Preliminary Programme

From the end of the 19th century European shipping companies employed an increasing number of chinese seamen from the southern province of Guangdong especially as stokers on steam ships. Beeing sojourners in western european sea ports for that reason some of these chinese men became residents in cities like Liverpool, Rotterdam, and Hamburg. In the 1920ies small chinese quarters emerged next to the waterfront, which were perceived as an exotic world, an enclave of the Far East inside Western Europe.
Refering to cultural and ‘racial’ clichés about the chinese the local authorities accused them of illegal immigration and organized trade of opium. Rumours about opium dens in the cities and some inquiries by the police seemed to show the cultural and racial difference of the Chinese. In Hamburg, Germany, the base of my research, the chinese concentrated in the St. Pauli district, where people told stories about a chinese underworld and labyrinths and secret tunnels.
Despite the fact that no Europeans frequented the very few existing opium dens, chinese men were perceived as a serious danger to the society and especially european women. The discoursive connection of chinese and opium reinforced the official refusal of chinese migration in europe. My paper discusses the racialization of a small ethnic group and, in the same time, a chapter of the globalization of migration in Europe. (Show less)

This paper investigates the issue of the social position and political role played by Social Democrats of Slovak and Czech ethnic origin in Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg Empire until 1918 and a multinational metropolis even after the Empire´s dissolution. The Czechs were the most numerous non-German national group in Vienna by 1900, while the Slovaks who were generally more oriented towards the Hungarian capital Budapest, had a smaller but not insignificant presence as well. Within the multinational Social Democratic movement of Vienna the Czechs were an important element which coexisted with the dominant Austro-Germans in an ambivalent way. Czech migrants from Bohemia and Moravia were loyal Social Democrats who took their place within the common movement, but they also founded their own ethnic worker societies, cultural associations and even Czech-language schools. Moreover, after 1899 the Czechs formed their own autonomous ´Czechoslav´ Social Democratic party organization and trade unions, which enhanced the ambivalent character of the German-Czech relationship within the common all-Austrian party. The Czech Social Democrats, who also had their own party organization for the province Lower Austria, participated in the overall national-emancipatory movement of the Czech people and to some extent co-operated with the Czech bourgeois parties in furthering common national goals. Meanwhile, the Slovaks in Vienna increasingly participated in the Czechoslav Social Democratic party organizations as well. In fact, the Social Democratic movement was an important school of Czecho-Slovak solidarity and ever closer co-operation. The Czechoslav party also actively supported the Slovak Social Democrats of Pressburg(Bratislava), which became the main center of Slovak Social Democracy in pre-1918 Hungary. The proximity of Vienna and Pressburg thus led to a strengthening of Czecho-Slovak unity in each of the two cities as well as the creation of a broader political basis preparing a common Czecho-Slovak Social Democratic party after 1918. However, the absorption of the Slovak Social Democrats by the Czech party in 1918-and arguably in Vienna already before 1914- meant that the perspective of Slovak autonomy within Czecho-Slovakia never got a serious chance of expressing itself within the party. The Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party, indeed, was one of the most centralist and "Czechoslovakist" political parties in the new Republic and this led to a marginalisation of the Slovaks within the party, especially when after 1918 a new generation of young pro-centralist Slovak Social Democrats took over the leadership of the party in Slovakia. After 1918 there continued to exist a substantial Czech and Slovak population in Vienna, and one of the questions that should be further investigated is how political developments within Czechoslovakia and the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party were reflected within this community. (Show less)

Cooperation, based on common values or ideals, between a financing organization and a group of pioneers, represents an interesting social experiment. But in fact such experiments usually turn sour through time, due to variety of causes, such as unpredictable economic costs or harsh living conditions.
By investigating a specific case, concerning the relationship between Hebrew farmers in pre-state Israel and the JCA society, we shall examine those disturbances: their appearance, the characteristics they bear and how the social processes they set in motion reinforce social inequality.
Early Hebrew immigrants to Palestine considered agriculture both as a national value and as a means for personal progress. The JCA, a philanthropic Jewish society, created in 1901 four villages in Lower Galilee, expecting to bring their farmers to economical independence within several years. The plan failed, and the JCA had to support the farmers till 1941, when it has sold them the properties at a loss.
We shall examine the fascinating social relationship which developed between those two entities. Each side acted according to its own social code, and felt entrapped with the other against its will. This mutual dependence created tensions. The JCA felt it was continuously blackmailed by parasites, while the farmers believed they were subjugated to a non sensitive master. (Show less)

The distinction between mobility and sedentariness plays a crucial role in discussions on trade in the 1920s and 1930s. Local cooperatives – together with public administration - fought extensively against mobile trades. Their arguments redundantly associated mobility with complaints about low-quality goods, dubious hygiene and dishonest methods of sale. According to the discursive context, the alien nature of mobile traders was pointed out more or less explicitly. In actual fact, we find a large variety of attempts to seek livelihood through mobility during the period. These attempts constitute a broad spectrum of quite different practices, a spectrum ranging from travelling salesmen, to peddlers, peripatetic merchants, street traders, migratory labour, seasonal workers, itinerant journeymen and ambulatory traders. We find more or less improvised roles (like war widows selling wild flowers) or some whose occupation can’t successfully be claimed as work (like the tramping of beggars and vagabonds). Finally we find numerous established trade practices which involve some degree of mobility. All of these together manifest respectability, sedentariness, homelessness and mobility to varying extents.

Small trade serves to demonstrate how certain distinctions are imposed and established in the period, for example, those between legitimate and illegitimate markets and trade locations, and between the circulation of goods and human labour. Professions are increasingly differentiated and normalized. For instance, salesmen’s work is further established and specified in law as well as better organized in practice. Their representations and attempts to devise a specific professional training (a ‘science’ of sale) contribute to the profession’s increasingly modern image at the time. There are, however, numerous complaints that this image is in fact endangered by the uncontrolled influx of unsuitable unemployed people. At the same time peddling is viewed as a traditional, economically obsolete, and even parasitic occupation. It is defined as a question of neediness and inability to practice other professions more than as a profession in its own right. It is bound by the necessity of proving a certain required age (over 30 years), a (not too severe) physical handicap, one’s pronounced state of poverty, as well as a good reputation and political trustworthiness. All of this had to be proven once a year, in a procedure involving five or more different authorities. Simultaneously the geographic areas where peddling was allowed became more and more restricted. Despite these attempts at normalization, there was still a huge transitional sphere between these professions and between sedentary craft and mobile trades. We find homeless, tramping salesmen, salesmen accused of illegal peddling or peddlers working as salesmen, using carts for transport etc. There are records which imply a wide range of completely unauthorised trade of many kinds.
The reconstruction of individual cases allows us to show the variety of these occupations. The hints provided by the records enable us to glean enough information to put together a picture of their migratory practices. In contrast to other professions – such as journeymen who could still refer back to their ‘wandering years’ tradition - these traders tended to neglect their travels in their self-representations.
The paper will outline this process of normalization and professionalization within the context of far-reaching transformations of the ‘space of possibilities’ (Bourdieu) of mobility and sedentariness in the period. (Show less)