Labour history

This essay builds on foundations laid by Edward Harris in his essay 'Workshop, Marketplace and Household' (2002). In that essay, Harris set out the evidence for some 170 occupational terms and discussed the division of labour in the Athenian economy. This essay adds subsequent findings, bringing the list of occupational terms to 276. It then asks how many of these terms denote activities that could have provided individuals with an entire livelihood; I thus exclude part-time tasks and tasks that represent part of the chaîne opératoire involved in the production of this or that commodity, but a part that could not in itself have provided a complete livelihood to its practitioner. The chapter is under embargo by CUP, so pop me an email if you would like a copy.

Several authors have argued that one of the main goals of the International Working Men's Association was to control transnational labour markets. In the eyes of trade unionists, especially in Britain, uncontrolled cross-border migratory movements threatened to undermine wage standards and working conditions. Their solution was to organize internationally, both to prevent strike-breaking and wage-cutting by workers from abroad, and to support unions elsewhere to raise wage standards in their home countries. Cigar-makers operated on a cross-border labour market and were very prominent in the First International. In this article I describe the connections between the German, British, Dutch, Belgian, and American cigar-makers as migratory workers, and their actions to stimulate, support, and coordinate trade unions internationally. I argue that the international cooperation of cigar-makers was primarily motivated by a wish to regulate their cross-border labour market, not so much by an abstract ideal of international solidarity.

The Routledge Handbook of Neoliberalism seeks to offer a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon of neoliberalism by examining the range of ways that it has been theorized, promoted, critiqued, and put into practice in a variety of geographical locations and institutional frameworks. Neoliberalism is easily one of the most powerful discourses to emerge within the social sciences in the last two decades, and the number of scholars who write about this dynamic and unfolding process of socio-spatial transformation is astonishing. Even more surprising though is that there has, until now, not been an attempt to provide a wide-ranging volume that engages with the multiple registers in which neoliberalism has evolved. The Handbook of Neoliberalism accordingly serves as an essential guide to this vast intellectual landscape. With proposed contributions from over 50 leading authors, the Handbook of Neoliberalism will offer a systematic overview of neoliberalism’s origins, political implications, social tensions, spaces, natures and environments, and aftermaths in addressing ongoing and emerging debates. Numerous books have been published on neoliberalism, including important edited volumes, but none of these contributions have attempted to bring the diverse scope and wide-ranging coverage that we plan to incorporate here. Most of the edited volumes and monographs on neoliberalism that have been published to date have a very specific thematic focus, either on particular empirical case studies, or alternatively attempt to wrestle with a specific theoretical concern. In contrast, the Routledge Handbook of Neoliberalism aims to provide the first comprehensive overview of the field.

With authors working at institutions around the world, the Handbook of Neoliberalism will offer a thorough examination of how neoliberalism is understood by social scientists working from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Our goal is to advance the established and emergent debates in a field that has grown exponentially over the past two decades, coinciding with the meteoric rise of neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology, state form, policy and program, and governmentality. In short, the Handbook of Neoliberalism will intervene by both outlining how theorizations of neoliberalism have evolved and by exploring new research agendas that we hope will inform policy making and activism. The Handbook of Neoliberalism will include a substantive introductory chapter and seven main thematic sections. By presenting a comprehensive examination of the field, this edited volume will serve as an invaluable resource for undergraduates, graduate students, and professional scholars alike. We envision the book as both a teaching guide and a reference for human geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, heterodox economists, and others working on questions of neoliberalism and its multifarious effects.

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This paper argues that historical research on late medieval and early modern craft guilds fails to escape teleological and anachronistic views, including when they are addressed as commons or 'institutions for collective action'. These present-day conceptual lenses do not only create idealized views on guilds, but also of the contexts in which they operated, especially the state and the market. This is especially the case with neo-institutional views on the commons, which fall back on a transhistorical rational actor, who can choose between three options for the allocation of resources and surpluses, namely the state, the market and the common. The paper shows that guilds were fundamentally entangled with both the state and the market and that their ethic implied a less utilitarian and instrumental attitude towards natural resources. The consequence of this is that the history of the guilds offers different lessons to present-day commoners than those implied by present-day research. With an eye at launching a reflection on that, I argue in favour of a cosmopolitical perspective, which invites to take fundamentally different worldviews seriously. This includes questioning our own conceptual and analytical abstractions like the state, the market and the individual, up to and including the very distinction between nature and society or nature and politics, which are at the very basis of modern science itself.

