Search

The Nanking regime was born of factional strife and bloodshed. In the early morning of 12 April 1927, gangs of thugs belonging to the Mafia-like Green Gang plunged through the streets of Shanghai, seized Communists and suspected Communists, and executed them on the spot with pistols or broadswords. Several thousand were massacred then and during the ensuing month. Chiang Kai-shek had split with the Communists; the first united front was ended. Six days later, on 18 April, the Nationalist government was inaugurated at Nanking. The challenge confronting the new government was awesome – nothing less than to turn back the tide of national disintegration that, for a century and more, had been washing over the Chinese nation. A central, national government had virtually ceased to exist. Political power had devolved into the hands of regional militarists, ‘warlords’, who too often were unconcerned for the popular welfare and sought only to enhance their wealth and power by reliance on military force. The sense of moral community – the broad and pervasive consensus regarding the values and proper relationships of cultural and social life, which had so richly contributed to the stability of traditional China – had disintegrated, and in its place were confusion and contention. Even the economic foundations of the traditional political system had eroded. THE INITIAL CONSOLIDATION OF POWER Because the Chinese were profoundly sensitive to the abject condition of their nation, to the ravages of warlord struggles, and to the humiliations of imperialist aggression, the Nationalist revolutionary armies had been greeted exultantly as their Northern Expedition moved from Canton in the south (beginning in July 1926) to Peking in the north (occupied in June 1928) (see volume 12). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our final task is to examine the impact of factory legislation on the evolution of child labour practices during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. With the 1874 law at last providing for a reasonably effective inspection service, the stage was set for a serious confrontation between the State and employers who resisted or ignored the reform movement. A number of important questions arise for the historian: How did the laws making primary education free and compulsory affect child labour? Which sections of the 1874 law provoked the most hostility? Were large-scale enterprises more amenable to pressure from Factory Inspectors than small ones? And what was the overall position when the 1874 law was superseded by new factory legislation in 1892? Fortunately, the documentation available to help provide some answers is abundant. All of the quarterly and annual reports drawn up by the Divisional Inspectors for the Minister of Commerce have survived in the national archives. Although unlikely to provide a full account of events, being vulnerable to the widespread fraud committed in the workshops, this source does leave us with a mass of detail on the implementation of the law. It can be complemented by the findings of various Enquiries into the condition of the proletariat during the 1870s and 1880s, and by the occasional working-class autobiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The difficult birth of the 1841 law gave a hint of the obstacles to come during the period of enforcement. The crusading fervour of the reformers had exposed the complacent attitude to child labour of Ministers in the Government, and the opposition to State intervention of many industrialists. The passage of the law did at the outset provoke a flurry of activity within the administration. A body of Inspectors was created, and a campaign of enforcement launched at both the national and the municipal levels. Nonetheless, the early experience of social legislation was fraught with difficulties, against which successive régimes made little headway. The period of illusions and disappointments, 1841–3 In August of 1841 the Minister of Commerce requested Prefects to draw up lists of firms covered by the 1841 law, and others to which it might usefully be extended. The Prefects in turn consulted the Mayor of each commune, and examples of their replies survive in all of the major manufacturing areas. The Minister then set about organizing a system of inspection. He chose to ignore the considerable pressure for salaried Inspectors, on the lines of those established in Britain by the 1833 law. Instead he opted for voluntary, unpaid Commissions of Inspection, recruited mostly from the notables of industry, commerce and the liberal professions. The twelve members of the Commission covering the arrondissement of Colmar, for example, included three manufacturers, three doctors, two lawyers, a landowner, a former merchant and a retired army officer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The allegation that industrial development was undermining the physical condition of the population was worrying enough for notables during the mid-nineteenth century, not least because it implied a threat to the military strength of the country. The possibility that there was also a moral and intellectual decline under way was if anything more disturbing. In their minds, moral corruption and the politics of their opponents were inextricably linked. The great fear was that a deterioration in the general education of the classes populaires would prepare the ground for some kind of social and political revolution. Time and again reformers of various political hues argued that industrial society was prising away working-class children from established institutions, such as the family, the Church, the school and the apprenticeship system, only to thrust them into the unsavoury atmosphere of the factory and the slum. Deprived of ‘wise counsels’, the gamins of the city were exposed to all manner of debauchery and political extremism – or so the argument ran. Sorting out fact from fantasy in all this is not easy. Accusations of declining moral standards amongst the young are far from specific to the 1830s and 1840s. Nonetheless, it is possible to discern a number of changes, if not an overall decline, affecting the various strands of the popular education in the towns during the early nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of whether the plight of child workers improved or deteriorated with industrial development was hotly disputed in the nineteenth century. The general drift of opinion has always been that their work became more onerous, with the long, gruelling hours of the early textile mills firmly implanted in the popular view of the Industrial Revolution. The oft-quoted passage from Villermé, describing conditions in the cotton and woollen industries of Alsace during the 1830s, has set the tone for much subsequent discussion: They remain on their feet for sixteen or seventeen hours a day, at least thirteen in an enclosed space, without changing either their place or their position. This is no longer work, or a task, it is torture; and it is imposed on children of six to eight, badly fed, badly clothed, and obliged to cover, at five in the morning, the long distance which separates them from the workshops, and which finally exhausts them in the evening when they return home. Although no enemy of the factory system in general, Villermé concluded that excessive working hours were one of its major drawbacks, which could only be changed by administrative decree or by law. The industrialists, for their part, took a more optimistic view. Without necessarily denying that life for the proletariat in the towns was becoming increasingly miserable, they argued from the 1830s onwards that the extension of the factories was the most likely source of benefits for employer and employee alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural France in the nineteenth century was first and foremost a mosaic of regions. The landscape provided an immediate image of diversity: mountains and forests looked down on lush valleys and plains; pays de vignoble stood out from surrounding arable and grass lands; maritime France differed from continental France. Most importantly of all, the great open-field systems characteristic of the north and east could be distinguished from the enclosed bocages of the west and the irregular ‘square’ fields more common in the south. Adolphe Blanqui, writing during the 1850s, depicted such contrasts between neighbouring pays in terms of oases in the desert: ‘Thus, the Limagne of the Auvergne shines like a diamond at the foot of the wilderness of Cantal; the Vaucluse plain at the entry to the terres brûlantes of Provence; the Médoc at the threshold of the Landes; the Touraine close by the Sologne; the gardens of Annonay at the exit from the gorges of Forez.’ These physical differences were matched by an equally wide variety of social structures. In much of northern France, on the vast open fields of the Ile-de-France, Picardy, the Beauce and parts of Normandy, the concentration of farms meant that a few wealthy tenant farmers and laboureurs held sway over a vast army of dependent agricultural labourers. Elsewhere, in the Mediterranean coastal district, the south-west, the Massif, Brittany and Flanders, society was nearer the Jacobin ideal of a ‘republic of peasants’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]