Manual de historia social del trabajo


Book Description

Desde siempre, la humanidad ha trabajado. El trabajo ha sido el elemento básico de la vida social. A partir de él se han organizado las comunidades y éstas se han caracterizado por su especialización. A partir de él, el género humano ha “dialogado” con la naturaleza, se ha relacionado con ella, la ha modificado y puesto a su servicio. Desde el trabajo, los hombres y las mujeres se han dado su forma, se han redefinido constantemente y se han relacionado entre sí. Con todo, la indefinición acerca de lo que significa el trabajo ha tenido como consecuencia que su estudio histórico haya abarcado aspectos muy diferentes y que se hayan utilizado visiones contrapuestas. Intentando superar las limitaciones de obras anteriores, este libro analiza la historia del trabajo, entendiendo como tal desde la historia de la técnicas y de los recursos productivos hasta la de los grupos y clases sociales protagonistas del mismo, pasando por el conocimiento de los mecanismos de integración de los nuevos procesos productivos y la historia de la legislación laboral y del papel del Estado en dicha actividad. Mikel Aizpuru Murua (1963) es profesor titular de Historia Social del Trabajo en la Escuela de Graduados Sociales de Vizcaya de la Universidad del País Vasco. Es especialista en historia del nacionalismo vasco y ha publicado obras como Eta tiro Baltzari (UEH. ,1990), “Bandos y caciques en el País Vasco durante la Restauración” (Estudios de Historia Social, núm. 54-55, 1991) Y “El clero diocesano guipuzcoano y el nacionalismo vasco: un análisis sociológico” (en J. Beramendi y R. Maiz), Los nacionalismos en la España de la II República. Siglo XXI, 1991). Antonio Rivera Blanco (1960) es profesor titular de Historia Contemporánea en la Facultad de Filología, Geografía e Historia de la Universidad del País Vasco (Vitoria). Ha publicado diversos artículos y libros relacionados con la historia del País Vasco, destacando en ellos la perspectiva social. Es autor, entre otros, de “La ciudad levítica. Continuidad y cambio en una ciudad del interior” (Vitoria. 1876-1936) (OFA, 1992) y “ Situación y comportamiento de la clase obrera en Vitoria” 1900-1915 (UPV, 1985).




Living Anarchism


Book Description

"Magnificent."—Paul Preston, author of The Spanish Holocaust Brick maker by trade, revolutionary anarchist and historian by default; this is a study of the life of José Peirats (1908–1989) and the labor union that gave him life, the CNT. It is the biography of an individual but also of a collective agent—the working class Peirats was born into—and the affective ties of kinship, friendship, and community that cemented into a movement, the most powerful of its type in the world. Chris Ealham is the author of Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-revolution in Barcelona, 1898–1937.







Slavery and Historical Capitalism during the Nineteenth Century


Book Description

This book examines the historiography of nineteenth century slavery from the perspective of the “second slavery.” The concept of the second slavery emphasizes the relationship between local histories and world-economic transformations. It breaks with conventional narratives of slavery by emphasizing the expansion of reconfigured slaveries in extensive new zones of commodity production in Brazil, Cuba and the US South as part of world-economic processes of decolonization, industrialization, urbanization, and the creation of mass markets. Thus, slavery was not a moribund institution. Capitalist modernity, liberal ideology, and anti-slavery from above or from below, faced a vigorous foe that operated within the very economic, political, and cultural premises of the changing 19th century world. This perspective offers an original approach to the history of slavery. It has opened up vigorous debates over slavery and anti-slavery, Atlantic history and capitalism. An international group of scholars critically engage older traditions of scholarship on Atlantic history, the economic history of slavery, and the history of slavery in Cuba, Brazil, and the United States from the perspective of the second slavery. Each chapter reinterprets its subject matter in a way that opens out to dialogue between national historiographies and to a reformulation of Atlantic and world-economic history. This collection of essays contributes to the development of a more productive conceptual framework for the reconstruction and reinterpretation of the historical relation of slavery and world capitalism during the nineteenth century.




Monographic Series


Book Description




American Sugar Kingdom


Book Description

Engaging conventional arguments that the persistence of plantations is the cause of economic underdevelopment in the Caribbean, this book focuses on the discontinuities in the development of plantation economies in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic in the early twentieth century. Cesar Ayala analyzes and compares the explosive growth of sugar production in the three nations following the War of 1898--when the U.S. acquired Cuba and Puerto Rico--to show how closely the development of the Spanish Caribbean's modern economic and social class systems is linked to the history of the U.S. sugar industry during its greatest period of expansion and consolidation. Ayala examines patterns of investment and principal groups of investors, interactions between U.S. capitalists and native planters, contrasts between new and old regions of sugar monoculture, the historical formation of the working class on sugar plantations, and patterns of labor migration. In contrast to most studies of the Spanish Caribbean, which focus on only one country, his account places the history of U.S. colonialism in the region, and the history of plantation agriculture across the region, in comparative perspective.




Library of Congress Catalogs


Book Description




"Lazy, Improvident People"


Book Description

Since the early modern era, historians and observers of Spain, both within the country and beyond it, have identified a peculiarly Spanish disdain for work, especially manual labor, and have seen it as a primary explanation for that nation's alleged failure to develop like the rest of Europe. In "Lazy, Improvident People," the historian Ruth MacKay examines the origins of this deeply ingrained historical prejudice and cultural stereotype. MacKay finds these origins in the ilustrados, the Enlightenment intellectuals and reformers who rose to prominence in the late eighteenth century. To advance their own, patriotic project of rationalization and progress, they disparaged what had gone before. Relying in part on late medieval and early modern political treatises about "vile and mechanical" labor, they claimed that previous generations of Spaniards had been indolent and backward. Through a close reading of the archival record, MacKay shows that such treatises and dramatic literature in no way reflected the actual lives of early modern artisans, who were neither particularly slothful nor untalented. On the contrary, they behaved as citizens, and their work was seen as dignified and essential to the common good. MacKay contends that the ilustrados' profound misreading of their own past created a propagandistic myth that has been internalized by subsequent intellectuals. MacKay's is thus a book about the notion of Spanish exceptionalism, the ways in which this notion developed, and the burden and skewed vision it has imposed on Spaniards and outsiders. "Lazy, Improvident People" will fascinate not only historians of early modern and modern Spain but all readers who are concerned with the process by which historical narratives are formed, reproduced, and given authority.







Personalist Anthropology: A philosophical guide to life


Book Description

Philosophical personalism has generated a very powerful field of study in the twentieth and twenty first centuries but has not produced a systematic exposition. This book fills this big gap by offering for the first time a full systematic personalistic vision of the human person. This ambitious volume offers a pedagogical and integrated exposition of philosophical personalism, answering vital questions about human identity and existence in a way that the reader (or student) can achieve an integrated view of the person. The book points to the real life of each person so that, by partially unraveling the mystery of the personal being, it becomes a philosophical guide for life. For these reasons, the book can be used both for academic purposes, as a manual of philosophy of man or for personal enlightenment. Divided in five parts, the first part of the book works as an introduction, offering an overview of the human person and of the notion of person. The second part describes the internal structure of the human being addressing topics as corporeity as a personal fact; sensibility and the senses; affectivity; intelligence; freedom understood as choice and self-determination and, finally, the personal self. The third part analyses the person in action and some special types of action such as work and language. The fourth part deals with interpersonal relationships beginning with I-You relationship (friendship, love) and following with the family and the social structure. Finally, part five deals with the so-called ultimate questions, that is, those that decide the final meaning of each person’s life, namely, time, death, immortality, and religion.