Temporary labour migration was one of the characteristic phenomena of human mobility in Europe during the twentieth century. The predominant answer in several European countries to the growing economic demand for an external labour supply on the one hand, and political demands to limit the numbers of foreign workers and to protect the native workforce from the competition of “cheap” migrant labour on the other, was a growing direct and active involvement of the nation state in regulatory efforts and recruitment operations abroad. Besides bureaucratic organizations on a national level, bilateral recruitment agreements – starting in their modern form in 1919 – became the most important tool to regulate labour migration between two countries. This article takes a look at the evolving system of bilaterally fixed migration relations in Europe and its implications for sending and receiving countries as well as for the labour migrants involved. It argues that the network of bilateral recruitment agreements provided controlled and selective migration channels in Europe between the 1950s and 1970s. These agreements installed and protected certain minimum standards to migrants and led to a general improvement of the rights and conditions offered to temporary labour migrants in Europe.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, a mass culture of popular radicalism – consisting of various socialist, industrial unionist, anarchist, Progressive, feminist, black radical and other movements – arose to challenge the legitimacy of corporate capitalism in the United States. This article considers the role of radical cartoonists in propagandizing for, and forging unity within, this culture of popular radicalism. By articulating a common set of anti-capitalist values and providing a recognizable series of icons and enemies, radical cartoonists worked to generate a class politics of laugher that was at once entertaining and didactic. Through a discussion of the works of Art Young for The Masses, Ryan Walker's cartoons for the socialist newspaper, Appeal to Reason, and the proletarian humor of Joe Hill and the IWW, this article argues that radical cartooning did not merely provide comic relief for the movements, but was an active force in framing socialist ideology and goals in a revolutionary age.

While much has been heard in recent times of the evils attaching to “the principles of 1834”, other important aspects of the New Poor Law have been seriously neglected. The laws of settlement and removal were unjust and inhumane, and the system of parochial rating was anomalous, uneven and, indeed, thoroughly iniquitous. One of the main features of the Poor Law Amendment Act had been the grouping of the parishes of England and Wales into unions of parishes. Those of a medium-sized town usually constituted one union, while in the countryside the typical union tended to comprise all the parishes within a radius of up to about ten miles of a country town, its centre. Under the Act, the administration of the Poor Law was based on the union and not, as heretofore, on the parish; yet the latter remained the financial unit, each parish being chargeable for its own Poor Law expenditure. This uneven arrangement prevented the effective operation of the Act, and, as will be shown, had unhappy consequences. Attempts at reform in these matters were strenuously opposed in Parliament between 1845 and 1865, and only in the latter year was the Union Chargeability Act passed.

The period 1500–1650 was characterized by huge global transformations. These had a major impact on a wide range of societal forms and cultures. As a result, different work ethics clashed and formed hybrid combinations, and new work ethics came into being during many-sided confrontations. The question of how the labouring poor in different parts of the world experienced these changes in the context of their work is an extremely difficult one. The present essay attempts to define a number of key concepts (“work”, “attitude”); it evaluates critically the various sources which might give us an insight into attitudes to work; and it reflects on interpretative difficulties. The essay concludes by presenting a few substantive hypotheses.

This article aims to understand norms and values pertaining to the definition of just wages in early modern Italy. The starting point is the treatise by the jurist Lanfranco Zacchia, De Salario seu Operariorum Mercede, which appeared in the mid-seventeenth century and represented the first attempt to collate a set of rules on wages based on the traditions of Roman and canon law. After a brief presentation of the treatise, I shall analyse the meanings and concepts of wages, and then consider the elements that determined the just wage. To understand how prescriptions were seen by individuals, I shall also compare them with information about court cases and rulings compiled by Zacchia in another book, the Centuria decisionum ad materiam Tractatus de Salario, and with the rest of the existing literature. Evidence from my comparison will allow us to understand the interaction and reciprocal influences between juridical thought and daily work practice, and underline the fact that wages were based on a complex system of norms and values where individuals, their social positions, skills, and experience determined the recognition of the just wage with reference to the local context.

Studies of working people have long been framed by the concepts of “free” and “unfree” labour, a pair that distinguishes workers who are fully proletarianized from those who are not. Proletarians are working people without property, and therefore compelled to sell their capacities for money, but at the same time personally free to choose whom to sell their capacities to. Such (double-) free labour is contrasted with labour that is unfree, either because workers are compelled to offer their capacities to specific takers – under conditions established by those takers rather than by means of a labour market – or because these workers are not completely propertyless. Throughout the twentieth century, a dominant assumption among labour historians has been that the two concepts of free and unfree labour also reflect a basic trend in modern world history: the progressive replacement of unfree labour by free labour – or the progressive proletarianization of the world's workers.

