Although non-monetary benefits remain an important component of most workers’ wages in today's industrial economies, development economists and economic historians tend to view such payments as a remnant of older, obsolete labour regimes. But when in-kind wages are assumed to be exploitative, an outcome of market inefficiencies, or simply the result of limited supply of coinage, their actual economic

In the past twenty years or so, the Nordic countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland) have seen a “renewal” in labour history. Thanks to exchanges outside the Nordic sphere and the “global turn” in labour history, new questions have been raised and topics addressed. Increased attention has been paid to the variations of labour and labour relations (including coerced labour), to working

This article examines the business strategies employed by early twentieth-century Bombay mill owners in work organization and wage differentiation. The traditionally highly segmented and fluctuating domestic textile markets in India were further complicated by colonial free trade policies, making them highly competitive. This prompted Bombay mills to adopt various strategies, including maintaining

This comment on Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory discusses how the book offers four interrelated theoretical contributions to the study of labour in the digital economy – redefining the factory, specifying digital Taylorism, materializing its infrastructure, and mapping class relations – through four sites of investigation. The piece discusses the implications of the resulting multiplication

Power at Work: A Global Perspective on Control and Resistance. Edited by Marcel van der Linden and Nicole Mayer-Ahuja. Work in Global and Historical Perspective, volume 16. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023, xi, 342 pp.

Narratives about indigenous labour in the pearl fisheries of the Caribbean, widely disseminated across the Atlantic world since the sixteenth century by Castilian chroniclers, have significantly shaped historiography. These accounts have reinforced a singular narrative about labour within pearl fisheries that overlooks this work's spatial and temporal changes in sea depths. This article examines and

The cry of “Get married women out of the factories!” echoed across the Spanish industrial landscape at the turn of the twentieth century, driven by two intertwined factors. From a societal perspective, women's place was at home, not in factories. On an economic note, concerns arose over women's lower wages displacing men from jobs. This research delves into a case study of a workers’ claim aimed against

In 1975, the National Coal Board (NCB) produced a short film, “People Will Always Need Coal”, to encourage recruitment into mining. It was extraordinarily attention-grabbing, presenting miners as cosmopolitan playboys. It defined the industry in hyper-masculine terms, encouraging would-be recruits to “be a miner”. This article uses the film as a starting point for a discussion of the complex interactions

Rapid technological development means that the ground on which recent academic studies and public debates about the future of work organisation are based is shifting too rapidly for predictions to be credible. Organisational studies scholars have provided a counterpoint to this futuristic, speculative debate about the world of tomorrow with studies that contextualise seemingly new trends within a longer

Theories about the impact of digital technology on society and the development of capitalism and debates about the influence of digital information technologies on the future of work have been abundant since the end of the twentieth century. Most of the academic debate has taken place outside labour history, leaving the actual effects of digital technologies on human work and labour relations often

This response to the comments on The Digital Factory discusses why and how the concepts of the digital factory and digital Taylorism have been applied in the book, as well as the question of the relationship between digital control and workers' resistance to algorithmic management technologies. While agreeing with the comments that point to the limitations of the concepts used, this response argues

Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory (2022) accomplishes in just under two hundred pages what many other books twice that length have struggled with: assembling a concise yet readable introductory map to the global, fragmented, and too-often hidden landscape of digitally-mediated capitalism. But the digital factory itself is an incomplete concept, almost always requiring us to look for the external

A growing body of literature is challenging techno-fetishistic perspectives on digital capitalism, as well as claims of the start of a new era characterized by total automation. This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the implications of digital technology for the future of labour by reading Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory (2022) through the lens of labour history. The use of digital

On 17 December 2010, the self-immolation of a young street vendor in Sidi Bouzid, a town in inland Tunisia, instigated the uprisings that became known as the Arab Spring or the Arab Revolutions – a wording that I will use here as a translation from the Arabic al-thawrât al-`arabiyya. Observers were shocked at the radical protests arising in these regions, where authoritarian regimes had crushed all

This article examines the removal of children from factories and their integration into the school system in the early nineteenth century, using decommodification as a conceptual framework. The Swiss canton of Aargau serves as a case study – a region where the textile industry flourished and a liberal government came to power after the July Revolution, subsequently enforcing compulsory education. Through

