This article attempts to examine the activity of the Bolshevik Party amongst the working women of Petrograd in 1917, and in particular the conflicting Bolshevik attitudes towards work amongst women. The study has been limited to Petrograd, because the situation there, while not typical, was of vital importance. The Petrograd Committee was a major policy-making body within the party, and a wide spectrum of attitudes towards work amongst women existed at this time within the Petrograd party, and a wide spectrum of attitudes towards work amongst women existed at this time within the Petrograd party. The major primary sources used for this article were the 1917 editions of Pravda, and 13 issues of Rabotnitsa, from May 1917 to January 1918.

It has been said that no other British industry, with the possible exception of coal mining, can claim such a rich or conflict-prone history of labour relations as the docks. In fact the major issues of more recent years in port transport concerning the nature of employment, strike activity and restrictive practices can only be fully understood within a historical perspective. The main focus of interest, however, of the plethora of public inquiries and research studies relating to the docks over many years has inevitably been the nature of employment – especially the effects and reforms of the casual system. Far less attention has been devoted to methods of job regulation and control over work as tools of analysis, now regarded as core elements in the study of industrial relations.

Popular conceptions of the politics of Robert Owen have changed surprisingly little since the early nineteenth century. Within a short time of the advent of his national campaign for Poor Law reform, Owen came under attack from radical parliamentary reformers on the grounds of his ostensible political conservatism. Among the rumours then afloat among the reformers, Richard Carlile later wrote, one was “that Mr. Owen was an instrument of the Government, to bring forward this plan of providing for the lower and poorer classes, for the purpose of drawing their attention from Parliamentary Reform”.

Vor mehr als einem halben Jahrhundert suchte Arthur Lehning im Sommer 1924 auf der vielen so bekannten Adresse Lazarettgasse 32 den Geschichtsschreiber des Anarchismus und Biographen Michael Bakunins, den passionierten Sammler sozialistischer Literatur, den Historiker Dr Max Nettlau zum ersten Mal auf. Wie ein roter Faden wird sich Nettlau, der auch an der Wiege des Intemationalen Instituts für Sozialgeschichte in Amsterdam stand, bis auf den heutigen Tag durch das Leben Lehnings ziehen.

How did philanthropy adjust to the transformation of society in the nineteenth century? What was its role in social relations and in relieving poverty? Recent writers studying these issues have suggested the need for detailed studies at local level, and in studying some English towns and cities in the earlier part of the nineteenth century they have come to varying conclusions. Roger Smith's study of Nottingham shows that philanthropy added insignificantly to the amount of relief available through the Poor Law. By contrast Peter Searby's study of Coventry shows that philanthropic funds were quite abundant and after some reforms in the 1830's even applied to the relief of the poor! Professor McCord's articles on the North-East of England in the early nineteenth century seek to establish the more ambitious claim “that nineteenth-century philanthropy provided increasing resources and extended machinery with which to diminish the undesirable effects of that period's social problems”.

This article examines some aspects of working-class standards of living in three Lancashire towns, Barrow-in-Furness, Lancaster and Preston, in the period 1890 to 1914. By looking on one hand at a number of externally determined factors, such as real wages and the cost of living, and on the other at the strategies with which the working-class families attempted to maximise their standards of living, an assessment is made of the relative success of these various strategies, particularly at periods when wages were on or below the poverty line. Particular stress is laid on evidence from Preston, in part because it has not previously been reported, but also because there appear to be a number of significant variations between Preston on the one hand, and Barrow and Lancaster on the other, when placed in apparently similar intrinsic conditions and in comparatively close geographical proximity to each other. These variations underline the extent to which generalisations derived principally from statistical data may be misleading, and also the importance of looking at individual discrete communities before relying on theoretical models of the relationship between, for example, income from primary employment and standards of living. If it is possible to demonstrate that working-class people in some towns were more successful than their near neighbours in combating poverty, we need to identify the reasons for these differences. Factors discussed include the economy of Preston compared with Barrow and Lancaster, comparisons of wage rates, the employment of women and its effects, and diets (including the use of allotments), the effects of drinking, as well as a look at possible negative factors, such as family size, and housing and hygiene.

The prominent position of Jews in various aspects of the production, distribution and vending of beer, vodka and other grain-based intoxicants in late-eighteenth-century Poland was noted by contemporaries and registers in the meager socio-demographic data available for the period. The Jewish innkeeper, particularly in the Eastern regions of Poland, was an important representative of the Dvorf Yid — the provincial Jew as recorded in memoirs, chronicles and travellers' accounts. In the middle of the eighteenth century, 20 to 30 percent of the Jewish population of Poland was estimated to be involved in some aspect of alcohol production and distribution — what came to be called the Propinacja.