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Lancashire's textile machinery industry developed with the mechanisation of its cotton industry, and by 1914 was the leading branch of mechanical engineering in Britain. Throughout this industry's history its artisans retained characteristics of respectability and militancy allied with a strong sense of local independence. (Chapter 1) As the industry expanded in the 1830's and 1840's the artisans fought to retain control over the labour process and maintain economic status in the face of technological change. Meanwhile they maintained a significant and under acknowledged role in the wider labour movement. (Chapter 2) Artisans of the leading firm of Hibbert and Platt were at the centre of the greatest industrial dispute of the mid nineteenth century, the 1852 engineering lock-out. (Chapter 3) The next forty years are seen as the classic period of the 'labour aristocracy' in Britain; the textile machinery artisans provide an excellent case study of this most controversial concept. (Chapter 4) The 1890's brought the unionisation of the industry's less skilled workers by localised 'new unions' and general labour unions, notably the Gas Workers and General Labourers Union. Meanwhile, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers was defeated by the Engineering Employers' Federation in 1898 which began a centrifugal drift of power from the weakened Executive to the branches. (Chapter 5) The inflationary conditions of 1910-14 brought a wave of strikes as artisan control of the labour process was re-asserted. (Chapter 6) The Great War created such demands for armaments that most firms became 'controlled' establishments and commercial work gave way to munitions. The associated problems of dilution led to the serious artisan-inspired strikes of 1917. (Chapter 7) The industry's inter-war decline reflects the decline of its artisans, who in 1920 and 1922 suffered further defeats by the employers and were subsequently obliged to yield in their century long struggle to retain control of the labour process. (Chapter 8).

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Changes in women’s relationship to caring labour, and changes in societal attitudes towards women as nurses during the period when they became union members and aspiring professionals, are revealed in thirty-seven oral history interviews with women who became nurses between 1958, a pivotal time in the development of the publicly funded health care system, and 1977, when the last residential school of nursing closed in Calgary. This study challenges the historiography that suggests that nursing programs of nursing in the 1960s and early 1970s were sites of unusual social regulation, and that nursing was a career choice that women made because of a lack of other more challenging or rewarding alternatives. This study also challenges assumptions that women in nursing were unaffected by the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s and instead passively accepted a position of gendered subservience at home and in the workplace. Instead, I argue that nurses skilfully balanced work and other social responsibilities, primarily domestic caregiving, and also were active in unionization and professionalization in advance of other Canadian women workers. The ability of nurses to maintain a prominent position in health care, to advocate for the conditions needed to provide the best nursing care possible, while also fighting for improved working conditions and higher professional status is an impressive story of how women in these decades used gender, and class, as tools to enact social change. These efforts are all the more impressive when considered within the context of social opposition faced by nurses as they both resisted and conformed to expectations that their primary role was as wives and mothers. Nurses negotiated this challenging political terrain by framing their work in terms of its practical necessity and gendered suitability as women’s paid employment. In making these claims, I position nursing and nursing education as a form of women’s labour that exemplifies employed women’s struggles to promote fairer wages, better working conditions, and access to the full benefits of economic and social citizenship for all women. This challenge to the prevailing assessment of nursing during this period establishes the main thesis of this dissertation. / Graduate / 0334 / 0569 / 0453 / mrgrtscaia@gmail.com

Changes in women’s relationship to caring labour, and changes in societal attitudes towards women as nurses during the period when they became union members and aspiring professionals, are revealed in thirty-seven oral history interviews with women who became nurses between 1958, a pivotal time in the development of the publicly funded health care system, and 1977, when the last residential school of nursing closed in Calgary. This study challenges the historiography that suggests that nursing programs of nursing in the 1960s and early 1970s were sites of unusual social regulation, and that nursing was a career choice that women made because of a lack of other more challenging or rewarding alternatives. This study also challenges assumptions that women in nursing were unaffected by the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s and instead passively accepted a position of gendered subservience at home and in the workplace. Instead, I argue that nurses skilfully balanced work and other social responsibilities, primarily domestic caregiving, and also were active in unionization and professionalization in advance of other Canadian women workers. The ability of nurses to maintain a prominent position in health care, to advocate for the conditions needed to provide the best nursing care possible, while also fighting for improved working conditions and higher professional status is an impressive story of how women in these decades used gender, and class, as tools to enact social change. These efforts are all the more impressive when considered within the context of social opposition faced by nurses as they both resisted and conformed to expectations that their primary role was as wives and mothers. Nurses negotiated this challenging political terrain by framing their work in terms of its practical necessity and gendered suitability as women’s paid employment. In making these claims, I position nursing and nursing education as a form of women’s labour that exemplifies employed women’s struggles to promote fairer wages, better working conditions, and access to the full benefits of economic and social citizenship for all women. This challenge to the prevailing assessment of nursing during this period establishes the main thesis of this dissertation. / Graduate / 2015-06-17 / 0334 / 0569 / 0453 / mrgrtscaia@gmail.com

