The militancy of maritime workers led worldwide to strikes of great magnitude, visibility and impact. In many countries these strikes had vast repercussions for the industrial and political development of the labour movement. As this comparative overview of maritime labour and unionism in some ten countries shows, however, after the first wave of strikes two conflicting tendencies arose which became a permanent feature of the maritime scene. The men themselves never lost their potential for militant action and adherence to radical ideologies. By contrast, many union leaders became increasingly pragmatic and even accommodationist. This article investigates the causes of this dichotomy and assesses the resulting tensions and conflicts. In many ports these led to break-away moves, spontaneous action and the replacement of moderate by radical leaders. In others the pragmatic tendency survived in power. This included a strong interest in alliances with adjacent unions and international unions.

As English urban society overhauled its systems of policing, poor relief and labour discipline in the early nineteenth century, one form of interaction between classes to become problematical was the act of giving to beggars. While economic ideology endorsed a more calculating approach to the relief of distress, social and religious ideology preached the necessity of expanded personal concern for the distressed. Among the commercial and professional middle classes a variety of volunteer activists attempted a solution to this dilemma by professionalizing relations between giver and receiver, thus anticipating the methods of later Victorian “charity organization” by a full half-century.

This paper investigates social differences in mortality on the basis of information provided by the registers of two Berlin parishes. The life expectancy of the lower classes was half as long again as that of the upper classes. This gap is smaller than that documented by Perrenoud for Geneva in the seventeenth century, but larger than that documented for contemporary small towns and medium-size cities.

Particularly infants and small children were the victims of “social inequality before death”, adults were only marginally affected. Nor did the major epidemics and diseases contribute much to this inequality. Although neither the use of animal milk for feeding nor leaving children with wetnurses in the country were common in Berlin at this time, conditions in this early-industrial city contributed to extremely high levels of infant mortality for specific sections of the population.

Just over ten years ago the future of labour history in Britain seemed assured. A self-confident, burgeoning field, it lay at the centre of the most innovative contributions to British historiography in the post-war era, and could claim as its own some of the most impressive historians of the time. Since the founding of the Society for the Study of Labour History in 1960, the field had moved from the periphery of historical concerns to occupy a central position in the spectrum of history writing.