{"title":"Tempered Radicalism: Zhang Dongsun and Chinese Guild Socialism, 1913–1922","authors":"Xuduo Zhao","doi":"10.1017/S002085902300024X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S002085902300024X","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the 1910s, guild socialism emerged as a response to the particular social and political problems of Britain and as a radical rebel against the established English socialist movement. From the beginning, guild socialism was characterized by its “Englishness”, and its global influences have largely been neglected. Through the case of Zhang Dongsun, a leading Chinese guild socialist, this article provides a transnational and comparative dimension of guild socialism and examines how its ideas were accepted, reinterpreted, and localized in a non-Western context. While English guildsmen propagated a strong anti-capitalist ideology and highlighted industrial democracy, mass self-government, and direct action, their Chinese comrades were advocating, at least temporarily, domination of the bourgeoisie and seeking to temper the radical social ethos motivated by the October Revolution. Guild socialism in China was deprived of its rebellious and militant elements and transformed into a moderate, wait-and-see theory that could, in Zhang's opinion, strike a perfect balance between elitism and mass democracy. Zhang's elitist interpretation of guild socialism showed his agency and ambition in pursuit of political modernity for China, but ironically it was his active reinterpretation that sealed the fate of Chinese guild socialism.","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"1 1","pages":"233 - 256"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75227796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Law, Labour and Lunch in France at the Turn of the Twentieth Century","authors":"Martin Bruegel","doi":"10.1017/s0020859023000214","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859023000214","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Ventilation emerged as an efficient technique to reduce the health impact of dust and gas in workspaces around 1900. However, this technical solution to a major sanitary problem collided with the human factor. When, in 1894, French law imposed shop-floor clearance during lunch to facilitate aeration, workers resisted the injunction as a disturbance of their daily eating routine. Authorities relied on labour inspectors to find solutions to contentious situations. The 1901 union-led strike in the high-fashion district in Paris propelled the issue to national attention. Striking women demanded the strict enforcement of the aeration rule. The executive obliged, but the newfound zeal subsequently rekindled antagonism towards the regulation. Reversing their claim, women workers launched a community-based petitioning campaign to return to pre-strike tolerance. Rumours of another walk-out by seamstresses, triggered by the enforcement of the regulation in 1902, precipitated a governmental volte-face. Authorities apprehended the power of the street and the threat of public disorder. Government yielded to the women's influence. A more relaxed version of the decree – it did not automatically require the evacuation of workspaces – appeared on 29 November 1904. It had taken ten years, and a zigzagging trajectory, to overcome the unanticipated consequences of purposive legislative action. The new rules proved to be very solid: they remained in place until Covid-19 pushed the government to temporarily authorize eating at one's workplace to prevent the spread of the virus in canteens and restaurants.</p>","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"63 26","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50167200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The End of a Long Tradition","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0020859023000251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859023000251","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"2 1","pages":"1 - 2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75466336","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Yaniv Voller. Second-Generation Liberation Wars. Rethinking Colonialism in Iraqi Kurdistan and Southern Sudan [Intelligence and National Security in Africa and the Middle East.] Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2022. xiv, 271 pp. Maps. £75.00. (E-book: $80.00.)","authors":"François Sennesael","doi":"10.1017/S0020859023000135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000135","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"11 1","pages":"185 - 188"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73912373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Andrea C. Mosterman Spaces of Enslavement. A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York Cornell University Press, Ithaca (NY) 2021. xiii, 230 pp. Ill. $39.95. (E-book: $25.99.)","authors":"D. R. Egerton","doi":"10.1017/S0020859023000123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000123","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"17 1","pages":"183 - 185"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87853834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rodrigo Finkelstein. Lost-Time Injury Rates. A Marxist Critique of Workers’ Compensation Systems [Studies in Critical Social Sciences, Vol. 216/ New Scholarship in Political Economy, Vol. 17.] Brill, Leiden [etc.] 2022. x, 236 pp. € 147.15. (E-book: € 147.15.)","authors":"Samuel K. Allen","doi":"10.1017/S0020859023000093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000093","url":null,"abstract":"Finkelstein motivates this ambitious narrative by prefacing this exploration of injury rates with a consequential and personal anecdote involving a clash among political powers within Chile’s workers’ compensation system. Thus, this mostly theoretical analysis is rooted in practical first-hand experience. Immediately, the reader is forced to recognize that Finkelstein’s analysis requires the unpacking of tightly interwoven components that include economic logic, countervailing incentives, ethical behavior, and important historical background. This serious and logically rigorous book requires substantial attention to detail, so the intended audience is one well-steeped in Marxist theory. From the outset, there is concern about the optics. Finkelstein observes directly that the “no-fault” workers’ compensation system (at least in Finkelstein’s experience in Chile, and perhaps elsewhere) still finds ways to lay blame, and place subjective valuations on the reality of