Volume 40 part 3 (December 1995)

Summaries

Joan Casanovas, Slavery, the Labour Movement and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 1850-1890
Nineteenth-century Cuban colonial and slave society sharply divided its inhabitants by race and ethnicity. These race and ethnicity divisions, and the formidable repressive apparatus necessary to sustain slavery and colonialism, hindered the emergence of a class identity among the urban popular classes. However, this oppressive atmosphere created working and living conditions that compelled workers of diverse ethnicity and race to participate, increasingly, in collective action together. Free labour shared many of the adversities imposed on unfree labour, which led the emerging Cuban labour movement, first to oppose the use of unfree labour in the factories, and later, to become openly abolitionist.

ANTONY TAYLOR, "Commons-Stealers", "Land-Grabbers" and "Jerry-Builders": Space, Popular Radicalism and the Politics of Public Access in London, 1848-1880
This article places the campaign for rights of public access in London in context. It provides a structural analysis of the importance of public space in metropolitan radicalism, and in so doing explores prevailing assumptions about the different uses of such space in a provincial and metropolitan setting. Its chief focus is upon opposition to restrictions on rights of public meeting in Hyde Park in 1855 and 1866-1867, but it also charts later radical opposition to the enclosures of common-land on the boundaries of London and at Epping Forest in Essex. In particular it engages with recent debates on the demise of Chartism and the political composition of liberalism in an attempt to explain the persistence of an independent tradition of mass participatory political radicalism in the capital. It also seeks explanations for the weakness of conventional liberalism in London in the issues raised by the open spaces movement itself.

LYMAN L. JOHNSON, The Competition of Slave and Free Labor in Artisanal Production: Buenos Aires, 1770-1815
Between 1770 and 1815 the population of Buenos Aires nearly doubled. Despite this impressive growth, the city and its hinterland suffered from a chronic labor shortage. Efforts to expand artisanal production were undermined by the resultant high wage levels. Similar problems affected the countryside where slaves and the forced labor of Indians and convicts failed to meet harvest needs. This paper examines the competition among these forms of labor. Economic, social and cultural factors that helped determine the allocation of labor types are also analyzed. Finally, since scores of slaves and Indian laborers gained freedom and entered the labor market each year, the economic and cultural factors that facilitated this movement are examined.