Questo saggio, per comodità, è diviso in due livelli di argomentazione. Parto dal presupposto cheper ragioni anagrafiche e per interessi di studio -non necessariamente i lettori abbiano dimestichezza con la materia, soprattutto con i suoi aspetti più tecnici e interni ai meccanismi negoziali e contrattuali. La prima parte, più espositiva, farà vedere tempi, forme e modi con cui le richieste sulle nuove forme di classificazione del lavoro e sul diritto allo studio retribuito emergono e si inseriscono all'interno delle lotte aziendali e di categoria dei primi anni settanta fino ad affermarsi come il collante di tutta la strategia sindacale, non solo nel campo industriale ma più in generale per la ricomposizione unitaria del lavoro dipendente alla metà del decennio. La seconda, conclusiva, avrà un carattere esplicativo sul significato profondo di questa vicenda, che non è stata solo sindacale. Intende cioè illustrare sinteticamente cosa siano (e quali effetti abbiano prodotto) l'inquadramento unico e la parità normativa operai-impiegati, da una parte, e il monte ore per il diritto allo studio retribuito dalle imprese a favore dei lavoratori (variabile a seconda dei contratti collettivi nazionali di lavoro e convenzionalmente denominato "150 ore" a partire da quello dei metalmeccanici, il primo ad averlo ottenuto nel 1973), dall'altra 1 . Questi istituti contrattuali, negli anni settanta, risultano assolutamente originali nel panorama industriale dei paesi sviluppati, in Europa e nel Nord America 2 . Lo riconoscono, 1 Lucio Libertini, Tecnici impiegati classe operaia. Inquadramento unico e 150 ore, Roma, Editori riuniti, 1974. 2 Lucio Pagnoncelli (a cura di), Tornare a scuola in Europa: sistemi formativi a confronto, a cura di, Milano, Unicopli, 1985; Maurizio Lichtner (a cura di), Esperienze di educazione degli adulti in Europa: una ricerca comparativa, Frascati, Cede, 1988 (I Quaderni di Villa Falconieri). Sull'inquadramento, benché la questione sia ben presente in tutti i paesi industrializzati come una delle fonti primarie delle divisioni e diseguaglianze sul lavoro (non solo professionali e salariali, ma anche culturali e sociali, di genere e fra generazioni), non vi è nulla di paragonabile all'organicità della classificazione unica italiana e alla parità normativa operai-impiegati; Conny Devolder, Pietro Causarano, Richard Hyman, Heribert Kohl, Lars Berggren, Syndicalismes à l'entreprise. Des avancées à l'ambiguïté, in Michel Pigenet, Patrick Pasture, Jean-Louis Robert (dir.), L'apogée des syndicalismes en Europe occidentale, 1960-1985, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2005, pp. 109-Afferenza: Dipartimento di Scienze formazione e psicologia, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Via Laura 48, 50121 FIRENZE

The aim of this article is to describe the role played by accounting in an industrial company in which elements of utopian socialism and capitalism co-existed. The case is the Royal Silk Factory founded by King Ferdinand IV at San Leucio, near Caserta in 1778. The article covers the years 1802–1826. In this hybrid institution, double-entry bookkeeping (DEB) was adopted to calculate the minimum profit rate owed to the capitalist shareholders, while ‘labour accounting’ measured the workers’ performance. The surplus value was shared between the enterprise and the workers. This article makes a number of contributions to the accounting history literature: First, it adds archival evidence of accounting practices in Italian industrial companies; second, it supports the close connection between DEB and capitalism; third, it shows that the accounting system is set up to reflect the different social organisation of a manufacturing company; and finally, it illustrates how the accounting system makes the wealth-generating and wealth-distributing processes accountable.

