Volume 44 part 3 (December 1999)

Summaries

Carl Strikwerda, Tides of Migration, Currents of History: The State, Economy, and the Transatlantic Movement of Labor in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
International migration has flowed and ebbed in two long waves over the last two hundred years. The major determinants of international migration have been the economy and the state. The economic forces impinging on migration are demography, technology, the level of wages, and geographical proximity, transportation, and communications. The state is the confluence of social and political forces within countries which define, encourage or curtail, and regulate movement across borders. The lesson of the nineteenth-century migration system is that states created it or allowed it to happen. They also always had the power to end it, and they eventually did. The huge break in the history of migration which accompanied the era of the World Wars points to the decisive power of the state to control migration and, by extension, the direction of economic development itself. The present article reviews the major phases of the history of modern migration in order to put the present crossroads in perspective.

Alistair Mutch, Unions and Information 1900-1960: An Essay in the History of Information
This article examines the use of information by British trade unions to react to occupational change. Using a case study of the response to welding by the Boilermakers Society, it looks at the barriers that prevented the use of information. It then examines the rise of trade union research departments. This leads to an outline of a framework for looking at the ways in which trade unions used information, based on their attitude towards their environment. The article suggests that an "information perspective" is a useful supplement to existing ways of examining trade union history which may shed new light on their development.

Erik Olssen and Hamish James, Social Mobility and Class Formation: The Worklife Social Mobility of Men in a New Zealand Suburb, 1902-281
This paper explores the relationship between social mobility and class formation in a working-class industrial suburb. By establishing the degree of class closure in three periods we can identify the relationship between the country's political history, dominated by the rise of a left-wing Labour Party, and the changing levels of closure. Labour established itself during a period of low mobility then stalled when mobility increased sharply in the 1920s. Comparison with the mobility rates for cities in other countries allows further analysis of the relationship between social structure and political behaviour. Our evidence indicates that voters were not unconscious of the shifting patterns of class rigidity.