Daniel Laqua's recent monograph Activism across Borders Since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts in and beyond Europe raises a number of pertinent issues for historians of human rights to reflect upon. This article takes the four analytical lenses highlighted by Laqua for assessing transnational activism and applies them to cases of human rights activism in the Cold War and post-Cold War era. In

This essay introduces a review dossier dedicated to Daniel Laqua's Activism across Borders since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts in and beyond Europe (London, 2023). The dossier features comments by four historians – Constance Bantman, Georgina Brewis, Nicole Robertson, and Mark Hurst – as well as a response from Laqua himself. Laqua's book provides a framework for studying different forms of

This essay engages with Daniel Laqua's book Activism across Borders since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts in and beyond Europe (London, 2023) from the perspective of a historian of both humanitarianism and youth. This short reflection therefore focuses primarily on the book's engagement with the topic of humanitarianism, before discussing an understated, albeit important, cross-cutting theme

This essay discusses different approaches to studying transnational activism in historical perspective. In doing so, it concludes a review dossier in which several historians have commented on aspects of Daniel Laqua's book Activism across Borders since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts in and beyond Europe (London, 2023). The author responds to the preceding pieces by addressing the contributors’

Daniel Laqua's Activism across Borders since 1870 is an impressive contribution to scholarly research on transnational activism. It provides a detailed and innovative study of the connections but also the divisions between individuals, groups, and organizations. Laqua's approach and analysis interrogate the connectedness, transience, ambivalence, and marginality of transnational activism. He explores

The history of Soviet “rights defenders” is seemingly well known. Emerging in the 1960s in response to fears of a creeping re-Stalinization, the rights movement was part of the broader dissident milieu that coalesced in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Drawing on new documents from the Ukrainian KGB, this article broadens the canon of what we consider “Soviet rights talk” by focusing on a group completely

The article analyses the solidarity campaigns organized by the Czechoslovak Committee for Solidarity with African and Asian Peoples between the 1960s and 1980s. It situates the Czechoslovak solidarity towards African countries in the wider framework of the solidarity politics of the Eastern bloc and points out differences as well as similarities. Although the Czechoslovak Solidarity Committee was one

The Soviet campaign in support of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the Vietnam War saturated Soviet public culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was the longest solidarity action in Soviet history and the first to reach mass television audiences. This article examines the production and reception of a televised documentary film about the Vietnam War made by Konstantin Simonov – a celebrity

By tracing mentions of the English radical thinker Thomas Spence (1750–1814), his revolutionary “Plan”, and his disciples (the “Spencean Philanthropists”) in digitized collections of English-language Irish, Caribbean, Indian, Australian, Canadian, and US-American newspapers in the 1790s–1840s, this article explores the dissemination of the ideas and militancy inspired by Spence (“Spenceanism”) across

Focusing on the winter quartering of Kurdish nomadic tribes among peasant villages, this article discusses the patterns of Kurdish nomadism and nomad–peasant relations in the Ottoman sanjaks of Muş, Bayezid, and Van during the first half of the nineteenth century. It argues that the political structure of these regions and the requirements of animal husbandry among the nomads not only created a distinct

Campaigns on behalf of Russian political prisoners stretch from the revolutionary “nihilists” of the 1880s to the dissidents of the 1970s. While the efforts of political émigrés and their Western sympathizers – to promote awareness, raise funds, and pressure governments – met with decidedly mixed success, there were several watershed moments. This article examines how one such breakthrough, the compilation

This article explores the influence of worker resistance to Taylorism on industrial relations in Sweden. By analysing archival material from workers at the Separator Corporate Group, the Metal Workers’ Union, and the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, this article highlights the interplay between shop floor activism, discussions within trade unions, and central labour market relations. It demonstrates

This essay takes up the project of engendering capitalism by turning to the household. It situates a gendered analysis of capitalism within recent histories of capitalism, feminist analyses of social reproduction, histories of family and industrialism, histories of sexuality, and histories of women's labor. It argues that to analyze capitalism from a household perspective clarifies three core elements

It has long been recognized that, in order to understand economies in the past, we need better information about women's work and tertiary sector work. It is also well known that, while valuable in many ways, nineteenth-century censuses give incomplete information about women's contributions to the economy. Consequently, censuses are a poor basis for estimating the occupational structure. This article