The article seeks to fill a lacuna in Marxist scholarship concerning the actually-existing Marxism of politically-mobilised workers as an organic philosophy in its own right. To shed light on this issue, I investigate the reading-material which stimulated Marxist conversion and the accompanying intellectual invigoration of workers at the turn of the twentieth century in Russian Poland. For proletarian readers Marxism was the main political language, ushering them into the public sphere and allowing them to comprehend the emerging capitalist world. As a particular liaison of scientific knowledge and a practical political weapon, it allowed its adherents to redefine themselves and make political claims. Such a situational Marxism, drawing from but not reducible to the prevailing 'orthodoxy' , allows one to see the latter as a socially diverse plethora of ideas.

Departments of Labour Economics and Industrial Relations in Turkey have their roots in social policy education in the Turkish university system dating back to a pre-republican (1923) period. The social policy discipline, which was influenced by the German and in part by the French approaches during its establishment, has over time been exposed to intense Americanization efforts, which led to the creation of departments of Labour Economics and Industrial Relations. The paper analyses this transformation in two dimensions. The first dimension is related to the historical development of the institutionalization process. The second is that under whose influence was this institutionalization process shaped? It argues that Labour Economics and Industrial Relations as an academic discipline has come to be represented by two different traditions involving four generations of academics.

“Work–life balance” (WLB) is a relatively modern expression. However, there is no novelty in the core concept, as resistance to excessive incompatibility between work roles and personal roles has a history that predates contemporary struggles for a decline in unnecessary work–life conflict. The authors of this manuscript aim to convey a portion of this history by instilling, from an ethics perspective, an awareness of the efforts of early labor organizations, including labor unions, and a social organization that addressed labor issues. They will also communicate the resolve of key individuals, especially women, including labor leaders and activists, who contributed to labor reform and served as early proponents for WLB. In addition, implications and suggestions for practice and future inquiry will be provided.

Anarchism and geography have a long and disjointed history, characterized by towering peaks of intensive intellectual engagement and low troughs of ambivalence and disregard. This paper traces a genealogy of anarchist geographies back to the modern development of anarchism into a distinct political philosophy following the Enlightenment. The initial rise of geographers’ engagement with anarchism occurred at the end of the nineteenth-century, owing to Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin, who developed an emancipatory vision for geography in spite of the discipline’s enchantment with imperialism at that time. The realpolitik of the war years in the first half of the twentieth-century and the subsequent quantitative revolution in geography represent a nadir for anarchist geographies. Yet anarchism was never entirely abandoned by geographical thought and the counterculture movement of the 1970s gave rise to radical geography, which included significant interest in anarchist ideas. Unfortunately another low occurred during the surge of neoliberal politics in the 1980s and early 1990s, but hope springs eternal, and from the late 1990s onward the anti-globalization movement and DIY culture have pushed anarchist geographies into more widespread currency. In reviewing the literature, I hope to alert readers to the ongoing and manifold potential for anarchist geographies to inform both geographical theory and importantly, to give rise to more practice-based imperatives where building solidarities, embracing reciprocity, and engaging in mutual aid with actors and communities beyond the academy speaks to the ‘freedom of geography’ and its latent capacity to shatter its own disciplinary circumscriptions.

This article investigates visions of Esperanto upheld in the Swedish labour movement during the 1920s. It offers an account of the linguistic–political practice of the Swedish Worker Esperanto Association (SLEA). The analytical focus is placed on SLEA’s con- ceptualisation of Esperanto as an effective means for achieving social, political and communicative amelioration. The ideological open-endedness afforded by this idea is a particular point of interest. In SLEA’s practice, Esperanto was regarded both as a means of overcoming and safeguarding linguistic heterogeneity. The ameliorative potential ascribed to Esperanto could be appropriated both by national and cosmopolitan imaginaries. The co-presence of these two visions points to a fundamental indeterminacy interwoven into a seemingly rigid ideology of language.

