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In The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, Ellen Wood argues that the English urban landscape is characterised by lack of elegance, absence of charm and neglect of public services. She traces the origins of this impoverishment to the eradication of pre-industrial capitalist urban culture in the eighteenth century. The paper investigates the claim that English urban culture underwent a significant transformation in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century. A concern with the public magnificence of London as a means of representing the wealth and power of England is characteristic of eighteenth century treatise on urban improvement. The most influential of which, John Gwynn's London and Westminster Improved, published in 1766, draws upon the spatial linkage of economy, government and power typical of mercantilist thought. The paper argues that as the principles and practices of mercantilism were displaced by the spread of industrial capitalism and the liberal state, a concern with grandeur, elegance and embellishment in urban form was subordinated to the provision of the physical and social infrastructure necessary for the reproduction of labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concepts of the public sphere and public space have gained increasing purchase within social history. This paper contributes to this literature by theoretically developing a critical approach to both concepts. By drawing upon the insights of the Bakhtin circle, as well as Marxism and Poststructuralism, the paper suggests that public spheres under capitalism are structured through the basic contradiction between capital and labour. Each public sphere may then be seen as a refracted dialogic and spatial form of this basic contradiction, and is then best viewed as a contradictory spatial entity that obtains its unique identity through different “accents” and “word signs”. The capitalist state must aim to regulate, through governance and law, dialogue within a public sphere. By focusing on the Chartist demonstration at Hyde Park, London in 1855, I show how these theories can be employed to explore how a radical social movement appropriated space by developing a working class public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1960s students of agrarian society, have interpreted the existence of putatively "capitalist' economic practices and relations {e.g., commoditization, wage labor, semi-proletarianization, etc.) in the rural Third World as evidence of the capitalist nature of the economies concerned. The present paper challenges this interpretation. Based on an analysis of artisanal production m the northern Peruvian Andes, the paper shows that purportedly "capitalist" economic practices may be fully commensurable with "non-capitalist" relations (e.g., forms of cooperation in the production process, kin ties, etc.), and may even act as an obstacle to capital accumulation. 'Non-capitalist" forms of organizing the production process and of remunerating labor, on the other hand, may be essential to the accumulation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Costa Rica in the 1930s had a level of social development typical of a peripheral society, yet today Costa Ricans enjoy a level equivalent to the wealthier US and Italy. This paper examines the contribution of labor to state formation and social development. Beginning around the First World War, labor gradually forced the adoption of social legislation that altered the distribution of social power and reshaped the ideological and institutional character of the state. Reactions to the increasing power of labor and the state culminated in the 1948 social pact among labor, the middle strata and the dominant class that institutionalized the existing ideological and strategic trends responsible for the present level of social development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles Booth's seventeen volume Life and Labour of the People of London has been called the first social survey, it demonstrated the techniques of organised social research, and proved an impetus to the Social Survey Movement. In spite of its key position in the emergence of empirical sociology, little attention has been paid to the organisation of Booth's research team winch was to provide a template for the subsequent development of organised social research, nor to the identities of the twenty people who made up the research team, Remarkably for the time, one-quarter of the researchers were women, including the young Beatrice Webb and Clara Collet. This paper looks closely at the personalities and the organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This article examines the colonial and post-colonial histories of gender, labor and alcohol production and consumption in the tea plantations of North Bengal, India. It argues that the symbolic and metaphoric constructions of primitivism within a - wider imperial narrative provides one backdrop for an exploration of the symbolic and material histories of labor and alcohol politics in the plantation. The essay moves between different historical periods and languages, highlighting the interconnections between the semantic and bodily practices, which continue to index the gendered and racialized labor politics of contemporary tea plantations. It ends with a contemporary ethnographic examination of women's protest around the “liquor business” in the postcolonial plantation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional perspectives on ethnic institutions tend to consider mainly their role in the preservation of the cultural and social fabric of ethnic communities. Increasing evidence indicates that ethno-institutional effects are often more varied and complex. France's first industrial-era immigrants, massively crossing the border from Belgian Flanders during the second half of the 19th century, are a case in point. Immigrant Flemish workers introduced a new type of institution to the French working class: socialist cooperatives. These would have a long-term impact not only on the immigrant Flemish community itself, but also on the larger labour movement, on the region, and on the country as a whole. Three elements were important in this process of institutional cross-fertilization: Belgian workers' rich institutional repertoire; the coincidence of their settlement with the rise of the French labour movement; and the fact that their institutional innovation was easily transferable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author asks: How has the legacy of E.P. Thompson helped shape the emergence of Social History in the United States? How have ideas about race, gender and empire, largely absent from Thompson's work, been incorporated in writing on labor, immigration, and American exceptionalism? Is it now possible to synthesize race, class, and gender? Or, have histories based on class analysis so elided race and gender that such grafting has been foreclosed? With a bit of gossip here, a gesture to historiography there, and as little charm as possible, the author wonders: Is there any justice for "the Subaltern" in this profession? Or, is it just another "Organization Man" gone West? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on research scientist Clifford Geertz's theory of agricultural and socioeconomic involution in Dutch colonial Java which dominated Indonesian studies. The model of involution combines population pressure, resource and labor extraction schedules, productive elasticity, and indigenous leveling mechanisms into an overall pattern of involution. It refers to the marked tendency to respond to a rising population through intensification. He applied it to the most firmly entrenched wet rice growing regimes in Java and argued that they had reached their organizational limits owing to population pressure and colonial demands on land and labor. Geertz argues that involution on the technical production side was matched on the social side by a similar involution in rural family life, social stratification as well as in the folk-culture value system. The ecological mutualism has laid the foundation for a dual economy, a labor-intensive subsistence sector maintained alongside a more capital-intensive agricultural export sector. The problem with this thesis is the premise that a dual-economy could operate without changing fundamentally the structure of the indigenous economy.