Although the impact of Thompson’s work outside the UK has been recognized and pointed to many times, the ways in which Thompsonian categories and concepts, or Marxist thought from the West more broadly, was received in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc remain rather unclear. Although The Making has never been translated into Polish, Czech, or Slovak, the historians of East-Central European countries were not totally cut off from Western scholarship. Major academic institutes and universities throughout the communist bloc maintained basic contacts with colleagues in the West, and Thompson’s work was known among some local social historians. Marxism from the West in general and Thompson’s work in particular posed challenges that had to be dealt with. This paper traces the ways in which historians of Poland and Czechoslovakia responded to these challenges to the official position of Marxist orthodoxy. Taking The Making as an example, it highlights the reception (or lack thereof) of Western influences on local scholarship, and the dynamics of these encounters – whether they were affirmative or critical – in relation to the changing political landscape of East-Central European countries after World War II.

The work of E.P. Thompson has had an enormous impact on the writing of history in South Africa since the 1970s. This article traces the rise of this historiographical trend, focusing especially on the History Workshop at Wits University (Johannesburg). It outlines how a South African version of Thompsonian historical practice was theorized, and sketches some of the ways in which Thompson’s ideas were utilized by South African historians. The article shows how the History Workshop attempted to popularize their research, and examines the political projects behind these activities. Finally, the article suggests that although the influence of Thompson-style South African social historians has declined, their work has had a lasting impact on the country’s literary culture, well beyond the academy.

This article traces the reception of E.P. Thompson’s work in Argentina over the past three decades. It explores the context in which Thompson was read by labor historians as a means to analyse the way in which the country’s labor historiography was shaped over this period. It argues that, in the 1980s and the 1990s, against a context characterized by a crisis of the political left and a downturn in the labor movement, Thompson’s appropriation was focused on his critique of Marxist “determinism”. While this corresponded to similar developments in other countries, Argentinian labor historiography started to show a different path in the early 2000s, when a tremendous social, political, and economic crisis shook the country. The article concludes that recent developments in labor historiography in Argentina show a different pattern to those seen in the “Global North”.

In considering how “radical” histories of ordinary whites under apartheid might be written, this essay engages with several traditions of historical scholarship “from” and “of” below. For three decades, Marxist-inspired social history dominated radical historiography in South Africa. It has, however, proved little able to nurture historiography of whites that is politically engaged and acknowledges post-Marxist currents in the discipline. I advocate a return to theory and suggest that new sources may be drawn from the academy and beyond. Historiographies “of” below need not necessarily be historiographies “from” below and this article proposes the idea of a “racial state” as an alternative starting point for a history of apartheid-era whites. It goes on to argue that Subaltern Studies, as a dissident, theoretically eclectic and interdisciplinary current in historiography offers useful perspectives for exploring the everyday lives of whites in South Africa. After suggesting a research agenda stemming from these theoretical and comparative insights, I conclude by reflecting on the ethics of writing histories of apartheid-era whites.

This article introduces the present Special Theme on the global reception and appropriation of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). It aims to interrogate Thompson’s legacy and potential vitality at a moment of renewed social and intellectual upheavals. It emphasizes the need for an interdisciplinary and global reflection on Thompson’s work and impact for understanding how class, nation, and “the people” as subjects of historical inquiry have been repeatedly recast since the 1960s. Examining the course of Thompson’s ideas in Japan and West Germany, South Africa and Argentina, as well as Czechoslovakia and Poland, each of the following five articles in the Special Theme is situated in specific and different locations in the global historiographical matrix. Read as a whole, they show how national historiographies have been products of local processes of state and class formation on the one hand, and transnational transfers of intellectual and historiographical ideas, on the other. They highlight the remarkable ability of Thompsonian social history to inspire new lives in varying national contexts shaped by different formations of race, class, and state.

Our etymological understanding of PDE bread has been influenced, to a considerable extent, by Otto Jespersen's comment that ‘An Englishman cannot thrive or be ill or die without Scandinavian words; they are to the language what bread and eggs are to the daily fare.’ This article analyses the evidence behind the possibility that PDE bread might represent a Norse-derived semantic loan, i.e. that OE brēad acquired the meaning ‘bread’, which was more frequently expressed by OE hlāf, because of the influence of its Viking Age Norse cognate (cp. OIc brauð ‘bread’). On the basis of an in-depth study of the attestations of OE brēad and hlāf and their early Middle English reflexes, as well as the use of their cognates in various Germanic languages, the article challenges the traditional view that OE brēad originally meant ‘piece, morsel of bread’ and concludes that Norse influence is not needed in order to account for the semantic history of PDE bread.

This article explores the relationship between ‘national identity’, the urban environment and its religious practices. As a gateway city, where locals met foreigners to an unusual degree, late medieval Bruges provides a useful case-study. The focus is on the processes that shaped expressions of identity. These often involved religious rhetoric and practices. Foreign merchants, such as the Biscayans and Castilians, were grouped into ‘nations’, and identified with their homelands, especially in their chapels; but why and how they did so was not the result simply of patriotism or a sense of otherness, but of urban and strategic agendas, their own and those of native citizens.

Is the relation ‘is a morally permissible alternative to’ transitive? The answer seems to be a straightforward yes. If Act B is a morally permissible alternative to Act A and Act C is a morally permissible alternative to B then how could C fail to be a morally permissible alternative to A? However, there are cases where this transitivity appears problematic. My aim in this article is to provide a solution to this problem. I will then investigate two ways in which we might justify rejecting the transitivity of the ‘is a permissible alternative to’ relation. Next, I will look at Dorsey's solution, which involves a reinterpretation of the intuitions used to generate the problem. I will argue that none of these solutions are fully satisfying, before going on to provide a novel solution to the problem and to argue that it avoids the problems facing the alternative solutions.

The question whether distributive justice is at bottom practice-dependent or practice-independent has received much attention in recent years. I argue that the problem of intergenerational justice resolves this dispute in favour of practice-independence. Many believe that we owe more to our descendants than leaving them a world in which they can merely lead minimally decent lives. This thought is particularly convincing given the fact that it is us who determine to a significant extent what this future world will look like. However, no practices that would trigger distributive obligations exist between distant generations. Thus, if we have to leave more than a minimum for future generations, we cannot conceive of distributive justice in terms of the justification of ongoing social interactions. Rather we have to think of the entire concept as an idea based on persons’ legitimate interests and capacity for well-being, and which abstracts from participation in particular practices.

The political ecology of historical urban water systems can yield information on the long-term, social organization of resource infrastructure and its management. In this article, the water system of Piacenza, Italy, is examined through its history and the documents of the Congregazione sopra l'ornato, the committee in charge of water management in the city, under the Farnese dukes, from 1545 to 1736. The documents include letters from residents, responses and orders from the committee, tax documents and engineering reports. These records tell a story of a water system and its relationship to the city residents.