Corporate policing, yellow unionism, and strikebreaking, 1890-1930 : in defence of freedom / edited by Matteo Millan and Alessandro Saluppo.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Foreword: Coercion at work, violence in politics: what changed between 1890 and 1930? -- 1 Introduction: strikebreaking and industrial vigilantism as a historical problem -- Part 1 Institutional responses -- 2 Policies and practices against labour movement in the late Russian Empire -- 3 Violence against strikers in the rural peripheries of the Iberian Peninsula, 1890–1915 -- 4 The Swedish labour market c. 1870–1914: a labour market regime without repression? -- 5 State authorities, municipal forces and military intervention in the policing of strikes in Austria-Hungary, 1890–1914 -- 6 Employers of the world, unite!: the transnational mobilisation of industrialists around World War I -- Part 2 Strikebreaking tactics and practices -- 7 Anti-labour repression in the in-between spaces of empire: the Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes and the steamship workers of the “China Line” (1900–20) -- 8 In the name of constitutionalism and Islam: the murky world of labour politics in Calcutta’s docklands -- 9 Cairo, Athens, Salonica: strikebreaking and the anti-labour practices of employers and the state in the early twentieth-century cigarette industry -- 10 In reaction to revolution: anti-strike mentalities and practices in the Russian radical right, 1905–14 -- 11 “We can kill striking workers without being prosecuted”: armed bands of strikebreakers in late Imperial Germany -- Part 3 Civic and industrial vigilantism -- 12 The wild west of employer anti-unionism: the glorification of vigilantism and individualism in the early twentieth-century United States -- 13 Vigilant citizens: the case of the Volunteer Police Force, 1911–14 -- 14 From “state protection” to “private defence”: strikebreaking, civilian armed mobilisation and the rise of Italian fascism -- 15 Conclusion: strikebreaking and the fault lines of mass society, 1880–1930.

"This book provides a comparative and transnational examination of the complex and multifaceted experiences of anti-labour mobilization from the bitter social conflicts of the pre-war period through the epochal tremors of war and revolution, and the violent spasms of the 1920s and 1930s. It retraces the formation of a market for corporate policing, privately contracted security and yellow unionism, as well as processes of professionalization in strikebreaking activities, labour espionage and surveillance. Offering way of examining the violent transition to mass politics in industrial societies, it is of great interest to scholars of policing, unionism and striking in the modern era"-- Provided by publisher.