This paper analyses the experience of the Spanish Republican refugees who left Catalonia in the Retirada of January and February 1939. The first section – “the Road to Bourg-Madame” – considers issues of interpretation raised by the refugees' texts: it discusses historiography, the politics of memory, and political culture. In “Bourg-Madame”, the second section, the essay considers the refugees' experiences. It discusses previous patterns of Spanish migration, the decision-making process that preceded the refugees' journey, group identity formation during the Retirada, the gendered dimension of their experiences, the despair felt by many on arrival in France and the reception that the refugees met. The paper ends by discussing the surprising resilience of the refugees.

Using a variety of archival sources, notably personnel records and municipal minute books, this article builds a picture of the work-life histories of rank-and-file police constables and firefighters in the English cities of Birmingham and Leicester, and contrasts the techniques of behavioural control adopted by their employers. By drawing on an expanding literature on the social history of public institutions, the article compares the experience of managing such disciplined and uniformed public services. The article demonstrates that municipal management combined insidious devices for controlling workers' behaviour with consensual and negotiated tactics deployed by workers aware of the tangible material benefits offered by a career in public service. Moreover, by placing the English experience of municipal policing and fire-fighting in an international context by focusing on the visits and writings made by prominent technical and social reformers, the article offers a framework within which comparative research can be undertaken.

With the following two contributions the International Review of Social History hopes to focus scholarly attention on a rather neglected theme: the labour conditions of the ordinary foot soldiers in rebel armed forces. Although quite disparate in time, social setting, and method, both articles deal with the position and circumstances of common soldiers; both study these soldiers during a period of civil war; and both deal with rebel forces that were ultimately to emerge victorious and eventually be transformed into a regular army. Erik Swart's contribution on the soldiers in the army of the northern Netherlands is set in the late sixteenth century, just after the start of Holland's war of independence. Within a couple of years, the military underwent a comprehensive process of professionalization. The consequences for ordinary soldiers were far reaching: lower wages, fewer privileges, fewer rights, and an obligation to carry out digging work and other forms of manual labour. By contrast, their predecessors (the Landsknechts) had enjoyed a significantly higher status, with a system of organization not much different from that of nineteenth-century trade unions.

In the decades after 1550 the soldiery of the Netherlands witnessed the disappearance of the Landsknecht, who had the right to participate in decision-making and shape his daily life. He gradually became a mere “soldier”, subject to stricter discipline and control. This development accelerated after 1572 because William of Orange needed to maintain the support of the inhabitants of the Netherlands for the Revolt. Better discipline and control over his soldiers were imperative in this. Meanwhile, a progressive process of proletarianization left them largely unable to resist: they simply had nowhere else to go.

This article examines the civil war in central Uganda between guerrillas of the National Resistance Army and the government of Milton Obote between 1981 and 1986. Its central focus is the wartime experience of guerrilla fighters – men, women, and children. The material for the article has been collected through interviews with participants about their experiences. The interview partners described their motives and expectations as guerrillas as well as their perception of the reality of war “in the bush”. Their narratives differ from the victorious guerrilla's official history of the war and the guerrilla myth cultivated in that history, as they lack the subsequent certainty of victory and emphasize the fighters' disappointments and suffering. In this way, the method of oral history provides important points of departure for a social history of this war and allows us, at the same time, to differentiate and correct our current understanding of it in significant ways.