“Direct action” emerged as a central concept in labour-movement politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article traces and explains that process of invention. In doing so, it seeks to settle three currently unresolved historical problems: the problem of the meaning of direct action; the problem of its relative novelty; and the problem of its relationship to nation. The article

Ventilation emerged as an efficient technique to reduce the health impact of dust and gas in workspaces around 1900. However, this technical solution to a major sanitary problem collided with the human factor. When, in 1894, French law imposed shop-floor clearance during lunch to facilitate aeration, workers resisted the injunction as a disturbance of their daily eating routine. Authorities relied

This article examines the entangled logics of corporal and carceral punishments of mercenary soldiers in eighteenth-century Denmark. Beginning with the story of a single man and his unfortunate trajectory through a sequence of punitive measures before his death as a prison workhouse inmate, the article looks at how punishments of soldiers communicated in multiple ways and were used to a variety of

This article deals with a paradox. Evidence for the punishment of workers during the early Middle Ages is richer in the earlier period (sixth and seventh centuries), when rural workers are generally thought to have been the least oppressed; by contrast, direct discussion of the subject largely drops out of the record in the Carolingian era (eighth to tenth centuries), despite clear evidence for renewed

The processes of control and collection are prominent themes throughout pharaonic history. However, the extent that the central regime attempted to administer agricultural fields to collect revenues directly from the farmer who actually worked the land is unclear during the pharaonic period (c.2686–1069). Relations between those involved in agricultural cultivation and local headships of extended families

This article examines legal relations between estate owners and their servants and workers on Danish estates in the nineteenth century. From the end of the eighteenth century onwards, the traditional privileged role of Danish estate owners was changing, and their special legal status as “heads of household” over the entire population on their estates was slowly being undermined. The article investigates

What is the historical role of punishment in the management of labour? This is the central question of this Special Issue of the International Review of Social History (IRSH), “Punishing Workers, Managing Labour”. Through a close reading of the diverse range of articles included in this Special Issue and by addressing the relatively extensive but highly fragmented scholarship on the subject, this introduction

This article examines the experience of minors at the intersection of guardianship, domestic servitude (free and unfree labour), and punitive violence in Charcas (Bolivia) in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The author proposes that the study of the role of punishment in the lives of working children and adolescents allows us to question how practices that occurred under the legal cloak

This article traces corporal and collective punishment in relation to the labour control of slaves and other dependent persons during the Ur III period (c.2100–2000 BCE). Slaves and other dependent persons often worked in related contexts with some overlap in treatment. Persons of different statuses could be detained and forced to work. Persons of various statuses also received rations and other benefits

This article analyzes slave resistance, capital crimes, and state violence in the Mississippi Valley and the Paraíba Valley – two of the most dynamic plantation economies of the nineteenth century. The research focused on the intersection between slavery and criminal law in Brazil and the United States. The analysis of capital crimes committed by enslaved people in Natchez and Vassouras revealed changing

This article explores blacklisting practices following the massive 1886 Southwest strike staged by the Knights of Labor (KOL) against Jay Gould's railroad empire. It focuses mostly on strike leader Martin Irons and blacklisting advocate and newspaperman J. West Goodwin. The strike, which started in Sedalia, Missouri, before spreading to other states, was a disaster for the KOL. The union declined in

This article analyses the role coerced intermediaries had on colonial power and authority in the prisons of British India. Coerced intermediaries in this context were convicts placed in positions of control by the colonial prison administration as warders, overseers, and night watchmen and night watchwomen, summarized here under the term “convict officers”. These convict officers were employed by the

In the past few decades, caregivers, such as nursing assistants and home health aides, have come to compose the fastest-growing segment of the paid workforce in the United States. At the same time, corporate caretakers of workers’ savings, such as pension funds and mutual funds, have become the nation's largest investors, bound by fiduciary duties of trust. And unprecedented numbers of elder employees

This paper investigates two New Kingdom Egyptian texts pertaining to labour regulation: the Karnak Decree of Horemheb and the Nauri Decree of Seti I. They focus on combating the unauthorized diverting of manpower and represent the oldest Egyptian texts (fourteenth–thirteenth century BCE) explicitly concerned with the legal dimension of managing the workforce. After a brief historical overview, the

With the abolition of the guild system and the rise of a new legal regime based on free contract, a central dilemma emerged in Europe: how to enforce labour control in this new era of individual economic freedom. This article examines how this issue was addressed in the State of Milan, where ideas about freedom of contract championed by state reformers such as Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria were

