Volume 52 part 1 (April 2007)

Summaries

John Higginson, Privileging the Machines: American Engineers, Indentured Chinese and White Workers in South Africa's Deep Level Gold Mines, 1902-1907
Economists and historians have identified the period between 1870 and 1914 as one marked by the movement of capital and labor across the globe at unprecedented speed. The accompanying spread of the gold standard and industrial techniques contained volatile and ambiguous implications for workers everywhere. Industrial engineers made new machinery and industrial techniques the measure of human effort. The plight of workers in South Africa's deep level gold mines in the era following the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 provides a powerful example of just how lethal the new benchmarks of human effort could be. When by 1904 close to fifty thousand Africans refused to return to the mines, mining policy began to coalesce around solving the "labor shortage" problem and dramatically reducing working costs. Engineers, especially American engineers, rapidly gained the confidence of the companies that had made large investments in the deep level mines of the Far East Rand by bringing more than sixty thousand indentured Chinese workers to the mines to make up for the postwar shortfall in unskilled labor in late 1904. But the dangerous working conditions that drove African workers away from many of the deep level mines persisted. Three years later, in 1907, their persistence provoked a bitter strike by white drill men.

Noel Whiteside, Unemployment Revisited in Comparative Perspective: Labour Market Policy in Strasbourg and Liverpool, 1890-1914
Many historical studies, some of them comparative, have explored the foundations of welfare states and the birth of unemployment policies in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Nearly all have focused on political debate at national level. This paper bases its analysis on labour market reforms initiated in Strasbourg and Liverpool in the decades preceding the First World War. It explores how bona fide unemployed workers, the proper clients of official help, were distinguished from the mass of the poor and indigent. The labour market had to be defined and organized before policies for the unemployed could be put in place. The object is to demonstrate not only how this was done, but also how different perceptions of social justice and economic efficiency influenced both the process and the outcomes of public interventions, in this instance undermining attempts to transfer specific policies from one country to another.

Selina Todd, Breadwinners and dependants: working-class young people in England, 1918-1955
The prevailing image of twentieth-century English 'youth' is as a triumphal signifier of affluent leisure consumption. By contrast, this article demonstrates the importance of young working-class people's economic role as wage-earners in the mid-twentieth century. This shaped their treatment by the family and the state and the life histories of the adults they became. Juveniles were crucial breadwinners in interwar working-class households. However, the consequences of high unemployment among adult males helped redefine youth as a period of state protection and leisure in the post-1945 decades. Nevertheless, personal affluence remained limited, and young people's economic responsibilities high, until at least the mid-1950s. The history of twentieth-century youth is best understood as one in which young working-class people's fortunes were closely linked to their family's circumstances and their importance as a supply of cheap labour. Social class thus formed, and was formed by, the experience and memory of being young.