This article reviews the scholarly treatment of work and class in post-socialist states. It traces how the class discourses under socialism led to a lack of meaningful working-class studies in the post-socialist academy. It offers as an agenda for future research three points of departure: 1) greater confrontation of the one-sided discourse on class in these societies and the academy itself (a class blindness of research). 2) The value in studying postsocialist societies both comparatively to Global North and South, and as an intermediate positioning for worker exploitation and responses in global capitalism. 3) To achieve the first two agenda items a more grounded methodological approach proceeding from the lived experience of class and work is proposed.

In March 1974, trade union leader and Chairman of the Socialist Party of India, George Fernandes, formed a new independent trade union of railway workers and then led a massive nation-wide strike lasting about a month. Two years later— March 1976—Fernandes was arrested as the principal accused in the Baroda Dynamite Conspiracy Case, a plot to bomb strategic targets in New Delhi in resistance to Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian rule. How did George Fernandes’ political work change over these two years—from engaging in traditional trade union movement tactics during the Railway Workers’ Strike in 1974 to being the ringleader of a plan to bomb strategic targets in resistance to the postcolonial state? Why would an activist who advocated non-violent social movement tactics change strategies and end up leading a movement that primarily uses violent tactics? I argue that in its violent repression of the Railway Workers’ Strike and its illegal imprisonment of the strike’s leaders, Indira Gandhi’s administration demonstrated to Fernandes and other opposition party leaders that there was no room for a peaceful solution to the ever increasing social conflict of early 1970s India. Therefore, when Gandhi instated herself as dictator, longstanding advocates of satyagraha believed that symbolic violence against the state was the tactic most likely to lead to the restoration of democracy in India.

In the South Asian setting, the fields of gender history and family history are still predominantly concerned with relatively elite social groups. Few studies have examined issues of gender and the family in the history of Dalit, low-caste, and socially marginalized communities, especially those that were labelled ‘criminal tribes’ from the mid-nineteenth century on. This article explores the ways in which gender patterned criminalized communities’ experiences of everyday colonial governance under Part I of the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in the first two decades that it was enforced in northern India. In this early period, the colonial government did not closely regulate marriage practices, domestic arrangements, or the gendered organization of labour within communities categorized as ‘criminal tribes’. Nevertheless, notions of sexuality and gender underlay colonial knowledge of the ‘criminal tribes’, which emerged in dialogue with middle-class Indian gender and caste politics. Moreover, the family unit was the central target of the CTA surveillance and policing regime, which aimed to produce ‘industrious’ families. Officially endorsed forms of labour had complex implications for criminalized communities in the context of North Indian gender norms and strategies of social mobility. Gender power dynamics also shaped criminalized peoples’ interpersonal, embodied interactions with British and Indian colonial officials on an everyday basis. Meanwhile, different forms of leverage and evasion were open to men and women to cope with their criminalization and so the colonial state was experienced in highly gendered ways.

This article traces trends inside smallholder peasant household production and reproduction against the background of profound change in African agriculture's terms of trade between 1980 and 2015. The gender and generational dynamics of African peasant households that evolved under European colonial policies from the late 19 th century and largely persisted in the early post-independence era, were disrupted by the 1970s oil crises. By the 1980s, peasant labor displacement was gaining momentum, as evidenced by declining smallholder commercial agriculture, often but not always accompanied by rural out-migration. Ensuing differentiated involvement of peasant smallholder family members in unfolding processes of deagrarianization and depeasantization are explored on the basis of national statistical data and the author's and other social scientists' published work. The article's broad spatial focus and 35-year overview, are accommodated in a human geography methodology, which synthesizes research findings from multidisciplinary social scientists' micro, meso and macro level qualitative and quantitative data collection on spatial and temporal patterns of the gender/age division of labor, allocation of decision-making power and welfare provisioning patterns within smallholder households. Spatial and temporal analysis of sex/age ratios evidenced in published data on sectoral labour force participation, surveys of intra-household labour time allocation and national census population data are utilized to trace deagrarianization. Salient trends are: labor contraction in commercial peasant family farming, alteration in peasant land allocation and an emerging tendency for " older women left behind who could facilitate an agrarian fallback " , family members, who have migrated elsewhere or engaged in situ in non-agricultural occupations.

