In the Ottoman cities of what was later to become the state of Syria, premodern guilds survived well into the 1920s. By that time, too, the infant trade union movement was beginning to take shape. Three laws shaped the transition from craft guilds to trade unions as the dominant institutions for organizing labourers in Syria. The first was the law on craft associations of 1912, issued after a group of modernist Ottoman army officers, called the Young Turks, had toppled Sultan Abdülhamid II in a revolution in 1908; the second law, on professional associations, was issued in 1935 during the French Mandate over Syria; and the third was the Labour Code, one of the very first laws issued after Syria gained independence from France in 1946. Three states—three laws. While my PhD project focuses on this period of change and the relationship between these two very different forms of organization, guilds and trade unions, the aim of my visit to the National Archives in London was to find out more about the period just before that—about the late nineteenth century and the profound changes the Ottoman guilds underwent in the wake of the capitalist penetration of the regional economy.
Continue reading The End of the Guilds in SyriaTag: labour history
Socialism and Slavery within the British and German Socialist Labour Movements, 1830–1890
I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the workingmen at Manchester and in all Europe are called to endure in this crisis. It has been often and studiously represented that the attempt to overthrow this government, which was built upon the foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis of human slavery, was likely to obtain the favor of Europe. Through the actions of our disloyal citizens the workingmen of Europe have been subjected to a severe trial, for the purpose of forcing their sanction to that attempt.1
With these words, among others, the American President Lincoln addressed a famous letter to the workers of Manchester in January 1863. What had happened? Manchester and Lancashire suffered from the Cotton Famine from 1862 onwards, which made many workers unemployed and drove them into poverty. Supporting the Confederate States in the American Civil War, as many merchants and members of the upper classes did, could therefore have been an obvious way for the workers to get back to work and earn a crust. Yet under difficult conditions, workers continued to support the northern states and the struggle to end slavery. In Manchester city centre today, a large statue commemorates this contact between sections of the British working class and the American president.
Continue reading Socialism and Slavery within the British and German Socialist Labour Movements, 1830–1890- Abraham Lincoln, ‘To the Workingmen of Manchester, England’, Jan. 19, 1863, in Roy P. Basler, (ed.), The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols. (New Brunswick, 1953), vi, 63–5, at 64. [↩]