Trousson, Raymond / Vercruysse, Jeroom (dir.), Dictionnaire general de Voltaire. (Champion classiques, references et dictionnaires 18) 1272 p. 2020:10 (Champion, FR) <670-9>
ISBN 978-2-38096-016-7 paper ¥7,064.- (税込) EUR 38.00

Bensimon, Fabrice, Artisans Abroad: British Migrant Workers in Industrialising Europe, 1815-1870. 288 pp. 2023:2 (Oxford U. Pr., UK) <686-408>
ISBN 978-0-19-883584-4 hard ¥23,920.- (税込) GB￡ 83.00 *

Between 1815 and 1870, when European industrialisation was in its infancy and Britain enjoyed a technological lead, thousands of British workers emigrated to the continent. They played a key role in several sectors, like textiles, iron, mechanics, and the railways. These men and women thereby contributed significantly to the industrial take-off in continental Europe. Artisans Abroad examines the lives and trajectories of these workers who emigrated from manufacturing centres in Britain to France, Belgium, Germany, and other countries, considering their mobilities, their culture, their politics, and their relations with the local populations. Fabrice Bensimon reminds us that the British economy was not just oriented towards the Empire and the USA, but also towards the continent, long before the European Union and Brexit, and shows the critical role played by migrant workers in the Industrial Revolution. Artisans Abroad is the first social and cultural history of this forgotten migration.

Sachs, Miranda, An Age to Work: Working-Class Childhood in Third Republic Paris. 208 pp. 2022:12 (Oxford U. Pr., US) <686-1436>
ISBN 978-0-19-763845-3 hard ¥18,625.- (税込) US$ 83.00 *

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the French Third Republic attempted to carve out childhood as a distinct legal and social category. Previously, working-class girls and boys had labored and trained alongside adults. Concerned about future citizens, lawmakers expanded access to education, regulated child labor, and developed child welfare programs. They directed working-class youths to age-segregated spaces, such as vocational schools or juvenile prisons. With these policies, they distinguished the youthful worker from the adult worker and the juvenile delinquent from the adult criminal. Through their emphasis on age, these policies defined childhood as a universal stage of life. And yet, they also reproduced inequalities in the experience of childhood. In An Age to Work, Miranda Sachs considers the role of the welfare state in reinforcing class and gender-based divisions within childhood. She argues that agents of the welfare state, such as child labor inspectors and social workers, played a crucial role in standardizing the path from childhood to the workforce. By enforcing age-based rules, such as child labor laws, they attempted to protect working class children. But they also policed these chidren's productivity and enforced gender-specific labor practices. An Age to Work also enters the streets and apartments of working-class Paris to examine how the laboring classes envisioned and experienced childhood. Although working-class parents continued to see childhood as a more fluid category, they agreed with state actors that their offspring should grow up to be productive. They too mobilized the welfare state to ensure this outcome. By interrogating these diverse perspectives, An Age to Work reveals that the same sort of welfare system that created social hierarchies in France's colonies reinforced the class system at home.

Studer, Brigitte, Travellers of the World Revolution: A Global History of the Communist International. Tr. by D. R. Roberts. 640 pp. 2023:6 (Verso, UK) <686-1437>
ISBN 978-1-83976-801-9 hard ¥8,646.- (税込) GB￡ 30.00 *

The Communist International was the first organised attempt to bring about worldwide revolution and left a lasting mark on 20th-century history. The book offers a new and fascinating account of this transnational organisation founded in 1919 by Lenin and Trotsky and dissolved by Stalin in 1943, telling the story through the eyes of the activists who became its "professional revolutionaries". Studer follows such figures as Willi Muenzenberg, Mikhail Borodin, M.N. Roy and Evelyn Trent, Tina Modotti, Agnes Smedley and many others less well-known as they are despatched to the successive political hotspots of the 1920s and '30s, from revolutionary Berlin to Baku, from Shanghai to Spain, from Nazi Germany to Stalin's Moscow. It traces their journeys from revolutionary hope to accommodation, defeat or death, looking at questions of motivation and commitment, agency and negotiation, of life and love, conflict and frustration. In doing so, it reveals a forgotten Comintern, the expression of a multi-dimensional revolutionary moment, which attracted not only working-class but feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist activists, highlighting the role of women in the Comintern and the centrality of anti-colonialism to the Communist project. The book concludes with a reflection on the ultimate demise of a historically unique undertaking.

世界中の女性共産主義運動家ハンドブック
de Haan, Francisca (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Communist Women Activists Around the World. 804 pp. 2022:11 (Palgrave Macmillan, UK) <686-1262>
ISBN 978-3-031-13126-4 hard ¥48,616.- (税込) EUR 199.99 *

This Handbook addresses the role of women in communism as a global, social and political movement for the first time, exploring their lives, forms of activism, political strategies and transnational networks. Comprising twenty-five chapters, based on new and primary research, the book presents the lives of self-identified communist women from a truly international perspective and outlines their struggles against fascism and colonialism, and for women's emancipation and national liberation. By using the lens of transnational political biography, the chapters capture the broader picture of these women's lives, unpacking the links between the so-called public and private, the power structures and inequalities of their societies, the formal networks and politics in which they were involved, and the informal connections and friendships that supported their activism both at the national and international level. Challenging androcentric and Eurocentric narratives about communism, this Handbook reveals the active and significant roles of women in nineteenth- and twentieth-century communist movements and regimes, and highlights the importance of communist women in shaping the agenda for women's rights worldwide.