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and the law-giving talent of the factory Lycurgus so arranges matters, that a violation of his laws is, if possible, more profitable to him than the keeping of them" (p. ). Had Freeman started the quote from the sentence immediately preceding this one, the connection between the management of work under slavery and in the factory would have become obvious: "The place of the slave-driver's lash is taken by the overlooker's book of penalties."  Freeman's focus on the large factories implies that industrial giantism created all major developments in labour control mechanisms and has acted as the major tour de force of capitalism since the eighteenth century. The underlying argument that the giant factories and the developments they instigated were a product of Western capitalism associated with freedom leaves the reader with an oft-repeated narrative of a more or less straightforward progress of industrial capitalism. It is sad to see that Freeman misses the valuable opportunity to show how industrial giantism rose on, got inspired by, and reproduced the various existing forms and knowledge of labour control developed outside industrial giantism. Despite these critical comments, this book deserves the attention of the scholarly community and also of the general reader with an interest in the history of capitalism. As Freeman incorporates many colourful examples and writes eloquently but without pretence, undergraduate as well as graduate students will enjoy this book, which could easily be incorporated into a variety of courses. For the scholarly community, the most compelling aspect of the book is Freeman's success in going beyond what he calls a "narrow exercise in the study of architecture, technology, or industrial relations" and writing an inspiring history of the giant factory that brings labour history closer to other disciplines, such as design and architecture, history of migration, science and technology, cultural history, urban history, state politics, and political economy. Freeman has successfully proven the potential of the factory as a fruitful unit of analysis to delve into multiple important themes; a potential that should be further explored by labour historians. For this, and other reasons, the book deserves to be widely read and discussed.

Goldstein tells the story of the Bund from the street level up. As a union organizer, he often worked with the toughest segments of the Warsaw Jewish proletariat, including slaughterhouse workers and porters. As an organizer, and as head of the Bundist party militia, he also came into contact with members of the underworld and underclass, who often overlapped with his official constituency. As Sherer notes, Goldstein does not deal with ideology or (much) with party congresses. Of course, the Bund never had the chance to institute the kind of socialist society it dreamed of. Even so, as Goldstein conveys vividly, the Bund improved the lives of its members and constituency on an everyday basis. It won occasional material improvements for the workers, and it defended all Jews against anti-Semitic attacks. It also raised its members' cultural and intellectual horizons, providing them with the tools to understand their world and their predicament. To its members the Bund provided a close comradely community, with a family feeling that had always been the Bund's hallmark. Goldstein conveys the difficult conditions of Jewish working-class life in Poland between the wars. He describes the poverty, the anti-Semitismwhich ranged from efforts to force Jewish workers out of the slaughterhouses to the institution of "ghetto benches" in the universitiesand the political repression. The Bund militia busily battled anti-Semitic hooligans and, occasionally, the police. It was also constantly at war with the communists, who for much of the period under discussion regarded the Bundists as "social fascists" in accord with Comintern policy, and once even launched an armed attack on the Medem Sanitarium. It might surprise some how often gunfire is mentioned in a memoir of interwar Jewish life. Significantly, Goldstein also frequently notes cooperation with the Polish Socialist Party, especially when it came to battling anti-Semitism. The Bund's ability to reach out to Polish comrades, even when relations between the parties were sometimes tense at the top, was one of its chief appeals during its election victories. Other Jewish parties simply did not have that connection to counterparts in the majority population. On the other hand, the Bund's relations with the Zionists were hostile, but do not seem to have erupted into violence. Zuckerman provides a fluid and, for the most part, accurate translation of the original, as well as good notes and a glossary explaining unfamiliar terms, and identifying individuals and organizations mentioned in the text. Twenty Years in the Jewish Labor Bund is published as a "Shofar Supplement in Jewish Studies", and it would make good reading for students of East European Jewish history, modern Jewish politics, or the history of socialist movements, or, indeed, for anyone else without access to the original.

Although a crucial element of imperial architecture, non-metropolitan penal colonies remain relatively understudied, compared with the richness of historical scholarship on modern prison systems in Western Europe and its offshoots. Complementing the perspective chosen in the recent International Review of Social History Special Issue 26, “Transportation, Deportation and Exile: Perspectives from the Colonies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”, the four articles in this Special Theme propose an additional angle of investigation of the role of convicts in the incorporation of new territories into colonial empires. The authors place sites of punishment, rather than flows of convicts, at the core of their reflection, and provide a close-up analysis of circulations of information and people across the borders of penal sites on various scales: local, trans-regional, and international. They problematize the notion of “border”, and consider it as a vantage point that leads to a new conceptualization of the penal colony as a system that expands in its surroundings and, in turn, assimilates external political, social, and economic stimuli. Relying on several distinct methodological approaches, the authors foreground the specificities of colonial punishment and demonstrate how punishment became part of the creation and maintenance of power inequalities between the colonies and the metropoles.

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