Analysis of so-called threatening letters produced in early nineteenth-century agrarian social conflict in terms of collective identity and collective efficacy, arguing that peasant movements had a long-term impact on patterns of economic development by retarding processes of primitive accumulation.

Popular discourses on globalization and many global histories do not have much to say about Africa, despite significant advances in global history’s engagements with Africa in recent decades. The continent generally only features to the extent that it trades, usually as subordinate partner, with the rest of the world or is penetrated by foreign merchants and colonizers. Such accounts approach the continent’s integration into world markets from without. This literature thus emphasizes colonial transport infrastructure, export trade, and forms of labor that feed directly into global markets, including wage labor and cash cropping. The historiography on African mobility and labor, however, opens up promising avenues for better integrating the continent into global history. African historians’ growing focus on local mobility and informal trade, on the ways in which Africans took part in shaping connections with global markets, and on productive activities not geared towards export allows us to reframe Africa in global history as more than a passive victim of colonialism, the slave trade, or global capital.

Hellenism is one of those overarching, ever-changing narratives always subject to historical circumstances, intellectual fashions and political needs. Conversely, it is fraught with meaning and conditioning powers, enabling and constraining imagination and practical life. In this essay I tease out the hold that the idea of Hellas has had on post-war Greece and I explore the ways in which the American anti-communist rhetoric and discussions about political and economic stabilization appropriated and rearticulated Hellenism. Central to this history of transformations are the archaeologists; the archaeologists as intellectuals, as producers of culture who, while stepping in and out of their disciplinary boundaries, rewrote and legitimized the new ideological properties of Hellenism while tapping into the resources of their profession.

Em junho de 1919, eclodiu em Salvador a primeira greve geral da Bahia, rapidamente se expandindo para várias cidades do Recôncavo e convertendo-se no mais espetacular episódio da história da classe operária baiana em toda a Primeira República. Demonstramos, neste artigo, que tal movimento foi condicionado por três fatores, dois deles de caráter exógeno e um endógeno ao próprio movimento operário. Os condicionantes externos estão relacionados às flutuações econômicas derivadas da Primeira Guerra Mundial e à crise política criada pela cisão interoligárquica por ocasião das eleições estaduais e federais em 1919. O terceiro condicionante, de natureza endógena à classe operária, diz respeito às mudanças operadas em sua organização sindical e política. Conjugados, esses três elementos foram fundamentais para a eclosão e vitória do movimento.

Studies of labor struggle often concentrate on overt resistance, such as strikes, and neglect the rich variety of subterranean acts of workplace dissent. The few studies of this informal resistance that exist are largely a-historical and Eurocentric micro-studies that generally argue such dissent lacks radical content. Drawing on two unorthodox Marxist currents, including " autonomist Marxism " , this article presents a historical study of everyday resistance by meatworkers in Aotearoa New Zealand during the 1970s. It is asserted these struggles often hampered profits and production, complemented overt resistance, and were frequently collective rather than individualistic in nature—indeed, in many plants dissent was based on informal work groups of workplace-whanau. These were multiethnic extended family-like informal groupings that were influenced by Maori culture. While capital comprehensively restructured the meat industry in the 1980s and 1990s, it has not meant the " end of resistance " today.

This paper examines the significance of work experience schemes and part-time jobs for school pupils within the context of recruitment to youth jobs. Specifically, it focuses on the role played by work experience and part-time jobs in the recruitment of young people to engineering apprenticeships in a Midlands town during the recession of the early 1980s. The employers gave greater importance to holiday jobs, Saturday jobs and paper rounds than work experience in recruiting apprentices. The former were viewed as a more effective guide to applicants' work attitudes. Work experience lacked the element of 'sacrifice' and other aspects associated with 'real' work Despite this, work experience proliferated in the 1980s, whilst pupils' part-time work has been neglected as a learning resource.