injuries. Finkelstein’s mission is to elevate workplace injury rates beyond mere indicators, and instead he labels them a “new problematic”. He argues that there is an essential connection between injury rates and capitalism itself. Injury rates are couched in terms of “lost labor power for sale”, and, moreover, there is conflict among the market forces and behavioral response perspectives. Unlike a traditional economic approach, Finkelstein prefers to focus on “value” rather than prices (of workers’ compensation premia) as it pertains to laborers, whom he sees as bearing the brunt of the burden imposed by workers’ compensation insurance that necessitates the recording of injury rates. Finkelstein claims to have discovered the theoretical notion of “surplus lost value”. Here, he argues that capitalism (as a system, rather than capitalists per se) thrives on underpaying for injuries. Initially, this does not seem novel, rather it combines the usual rent-seeking behavior found in situations where some players have market power and possess an underlying need to make compensation arrangements incentive compatible, e.g. by not compensating 100 per cent of losses in order to mitigate problems of moral hazard. To establish the historical basis for these observations, Finkelstein focuses primarily on nineteenth-century Germany and the laws and underlying economic “preconditions” that result in the “worker question” and related problems. Here, the backstory is well-researched. Bismarck’s Germany represents an economic shuffle that is analogous to shifting tectonic plates. The transition from peasants working land owned by feudal lords to workers moving to industrial establishments without a connection to (either commons or private) land leads to problematic consequences that include unemployment, poverty, and the rise of injury-related complications.","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"1 1","pages":"177 - 179"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83101893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A.K. Baiburin The Soviet Passport. The History, Nature, and Uses of the Internal Passport in the USSR (Transl. from Russian by Stephen Dalziel.) [New Russian Thought.] Polity Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2021 (2017). xvii, 451 pp. Ill. £35.00; € 39.60. (E-book: £31.99; € 35.99.)","authors":"Gijs Kessler","doi":"10.1017/s0020859023000184","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859023000184","url":null,"abstract":"A.K. Baiburin The Soviet Passport. The History, Nature, and Uses of the Internal Passport in the USSR (Transl. from Russian by Stephen Dalziel.) [New Russian Thought.] Polity Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2021 (2017). xvii, 451 pp. Ill. £35.00; € 39.60. (E-book: £31.99; € 35.99.) - Volume 68 Issue 1","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135274621","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"International Solidarity in the Low Countries during the Twentieth Century. New Perspectives and Themes Ed. by Kim Christiaens, John Nieuwenhuys, and Charel Roemer. De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin 2020. vii, 320 pp. Ill. € 104.95. (E-book: € 104.95.)","authors":"Silke Neunsinger","doi":"10.1017/S0020859023000172","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000172","url":null,"abstract":"and prices in the grain markets. Instead, the author seems content to point out how, in the first half of the sixteenth century, this type of insurgency increased in frequency and intensity compared to his previous late medieval survey. The arithmetic balance between convergences and differences from late medieval popular protests seems to favour the former (p. 177). Cities continued to be the main site of revolts, and their leaders continued to be from popular or at least nonaristocratic backgrounds. The goal of most of the protests was not religious but political: to obtain a hearing or even representation in order to influence the financial, economic, and management decisions of the city, with particular regard to the hegemonic role of the nobility, the management of taxes, and food resources. This was sometimes at the cost of invoking the intervention of foreign powers and the enemy. Women and the merchant class played a new and more important role there, and protests were more keenly felt and conducted with greater awareness and strategic capacity. Compared to the premodern model of popular protest drawn by academics, according to which popular uprisings before the nineteenth century were almost always caused by subsistence crises, had leaders who came from the upper classes, and resulted exclusively in failure, Cohn identifies a significantly higher degree of political awareness, strategic autonomy, and success. The author’s final chapter is likely to be the one most debated; it is one with which I substantially agree. The underlying instance of the popular protests in the halfcentury of the Italian wars reveals a perhaps only barely conscious demand for the enlargement of power, through which they revived “the ideals and democratic practices of the communal period”. The growth of aristocratic regimes in this period nullified any possibility of realizing such ideals, yet the ideas of broader political representativeness and the morality of social and political equality, thanks in part to these protests, continued to work their way deep into European societies. They were not an invention of the nineteenth century, and its antecedents should not be sought solely in the age of revolutions.","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"10 1","pages":"197 - 200"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78882364","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Elizabeth Quay Hutchison. Workers Like All the Rest of Them. Domestic Service and the Rights of Labor in Twentieth-Century Chile Duke University Press, Durham (NC) [etc.] 2021. xviii, 206 pp. Ill. $99.95. (Paper: $25.95.)","authors":"Inés Pérez","doi":"10.1017/S0020859023000111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000111","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"33 1","pages":"181 - 183"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82811700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"ISH volume 68 issue 1 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0020859023000068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859023000068","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"18 1","pages":"f1 - f4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81236740","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}