Volume 53 part 2 (August 2008)

Summaries

Bert De Munck. Skills,Trust and Changing Consumer Preferences. The Decline of Antwerp's Craft Guilds from the Perspective of the Product Market, ca. 1500 - ca. 1800
The main reason for the decline of craft guilds in Antwerp should not be sought in the labour market but rather in the product market. Apprenticeship systems, masterpieces, and trademarks were conducive to a labour market monopsony but at the same time to the representation of product quality. On the one hand product quality was legitimized through the superior manual skills of masters, on the other it was objectified through the attribution of quality marks to the characteristics of the raw material used. This strategy was successful for the sale of the durable, expensive, luxury products Antwerp was renowned for until the first half of the seventeenth century, but economic elites and customers stopped favouring corporative regulations, when demand shifted towards less expensive and more fashionable products. As guild-based skills were not necessarily superior in reality and consumer loyalty ultimately depended upon the masters' trustworthiness, the craft guilds were bound to lose credibility.

Ben Maddison. Labour Commodification and Classification: An Illustrative Case Study of the New South Wales Boilermaking Trades, 1860-1920
Labour commodification is a core process in building capitalist society. Nonetheless it is given remarkably little attention in labour and social historiography, because assumptions about the process have obscured its historical character. Abandoning these assumptions, a close study of labour commodification in the boilermaking trades of late colonial New South Wales (Australia) illustrates the historical character of the process. In these trades, labour commodification was deeply contested at the most intimate level of class relations between workers and employers. This contest principally took the form of a struggle over the scheme of occupational classification used as the basis of pay rates. It was a highly protracted struggle, because workers developed strategies that kept the employers' efforts at bay for four decades. Employer efforts to intensify the commodity character of boilermakers' labour were largely ineffective, until they were given great assistance in the early twentieth century by the state arbitration system.

Matt Vaughan Wilson. The 1911 Waterfront Strikes in Glasgow: Trade Unions and Rank-and-File Militancy in the Labour Unrest of 1910-1914
This article examines one of several massive industrial conflicts experienced in Britain and elsewhere during 1910-14, paying particular attention to organization and the dynamics of the strikes at a local level. It takes as a case study the port of Glasgow, which has until recently received little attention from historians of waterfront labour, despite its status as a major port and an important area for labour activity. Much literature on the waterfront strike wave emphasizes spontaneity and rank-and-file initiative. These were important in Glasgow as elsewhere, but experiences varied markedly between the major ports. Moreover, prior organization and individual initiative should not be overlooked. Officials of the National Sailors' and Firemen's Union played a significant role at national and international levels, while Glasgow Trades Council and activists associated with it provided a critical lead locally. The strongly local character of the strike movement and its leadership in Glasgow shaped both the strikes themselves - which were appreciably more unified and coherent in Glasgow than in some other centres - and the subsequent development of waterfront organization on the Clyde, marked as it was by the emergence of independent locally-based unions among both dockers and seamen.

Joeri Januarius. Picturing the Everyday Life of Limburg Miners: Photographs as a Historical Source
Although recent years have seen growing theoretical interest among historians in the use of visual material, researchers continue to neglect the importance of photographs as source material. This is particularly striking since, now that iconographic material is becoming more widely available and archival institutions are beginning to place greater emphasis on visual material as use of the simple camera becomes more widespread, photographs often provide the only source of essential information for study. They illuminate the concept of the everyday, which in turn casts light on the significance of consumer goods, domestic comfort, the aspirations of men, women, and children, in short the banality of everyday life which echoed their mentalities and how they viewed the world.