The article explores the history of the Employees’ State Insurance Act of 1948 (ESI), a law enacted in the first year of Indian independence. Global trends in social policy had influenced debates on a social insurance for Indian workers since the 1920s. Transformations of Indian industry, World War II, the post-war crisis, and the emerging economic policy of the postcolonial State then created conditions for legislation. Just as the international welfare discourse, Indian contributions included, converged on social welfare as a universal citizen right, the regulatory content of the health insurance scheme devised for India diverged from this normative consensus: the ESI Act remained strictly employment-based, contributed to an emerging structure of graded entitlements, and to the hardening of boundaries between what would later be called “formal” and “informal” labour. Simultaneously, it also generated horizons of expectation that continue to inform labour struggles.

This article explores relationships between masculinity and welfare in post-First World War Britain through an analysis of unemployment relief. While their service to the nation entitled them to government benefits, veterans of the First World War fit into a context of already-existing unemployment relief schemes and already-established assumptions about who was deserving of state assistance, which privileged married men with children. The politics of preference surrounding unemployment relief reveal competing principles of deservedness connected to different models of masculinity, the breadwinner and the soldier, the married man and the single man. There was general agreement that ex-servicemen had a significant call on the state's resources, but manhood above all meant the ability to provide for wives and children, which resulted in the marginalization of the claims of single men and the endangering of the principle of universal entitlement for ex-soldiers.

Previous research has understood the migrations of gay men and other queer people through a lens of identity development, whereby relocation is driven by processes of coming out and consuming particular urban amenities. Meanwhile, labour geographers have largely overlooked sexuality, seeking to understand work-related migration in relation to gender, race, citizenship and the collective organization of workers. Drawing on the migration narratives of gay-identified men living in Ottawa, Canada, and Washington, DC, USA, we argue that the norms governing gender and sexuality within various workplaces, economic sectors and locales continuously influence migration related to work and inextricably linked processes of social reproduction. In particular, we explain how the affective needs of gay workers both deflect them from and attract them to particular locales and workplaces. In their migration destinations, gay workers tend to also transform the norms of social reproduction within workplaces and sectors. While gay workers may use migration to successfully negotiate the uneven landscapes of inclusion and visibility in North America, their agency is also constrained by the ongoing of regulation of sexuality in both workplaces and social and community environments.

This paper offers a critique of the existing historiography on the late apartheid period, arguing that white workers’ role in and experience of the unraveling of racial privilege in the labor arena has been obscured by a focus on the high politics of reform and on anti-apartheid resistance emanating from African labor and the broader black population. Reporting from the archive, it discusses two under-utilized archival collections – that of the Commission of Inquiry into Labour Legislation and of the Mineworkers’ Union – as sources for starting to write white working-class organization, politics, identity, and experience into the history of reform and resistance, thereby adding a new dimension to South Africa’s broadly conceived struggle history.

Studying the spatial exclusion of Dalits is distinct from looking at caste as an axis of spatial organization in the city. The “urban” is not just a location for mapping the social geography, but a mode that engenders spatial inequality. This article probes the spatial strategies of urban planning, between the 1920s and 1970s, which produced exclusionary spaces and masked the dynamics of caste within its techno-managerial rationality. It refocuses the lens of scholarship on Bombay from the urban periphery moving beyond the three popular sites of Bombay’s historiography: the factory, the neighborhoods of mill district, and the Island City. Exploring the politics of urban expansion, it illustrates how the planning regime reproduced hegemonic caste-class relations, which relegated Dalit migrants to the city’s fringes, on low-quality lands, and in segregated neighborhoods. Based on life histories, this article shows how Dalits created spaces for living, linked inextricably to their labor, and contests the abstract notions of space like “slum” that identify and mark people and their spaces. It also explores the affective relations nurtured and solidarities forged in the Dalit neighborhood on the terrain of urban politics, which recognizes Dalit actors and their struggles for redistribution and dignity.

The extensive Yugoslav economic migration and presence of Yugoslav ethnic minorities in Western Europe, as well as the interaction of this migration with the Yugoslav crisis of the 1980s, remain under-researched. This article sets out to offer a modest contribution on this neglected topic. It argues that short-distance transnational communities and short-term migration were already at the centre of grievances articulated on ethno-nationalist grounds in the early 1980s. It links these grievances to the different impact of the two oil shocks and the process of European integration on each Yugoslav republic, differences which contributed to the crisis of federal unity.