The “war communism” of the Jacobins, mobilizing all economic forces for the defence of the Republic, has many features which seem to anticipate later regimes more self-consciously and more consistently socialist. At the same time it appears in some respects as a partial return to the étatisme of the Ancien Régime in reaction against the liberalism of 1789. Particularly is this true of the adoption, in 1793, of a system of price control for essential commodities.

In the history of immigration control, the period from the 1880s to the 1920s saw an international dynamic of growing restrictions. World War I in particular has been regarded as watershed marking the end of laissez-faire migration policy. But whether 1914 can be seen as a crucial turning point depends on the country under consideration, as well as on the chosen analytical approach. Analysing Britain’s politics of immigration control before and after the war and comparing it with its Prussian equivalent, this article discusses the shifts and continuities in the concrete administration of migration. Focusing on the changing practice of expelling foreigners, it suggests a chronology of control that does not entirely correspond with the overall political changes. By 1918, the British bureaucracy possessed elaborate means to monitor aliens, and the state increasingly impacted on the migrants’ lives. In contrast, Prussia was maintaining a tightly regulated regime already, which its authorities had established well before 1914.

For the city of Bombay the establishment of British rule over Maharashtra (1818) inaugurated a period of extensive growth in trade, industry and banking. In search of wealth and power merchant communities and trading castes, mainly from the Northern province of Gujarat, settled in Bombay to exploit the economic opportunities that arose under the British raj. In the mid nineteenth century Indian entrepreneurs started a textile industry, which proved to be a new way to invest capital and to make profit. The management functions in their Bombay mills were filled by Europeans or Indians with an educated, middle-class background. The social and linguistic position of these people prevented their easy communication with the local labour-force of marathi-speaking peasant origin. Therefore, from the creation of the industry, mill-owners and management cadres delegated the task of labour recruitment to a special class of men, called jobbers.

In urban Africa today, like elsewhere, the purported survival strategies of individuals are determined constantly by severe material constraints. The poor and the new poor are overwhelmingly new city dwellers dependent on precarious, intermittent odd jobs (petits boulots; single women with small children; young school dropouts (déscolarisés, condemned to the expediencies of the streets, illicit actions and, in many cases, delinquency; unemployed graduates (diplomés-chômeurs), without opportunities for paid employment; as well as those designated successively in the vernacular as conjoncturés, déflatés and compressés (i.e. affected by wage reductions, permanent employees downgraded to temporary contracts or casual labour, and workers who have lost their jobs through massive redundancies). These individuals can meet only the most basic needs (eating, feeding their children, paying the rent). When survival becomes an issue, long-term strategies tend to be constrained by the need to fulfil the most basic needs and daily necessities. At any rate, pursuit of this objective does not involve selective mobilization of optimized means, when those who admittedly are looking out for themselves (se cherchent), rummage about (grouillent à droite [et] à gauche), pursue small jobs in unskilled manual labour or portering, or as night watchmen (racolage pour trouver des petits contrats de manoeuvrage, de manutention ou de veilleur de nuit), search constantly for opportunities to sell items that they bought for a little bit less, inland or across the border. They may also try to establish a business or small craft shop and, during the interim, get by with difficulty thanks to sporadic aid from relatives who are also unemployed.

This article focuses on the lives of workers in small commerce and in domestic service in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. It seeks to understand both what united and what differentiated maids (criadas) and clerks (caixeiros), two types of laborers whose lives and work had much in common, and two categories of labor that, although ubiquitous, are frequently overlooked in Brazilian labor history. We consider how, together, class, gender, and race shaped the divergent trajectories of criadas and caixeiros over the course of the nineteenth century, and what the legal disputes in which they were involved during that period can teach us about the shifting dynamics in labor relations in a society marked by both slavery and labor dependency more broadly. As sources for this analysis, we draw on documents produced by legal proceedings from the 1830s through the 1880s, in which men and women involved in petty commerce and domestic service presented their cases before the courts to claim their unpaid wages.