Forced labour was central to the provision of public infrastructure in African colonies. Whereas current historiography focuses on the role of external drivers, such as humanitarian organizations or the Forced Labour Convention of 1930, in triggering change, no attention has been paid to the local initiatives that contributed to the end of forced labour. This article explores the transition to paid

Luis Inácio Lula Da Silva, originally a metalworker and trade union activist, was president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010, leading the largest country of Latin America, with more than 212 million people. In 2020, social and labour historian John D. French, with a long career devoted to Brazilian labour history, published the much acclaimed biography Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker

This comment discusses three topics. First, John French's biography of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is located in the broader trajectory of the production of biographical narratives of activists under the auspices of the historiography of the labour movement. Second, French's daring gesture of comparing the trajectories of Lula and August Bebel, who lived in such different contexts, and the impact of

Lula and His Politics of Cunning explores the origin, roots, and evolution of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's vision, discourse, and practice of leadership as a process of becoming. This commentary invites historians of labor movements and the left to think beyond their geographical and chronological specializations. It argues that there is much to gain from thinking globally if we wish to achieve meaningful

In this paper, I consider John French's biography, Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil (2020). French discusses his methodology, which he characterizes as “a social biographical approach”. I argue that this methodology is already in historians’ toolkit. Historians writing biography seem to start with first premises rather than building on what went before. I thus

There were times – not so long ago – when it seemed that historical processes could be dissected as though human action did not matter. Those times have changed. Nowadays, scholarly biography is enjoying broad interest, also among social historians, as is shown in this issue of the IRSH, in which John D. French explains how biography can contribute to a better understanding of global labour history

John D. French's stimulating article, which explores the scope for comparing working-class leaders across time and space, is considered in this contribution by reference to my biography of August Bebel and with a particular focus on the following topics: a) historical actors as shaped by their own particular time and place; b) the importance of personal relationships and networks in making people who

In the early twentieth century, the Bata company became one of the largest shoe manufacturers in the world, and an emblematic icon of family capitalism. This paper presents an overview of the social welfare system developed by the firm, first in its hometown of Zlín (Moravia) and then in more than thirty company towns founded in Czechoslovakia, Europe, and other continents from the 1920s to the 1950s

Dorothy Cobble's magnificent, sweeping saga of the 100 plus year struggle for “full rights feminism” introduces us to myriad activists who sought common ground in the expansion of civil, political, economic and social rights as the key for raising the standard for working women, and by extension for all of humanity. However, as Cobble notes, some full-rights activists did not measure up to the potential

Cobble's study of American social democratic feminism is a fascinating narrative of the lives of women who crossed the boundaries of class, race and nation-states to build a better world. Her chronological account of the careers and activism of these women is not only a major contribution to the history of feminism but also a significant addition to the study of social democracy worldwide.

This introduction to the review dossier on Dorothy Sue Cobble, For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality, introduces the major themes of the work in light of Cobble's earlier interventions in gendering labor history and focus on laborite activist women here called “full rights feminists”. It asks the contributors to expand on and decenter the transnational and global

In 2018, the International Labour Organization published a study about the critical role of paid and unpaid care work for the health of society, the economy, and the planet and about the ways that care work is sustained through the super-exploitation of women, particularly migrant women and racially and ethnically marginalized women. Dorothy Sue Cobble's sweeping, carefully researched, and beautifully

On 15 September 1970, over 400,000 workers struck General Motors (GM), the biggest corporation in the world. It was a massive walkout, lasting sixty-seven days and affecting 145 GM plants in the US and Canada. GM lost more than $1 billion in profits, and the impact on the US economy was considerable. Despite the strike's size, it has been understudied. Fifty years later, this article provides a re-assessment

This article examines the survival strategies of forestry workers and craftspeople in the late Ottoman Empire. Through the example of the Tahtacı, a semi-nomadic community specialized in lumbering in the forests along the western and southern coasts of Anatolia, it visualizes the adaptation strategies of forestry labourers in the changing economic and ecological environment of the Mediterranean Basin

This article asks under what historical conditions people who consider themselves as belonging to the ingroup resort to collective violence against free labour migrants. Based on cases in the North Atlantic, and largely limited to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it offers a starting point for a more global approach. By using the concept of boundary work, I conclude that once ethnic boundaries