political and economic development. Research on the phase of politicized and militant white worker action ties up with research into the international pre-World War I labour movement. The strength of this literature reflected the insurgent labour movement linked to political struggle against apartheid before 1990. After this review, the second half of the paper tries to consider and contextualize the challenging post-apartheid labour situation together with its political aspects. With the successful conclusion of the anti-apartheid struggle, students of the labour movement, as well as of South African society, have become more aware of the distance between establishing a liberal democracy and actually changing society itself in a direction leading towards less inequality and an improved life for those at the bottom of society, or even the broad mass of the population. As recent literature reveals, the development of post-apartheid South Africa has been a differential and problematic experience for labour.

This article details the 1797 mutinies in the British Royal Navy in southern African waters at Simon's Bay and Table Bay at the Cape of Good Hope. Drawing attention to the intersections between international protest during the age of revolution and between local, African protest, it shows that the Cape mutinies were part of an empire-wide strike, and were rooted in the organizational traditions of naval sailors. Yet, these mutinies were also of local significance. They signalled the growing confidence, and radicalization, of the popular classes at the Cape, as sailors, KhoiSan labourers, and slaves all experimented with new strategies of rebellion. Realizing the fundamental class bias of custom and law during their struggles for improvements in wages and working conditions and for a more democratic workplace regime, naval sailors also contributed to a broader political dialogue at the Cape concerning the relationship between the imperial state, freedom, and rights.

This paper examines the ways in which turn-of-the-century British socialists enacted socialism for children through the British Socialist Sunday School movement. It focuses in particular on the movement's emergence in the 1890s and the first three decades of operation. Situated amidst a growing international field of comparable socialist children's initiatives, socialist Sunday schools attempted to connect their local activity of children's education to the broader politics of international socialism. In this discussion I explore the attempt to make this connection, including the endeavour to transcend party differences in the creation of a non-partisan international children's socialist movement, the cooption of traditional Sunday school rituals, and the resolve to make socialist childhood cultures was the responsibility of both men and women. Defending their existence against criticism from conservative campaigners, the state, and sections of the left, socialist Sunday schools mobilized a complex and contested culture of socialist childhood.

This bibliographic essay seeks to contribute to the understanding of convict labour from a global and long-term perspective. First the conditions conducive to the emergence and transformation of convict labour are addressed by framing this coercive labour form within broader classifications of labour relations and by discussing its connection with the problem of governmentality. Subsequently, an overview of the literature is undertaken in the form of a journey across time, space, and different regimes of punishment. Finally, the limitations of the available literature are discussed, the possibility of a longer-term (pre-1500) and global history of convict labour is considered, and some theoretical and methodological approaches are suggested that could favour this task.

During the revolutionary 1790s, an unprecedented number of mutinies tore through the British, French, and Dutch navies. This simultaneous upsurge of lower-deck militancy in both allied and belligerent fleets was not coincidental, nor was it simply a violent expression of similar pressures making themselves felt on ships under different flags but all engaged in the same conflict. Instead, through manifold personal connections, men who circulated back and forth across the frontline, and through the gradual emergence of a common political ideology, mutinies across navies constituted a single radical movement, a genuine Atlantic revolution in this so-called age of Atlantic revolutions.