The following article examines the role of popular intellectuals in the rise of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, a mass-based movement opposed to the building of large dams in the Narmada Valley of central India. In particular, it focuses on two of this struggle's most prominent public figures and spokespersons, Medha Patkar and Arundhati Roy. The article examines the relationship between these individuals and the movement itself – how issues have been framed by Patkar and Roy for local, national, and international audiences, how support for the anti-dam struggle has been mobilized, and how each of these figures are themselves perceived and portrayed. The article will also examine some of the challenges faced by the movement and its leaders, not only from proponents of the dam projects, but also from other social activists and intellectuals. The latter have raised questions about representation, voice and strategy, as well as insider/outsider authenticity and legitimacy in the anti-dam movement, issues that this paper considers in some detail. Finally, the article draws on the Narmada case to ask some broader questions regarding popular intellectuals and social movement organizing and strategy.

The main aim of this paper is to analyse the singularity of the Spanish position with regard to coverage of the risk of sickness within the context of the different welfare models described in international literature. This analysis enables us to verify that in Spain, as in other countries, there were initially different forms of sickness coverage which coexisted, created by the market, by workers themselves and, gradually, by the state. Within this so-called mixed economy of welfare, the most extensive health coverage for the Spanish population was a result of the self-organization of workers, and this continued until the Civil War (1936–1939), not so much due to its efficacy and viability, as to the slow development of private insurance companies and the inability of the state to implement compulsory sickness insurance. The installation of the Franco dictatorship meant that the introduction of compulsory sickness insurance was further delayed, and when it was eventually passed, it offered only limited coverage, was enacted more for political than for social ends, and was to result in the virtual disappearance of friendly societies.

In the second half of the twentieth century small family businesses were still widespread in France. An important reason for this resilience was the share of unpaid work performed by kin in producing for the market. The unpaid work of family members in a range of craft and commercial family businesses – particularly by spouses, sons, and daughters – contributed to both the survival of the businesses and the well-being of the families, as is testified to in numerous sources, albeit statistically undocumented. Although social rights in France are considered to be some of the most advanced in Europe, the French Parliament was extremely slow to define the legal status of these family workers. It was not until 1982 that a law was finally enacted to bestow occupational status on collaborating spouses and to define a procedure optionally to register this unpaid work and to secure social security benefits for those carrying it out. This article focuses on the process that led to a new definition of the demarcation between the marital duty to assist, and work that exceeds this moral and legal obligation, thus creating a legal right to be compensated. Two empirical perspectives, involving an analysis of the reasons behind the shifting position of trade associations on this issue, and an assessment of the influence of long-standing gendered institutions, such as marital authority, on the formal and informal rules regulating family business are used to illustrate this slow and tortuous process of acquiring occupational rights for family workers.

The sugar workers of large-scale capitalist plantations in the Caribbean are familiar figures in social history. As portrayed in Sidney Mintz's landmark research in southern Puerto Rico, sugar workers are manifest rural proletarians: landless wage labourers exploited by “land-and-factory combines”. In Mintz's studies, Puerto Rican sugar workers became the classic case of modern rural proletarians. Such rural proletarians are the dichotomous opposite of peasants: hence given rural populations are either peasants or rural proletarians.

This article features a connected history of punitive relocations in the Spanish Empire, from the independence of Spanish America to the “loss” of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in 1898. Three levels of entanglement are highlighted here: the article looks simultaneously at punitive flows stemming from the colonies and from the metropole; it brings together the study of penal transportation, administrative deportation, and military deportation; and it discusses the relationship between punitive relocations and imprisonment. As part of this special issue, foregrounding “perspectives from the colonies”, I start with an analysis of the punitive flows that stemmed from the overseas provinces. I then address punishment in the metropole through the colonial lens, before highlighting the entanglements of penal transportation and deportation in the nineteenth-century Spanish Empire as a whole.

With the expansion of its territory in India in the first half of the nineteenth century, the British East India Company increasingly felt the need to widen postal networks and speed up communications. This essay looks at the crucial role of the dauriya (mail runner) in the development of postal networks by exploring the narratives around popular images of this “traditional” communication worker. Accounts of the lives of mail runners were interwoven with stories of their extraordinary physical strength and the dangers they negotiated along the way, their encounters with tigers, and their commitment to carry the imperial mail through rain and flood. Behind such narratives lay a history of regulations, a story of the making of a “modern” postal system. This entailed an effort to rationalize the system, calculating the speed of running, ensuring regularity, projecting estimated times of travel, and enforcing contracts. This essay aims to understand the logic of these changes, and the implications of these regulations.