This essay surveys Australian military nursing history during World War I, providing an overview of this emerging historical field, a sub section of nursing history. It traces contributions made by both academic and non-professional historians to the historical contextualisation of the experience of military nursing, and points to new directions for future investigation.

Traditionally it is assumed that "modern" civil society originated in the associations, clubs, and public sphere of the eighteenth century as a result of the "liberation" of the individual from the "shackles" of absolutism, religious intolerance, and the patriarchal family. However, recent research goes further back in time. Scholars such as Robert Putnam (sociologist), Antony Black (political scientist), and Katherine Lynch (histo-rian) associate the origins of civil society with the heyday of confraternities and guilds in the late Middle Ages. This has serious consequences for our understanding of the characteristics and functions of civil society. Given that confraternities were permeated by religious devotion and crafts were inextricably bound to the (often undemocratic) political establishment, fundamental questions arise about the importance of religion in civil society and the role of associations in the political participation of individuals. This article suggests that several long-term trends can be observed when broaching civil society from the perspective of guilds (or brotherhoods). In early modern guilds, the fraternal ideals related to mutual aid and equality appear to have gradually disappeared. Craft guilds stopped being "brotherhoods" and "substitute families" and transformed into formal and bureaucratic juridical institutions, while retreating into a sphere separate from household and family.

This paper examines internal labour markets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century using personnel records from the Union Bank of Australia and the Victorian Railways. Both employers hired young workers and offered them the possibility of very-long-term employment. Salaries were determined by impersonal rules, such as being attached to tenure and to position. Workers rarely received nominal pay cuts. This approach to human resources was designed to retain and motivate workers. We show that all of the classic features of internal labour markets used to describe American firms in the 1970s were present dating back to the Victorian period.

This article introduces an Africa-focused special issue showing that the rise of development in its modern form coincided with the demise of the political legitimacy of forced labor. It argues that by mobilizing the idea of development, both colonial and independent African governments were able to continue recruiting unpaid (or underpaid) labor—relabeled as " voluntary participation, " " self-help, " or " human investment " —after the passing of the ILO's Forced Labor Convention. This introduction consists of two parts: the first section summarizes the main findings of the contributions to the special issue. The second part advances preliminary considerations on the implications of these findings for our assessment of international development " aid. " The conclusion advocates that research on planned development focus not on developers-beneficiaries, but rather on employers-employees. Doing so opens up a renewed research agenda on the consequences of " aid " both for development workers (those formally employed by one of the many development institutions) and for so-called beneficiaries (those whose participation in development is represented as conducive to their own good).

This study uses food as a lens to examine three historical phenomena: globalization's limits, the rise of plantation-centric monocultures, and the resilience of social norms within migrant societies. The paper scrutinizes the West African oil palm's initial journey to, and reception within, the Malay Peninsula, one of the world's largest palm oil exporters by the end of the twentieth century. I pay special attention to changes in the crop's perceived food value during the inter-war years, a facet overlooked by earlier scholarship. Five different migrant groups in Malaya - planter households, Asian cooks, colonial officials, government chemists, and estate labourers - played critical roles in transforming palm oil into a crop purely for industrial purposes, rather than subsistence. The peculiarities of Malaya's social context are further sharpened by comparisons with Latin America and West Africa, where different groups of migrants propagated the oil palm's subsistence cultures, instead of shunning them.

This article argues that the late 1940s in India should no longer be reduced to the twin events of partition and
independence. A generalized political crisis unsettled, for a brief period, the structures of social and economic
power, and not just intercommunity relations and the constitution of the state. These years were thus, among other
things, a catalytic moment for the definition of ‘labour’ as both a political category and a parameter of post-colonial
politics: processes dating back to the First World War, at least, were consolidated, under pressure from this crisis,
into a new labour regime that has withstood political pressure for almost seven decades. The article offers an
analysis of the almost-forgotten post-war strike movement, which was nevertheless unprecedented in its social and
geographical spread. The movement elicited both repressive and reformist responses: the extraordinary level of
emergency powers applied to suppress it are, therefore, as much examined as the series of momentous legislative
and institutional changes of the late 1940s. In conclusion, the long-term consequences of this cycle of
strike–reform–repression for India's post-colonial labour regime are adumbrated. A strongly etatist, potentially
authoritarian, regime of industrial relations, it is argued, was checked by an enduring political trade union pluralism.
At the same time, divisions within India's working classes were deepened and consolidated as labour law and social
legislation sealed off the comparatively small ‘core workforces’ of public sector and large-scale industrial enterprises
from the majority of workers in what would soon be called the ‘informal economy’.

