ABSTRACT
In this chapter I focus on the strikes that broke out at the beginning of the twentieth century in cigarette-making factories in three different urban and industrial environments in the South-East Mediterranean – Cairo, Athens and Salonica – which are located at the periphery of capitalist growth. By utilizing a comparative approach, drawing on newspapers and archival records, the chapter highlights the policies and strategies of the state and employers vis-à-vis the strikes that broke out in the cigarette-making industry in the early twentieth century. The central question is how and for which reasons were the anti-labour ideologies, discourses and practices of employers and the state shaped. I argue that the mechanisms adopted to control the labour protests were not monolithic or inflexible and one-dimensional. Instead they covered a wide range of possibilities, from violent suppression, to the adoption of consensual methods and paternalistic mechanisms which aimed to manipulate labour protests and weaken trade unionism.
