Volume 56 part 2 (August 2011)

Summaries

Mary Hilson. A Consumers' International? The International Cooperative Alliance and Cooperative Internationalism, 1918-1939: A Nordic Perspective.
Interest in the history of consumer cooperation has grown in recent years, but the transnational dimensions of the movement, including the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), remain under-researched. This paper examines the debates about the meanings of cooperation during the period 1918–1939, focusing on the Nordic countries as a case study within the ICA. The paper considers how cooperators drew on the legacy of the Rochdale Pioneers as the basis for a programmatic statement for the ICA, before turning to explore the implications of this for the ordinary members who shopped in the cooperative stores. Examination of these debates within the cooperative movement can, it is argued, illuminate our understandings of both the transnational politics of consumption, and the ambitions, limits, and practices of internationalism during the interwar years. Lastly, some attention is given to the role of cooperation in the emergence of a distinctive Nordic region.

Custodio Velasco Mesa. Revolutionary Rhetoric And Labour Unrest: Liège in 1886 and Seville in 1901.
This article explores the similarities and differences of the discourse used by the main figures from the labour unrest of Liège in 1886 and Seville in 1901 to articulate their experiences and protests. The comparison, focused on the analysis of the interpretative frameworks, that is, on the "construction of arguments", highlights the role of the discourse as one of the cultural ingredients which encouraged and shaped both instances of collective action.

Cristiana Viegas de Andrade. Migration Systems in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Portugal: The Case of Vila do Conde.
This article aims to identify migration systems in north-western nineteenth-century Portugal to contribute to the understanding of the puzzle that is Portuguese migration dynamics. Through the analysis of the passport and parish registers from the concelho of Vila do Conde, it was possible to determine three systems, the Atlantic, the Lisbon, and the local. The occurrence and characteristics of the systems varied according to socio-economic contexts, both in the sending and receiving areas, and also according to the emigrants’ life cycles.

Marianne Maeckelbergh. The Road to Democracy: The Political Legacy of "1968". Over the past forty years, the social struggles of the "long 1960s" have been continuously reinterpreted, each interpretation allocating a new mix of relevance and irrelevance to the brief global uprising. This article is a contribution to one such interpretation: the small but growing body of literature on the central importance of experiments with democracy within movements of the 1960s. Rather than examining the transformative effect of 1960s movements on institutional politics or popular culture, this article examines the lasting transformation 1960s movements had on social-movement praxis. Based on seven years of ethnography within contemporary global movement networks, I argue that when viewed from within social-movement networks, we see that the political legacy of the 1960s lies in the lasting significance of movement experiments with democracy as part of a prefigurative strategy for social change that is still relevant today because it is still in practice today.