The conference is open to multi-disciplinary approaches and to both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. In particular, it will explore the complex relationships between private agencies, semi-public groups, and local and national police authorities. One particular focus will be the development of organizational forms of strike-breaking, notably through the emergence of self- defence groups and community police patrols during or in anticipation of strikes. The conference will also explore the role of ideologies and emotions in the generation of violence, whereby groups felt legitimized in their decisions to defend social order, state authority and economic freedom. Such actions were often simultaneously local as well as national, and national as well as international.

Argument

The conference is open to multi-disciplinary approaches and to both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. In particular, it will explore the complex relationships between private agencies, semi-public groups, and local and national police authorities. One particular focus will be the development of organizational forms of strike-breaking, notably through the emergence of self- defence groups and community police patrols during or in anticipation of strikes. The conference will also explore the role of ideologies and emotions in the generation of violence, whereby groups felt legitimized in their decisions to defend social order, state authority and economic freedom. Such actions were often simultaneously local as well as national, and national as well as international.

Programme

23 October 2018

• 17.30 – 18.00 - Opening Remarks Matteo Millan (ERC-PREWArAs Principal Investigator, University of Padova)
• 18.00 – 19.30 - Keynote Address Geoff Eley (University of Michigan), Normalizing and fracturing civility, 1860-1930: What were the tracks and boundaries of violence?

Reception/Dinner

24 October 2018

9.00 – 11.00 - First Panel

Panel Chair: Tom Buchanan (Oxford)

• George Gilbert (Southampton), Strike breaking in the late Russian Empire: reaction and revolution.
• Volodymyr Kulikov (CEU Budapest), Repression of Labor Movement in the Company Towns of Russia.
• Claire Morelon (Padova), For the protection of willing workers": Violence and Strikebreaking in Late Habsburg Austria.
• Amerigo Caruso (Padova), Anti-labor violence and the rise of strikebreakers’ gangs in late Imperial Germany, 1905-1914.

11.00 - 11.30 - Coffee Break

11.30 - 13.30 - Second Panel

Panel Chair: Patricia Clavin (Oxford)

• Alessandro Saluppo (Padova), Strikebreaking and Maritime Labor in Britain, 1890-1914.
• Erik Bengtsson (Lund), Sweden: the labour market regime without repression? An overview with a specific look at the 1899 anti-strike Åkarp Law.
• Charles Fawell (Chicago), Labour in the In-Between Spaces of Empires: Militancy and Repression Along the Maritime Highways of the French Empire, c. 1880-1930.
• Romain Bonnet (Padova), The Making of a Counter-Internationalism? Strikebreaking, political violence and the Fédération Nationale des Jaunes de France in Europe Belle Époque.

13.30 – 14.30 - Lunch

14.30 - 16.00 - Third Panel

Panel Chair: Giulia Albanese (Padova)

• Bruno Settis (SNS Pisa, CHSP), Security and surveillance services in mass production industries: the case of Fiat.
• Thanasis Betas (Thessaly), Cairo, Athens, Salonica. Strikebreaking and anti-labour employers’ and state’s practices in the cigarette industry in the earlier twentieth century
• Arturo Zoffmann Rodriguez (EUI), An honest worker against the red tyrants’: the dirty war between libres and cenetistas in Spain, 1919-23

16.00 – 17.30 - Fourth Panel

Panel Chair: Marc Mulholland (Oxford)

• Vilja Hulden & Chad Pearson (UCB & Collin College), The Wild West of Employer Anti-Unionism: Individualism, Vigilantism, and the Glorification of Organized Anti-Union Leagues in the Early-Twentieth Century United States.
• Prerna Agarwal (LSE), Countermanding the Red-Flag in the Name of Allah and ‘Constitutionalism’: the Murky World of Labour Politics in Calcutta Docks, 1930s. Pierre Eichenberger (Zurich), ‘Employers of the world, unite!’ The International Organization of Industrial Employers, 1900-1939.

17.30 - 17.45 - Coffee Break

• 17.45 - 18.30 - Final Remarks and discussion Martin Conway (University of Oxford)

20.00 - Reception/Dinner