This article scrutinizes election district and inspection district reports written by the deputies of the Turkish single-party government and the role of these reports in state decision making. Underscoring social discontent and the fragile hegemony of the new regime—both of which motivated the republican elite to monitor state and party administrations and public opinion—the article argues that the practice of reporting was neither a project of social engineering nor a practice peculiar to the Turkish state but rather a requirement of a polity concerned with the opinion of its citizens. In the absence of direct political participation of the people in government, the reports mediated between the state and society. Contrary to conventional accounts of the single-party period, the article argues that the republican elite did not govern the country through top-down decrees but instead sought to ascertain public opinion and its own administrative defects so as to consolidate its fragile hegemony. Based on these findings, I propose that we redefine the early republican state as a flexible authoritarian regime that was not detached from the society.

This study aims to generate fresh hypotheses concerning emergent variations in labor politics across postcommunist settings. Although labor may be weak throughout the postcommunist world, a historical comparison of labor politics in Russia and China reveals consequential differences in the extent and sources of union weakness. Taking these differences seriously, the study asks why organized labor in Russia—in spite of a steeper decline in union membership, greater fragmentation, and a conspicuously low level of militancy—was relatively more effective in advancing working-class interests during economic liberalization than the growing, organizationally unified trade union apparatus in China. The comparisons suggest that some constraints on organized labor are more malleable than others, allowing for openings where labor can affect outcomes in ways that surprise, if not scare, state and business. Specifically, key differences in historical legacies and in the pace and dynamics of institutional transformation have conferred upon Russian unions key organizational, material, and symbolic resources that Chinese unions do not possess to the same degree. These differences reflect mechanisms capable of generating increasingly divergent prospects for organized labor mobilization over long-time horizons.

The article offers an intellectual critique of Marxist political ecology as developed in western Europe between the 1970s and 2000s, focusing on the labour/ecology nexus. My critique is based on the intersection of two levels of analysis: 1) the historical evolution of labour environmentalism, focusing on what I will call the eco-modernist dilemma of labour; 2) the meaning of class politics in relation to the politics of the environment, with a special focus on the production/reproduction dialectic. Focusing on the work of four Marxist intellectuals whose ideas resonated with various social movements across the Left spectrum (labour, environmentalism, feminism and degrowth), the article shows how the current entrenchment of labour within the politics of eco-modernization hides a number of internal fractures and alternative visions of ecology that need to be spelled out in order to open the terrain for a rethinking of ecological politics in class terms today. This article offers a critique of what I consider a major trend in the environmental politics of the neoliberal era in western Europe: the political convergence between labour and mainstream Ecological Modernization, what I will call labour's eco-modernism, and its contemporary divergence from anti-capitalist ecological movements. This pattern has become dominant in a historical context marked by a generalized decline in labour's representativeness and political power, both at the trade-unions level and at the level of an almost generalized electoral defeat of the radical Left (Ely 2002, Ely and Nield 2000, Silver 2003, Van der Linden 2008), as well as by a wide adoption of neoliberal policies in western European countries. At the same time, labour's eco-modernism hides important internal fractures and ecological contradictions: on the one hand, in the wake of increasing unemployment levels, a number of different sectoral unions and political parties on the Left continue to support fossil fuels and the opening of new extractive frontiers (from gold mining to fracking to coal itself); on the other hand, labour's endorsement of eco-modernism has been confronted by grassroots resistance against new 'clean energy' projects, such as, for example, wind farms and large-scale solar power plants, energy-from-waste facilities and high-speed railways. These divisions complicate immensely the effort to