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This thesis traces the social history of the European community on the Zambian Copperbelt from the onset of copper mining in 1926 to the mid-1970s when a dramatic slump in the price of copper generated severe economic difficulties. There has been almost no academic work on the Copperbelt's European community and, in this respect, this thesis fills an important gap. However, a focus on the European community has a wider significance than filling this gap. Although the Copperbelt has generally been understood in a national or regional context, this thesis argues that developments there are better understood by exploring how the Copperbelt was linked to other mining regions around the world; in Britain, South Africa, the US and Australia. The European community was largely composed of highly mobile, transient individuals, and the constant movement of people made and sustained transnational connections. Mobility and transience are crucial to two of the main themes of this thesis: class consciousness and the importance of race. Class was a strong marker of identity for Europeans and a variant of 'white labourism' dominated life on the Copperbelt. Industrial unrest was a regular occurrence in the life of the European community as strikes and other disputes underpinned extraordinary levels of affluence. The frequency of industrial unrest diminishes the relevance of South Africa as a viable comparison, as does the relative lack of importance of race. This thesis argues that the predominant attitude of Europeans toward the African majority around them was one of indifference and that the importance of 'African advancement' has been overstated. Archival collections in Zambia and Britain constitute the main sources for this thesis. These sources are supplemented with material from archives in South Africa and Netherlands, contemporary publications including newspapers, and interviews with former European residents of the Copperbelt.

This thesis will re-evaluate the Chartist movement through research into day-to-day practice in four areas: sociability, material networks, gender and political subjectivity. It will demonstrate that Chartism's activism and the everyday lives of its members were indistinct. In the early years of the movement and the years preceding it, activism and political thought engaged with the quotidian to successfully build a movement that was not only relevant to but an integral part of people's everyday lives. This thesis will analyse how this interaction was not limited to Chartist activists politicising everyday grievances, but also how day-to-day practices and relationships contributed to the infrastructure, intellectual culture and political programme of the movement. This thesis will make original contributions to a number of debates. It challenges the dominant view of Chartism as first and foremost a political movement distinct from its social conditions. It will be argued that this dichotomy between the political and the social cannot be sustained, and it will be shown that activists were most successful when they drew from and were part of society. It will criticise the related trend in studies of Chartism and Radicalism to focus on political identity, meaning and forms of communication. It will argue that these topics are valuable, but need to be seen within a wider existential framework and integrated with an approach that sees cultural activity as one part of a range of activities. As such, it will illustrate the ways that cultural practices are bound with social relationships. Following this, it will make the case for practice to be looked at not just in symbolic or ritualistic terms but also in terms of day-to-day activities that were crucial for the development and maintenance of political movements. It will be argued that prosaic, mundane and day-to-day activities are integral aspects of social movements and as such are worthwhile areas of research. Finally, it will add to our understanding of Chartism by providing biographical information on Henry Vincent, an under-researched figure, and the south west and west of England, under-researched regions. This thesis is organised into two parts. The first will follow the work of activists in developing Chartism in the south west of England from the end of the Swing Riots until the Chartist Convention of 1839. Here it will be argued that Chartism relied upon a close and intensive interaction between activists and the communities they were politicising, with the result being that the movement was coloured by the politics, intellectual culture and practices of those communities. The second section will look at how the private lives and social networks of individual activists were integral to their political ideas, rhetoric and capacity to work as activists. Correspondence, documents produced by the state, the radical press and the internal records of the Chartist movement all shed light on the way everyday life and political thought and action merged.

This thesis explores the gendered dynamics of industrialisation in the late Ottoman Empire and British India. It examines the ways in which gendered notions of skill, waged work, domesticity and technology shaped employment patterns, labour processes and politics in silk factories in Bursa and cotton mills in Bombay between 1850 and 1910. The project undermines the notion that women's labour was incidental to the development of large-scale factory enterprise in Ottoman and Indian lands. I argue that the confinement of women to labour-intensive and low-paid occupations within and outside the factory brought down wages and provided flexibility to mechanised production. This flexibility was key to the survival and rapid growth of the export-oriented industries in Bursa and Bombay. The common mechanisms of women's marginalisation in the workforce included segregation, masculinisation of machinery, vertical organisation of trade unions, male-controlled recruitment processes and the household division of labour. The extent to which women influenced employment practices depended on the availability of external mediation as well as their means to subvert notions of victimhood, domesticity, honour and duty. In connecting the Ottoman and Indian paths to industrialisation from a gender perspective, the project destabilises male-centric approaches to the global history of economy, labour and technology.