Volume 43 part 2 (August 1998)

Summaries

David R. Green, Lines of Conflict: Labour Disputes in London, 1790-1870
This paper examines labour disputes in London between 1790 and 1870, based on a systematic coverage of working-class newspapers. Disputes were classified by type, cause and trade. Evidence exists for 294 disputes, the large majority of which were strikes. The incidence of disputes roughly paralleled cyclical and seasonal fluctuations in the economy. Wage claims were the main cause for conflict, although interpretation of such disputes needs to be related to price movements. The most serious disputes were associated with significant changes in control over employment and the labour process. Skilled and unskilled workers were involved in disputes, both taking advantage of specific circumstances to exert power at the workplace. The extent to which London was prone to disputes is discussed and tentative comparisons drawn with other regions in Britain.

Robin Haines, Margrette Kleinig, Deborah Oxley and Eric Richards, Migration and Opportunity: An Antipodean Perspective
Australian data can reflect on British questions, about the quality of immigrant labour, and the opportunities gained by migrating, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Three case studies are presented. The first uses quantitative methods and convict transportation records to argue that Ireland suffered a "brain drain" when Britain industrialised, siphoning off the cream of its workers to England and some, eventually, to Australia. Drawing on an entirely different type of data, the second study reaches strikingly similar positive conclusions about the qualities of Australia's early assisted immigrants: three splendidly visible immigrants stand for the tens of thousands of people who sailed out of urban and rural Britain to the distant colonies. A no less optimistic view of Australia's immigrants half a century later is demonstrated in the third case study on female domestic servants. Often referred to as the submerged stratum of the workforce, the most oppressed and the least skilled, the label "domestic servant" obscured a wide range of internal distinctions of rank and experience, and too often simply homogenised them into a sump of "surplus women". This study helps to rescue the immigrant women from this fate and invests them with individuality and volition, offering the vision of the inter-continentally peripatetic domestic, piloting her way about the globe, taking advantage of colonial labour shortages to maximise her mobility and her family strategies. Best of all, these migrants emerge as individuals out of the mass, faces with names, people with agenda.