Historians of the Second International have researched extensively the differences among and within member parties in terms of tactics, ideology, and national circumstances. This article illustrates the practice of socialist internationalism by examining how Austrian Victor Adler and Belgian Emile Vandervelde were able to mediate those differences through carefully crafted congress resolutions on three of the most important issues – ministerialism, socialist revisionism, and international conflicts – at the 1900 Paris, 1904 Amsterdam, and 1907 Stuttgart international socialist congresses. Both leaders played vital and complementary roles – the Adler-Vandervelde dynamic – elevating their effectiveness in forging socialist unity primarily between French and German socialism.

The article investigates the formation of an industrial workforce in Săvinești, a major center of Romania’s socialist chemical industry. Based on archival sources and oral history interviews, it examines how proletarianization was not fully realized but instead developed as a deliberately maintained dual condition. Industrial employment was combined with long-term commuting, ties to subsistence agriculture, and uneven access to urban housing. Such arrangements reflected the socialist state’s efforts to expand production while managing limited infrastructure and demographic realities. By situating this case within wider debates on proletarianization under socialism, the study offers a more grounded account of class formation in Eastern Europe.

To understand the early modern Caribbean, we must understand the societies that inhabited it. The parameters through which historians approach these societies have changed drastically in the last decade. While recent interventions have proven useful for framing our attitude to how populations in the Caribbean formed, they are less effective when applied to societies whose longevity was uncertain that, in some cases, fractured or collapsed. It is in this context that some historians have identified what they term “sinew populations”: communities whose “off-grid” nature necessitates different ways of thinking about how they functioned. Recent works have discussed how sinew populations ensured the long-term viability of their communities, but this approach also requires attention to the factors that could render a sinew population’s existence unviable.

This article uses an eighteenth-century Caribbean population of pirates as a case study to illustrate the issue of viability within sinew populations. In particular, the article emphasizes the weak social foundations on which this sinew population was built and the lack of interest among the pirates themselves, after 1718, in maintaining a large pirate population. In thinking about how pirates related to one another and what this meant for the long-term survival of the pirate sinew population, this article demonstrates the importance of social maintenance for understanding how Caribbean societies operated.

In July 1915 and October 1916, workers at the Bayonne, New Jersey, Standard Oil refinery went on strike, demanding better treatment and higher wages. In both cases, the workers were defeated by violence and repression. This article tells the largely forgotten story of the Bayonne strikes in the context of Progressive Era industrial relations in the United States that contributed to a specific United States version of welfare capitalism. The strikes emphasized the growth of unskilled mass production workers and highlighted the weakness of the existing labor movement, including its most radical expressions, in providing leadership to these workers. Capitalizing on this failure, Rockefeller and Standard Oil deflected the Bayonne workers’ anger into company unionism and welfare capitalism, which channeled the Progressive emphasis on “industrial democracy” to strengthen capitalism and prevent worker militancy and union organization for decades. The article examines how the Rockefellers’ vision of welfare capitalism differed from contemporary European counterparts, particularly to prevent social conflict by avoiding unions instead of collaborating with the union leadership.