During the 1990s, over seventy per cent of the married men and adult children of Stone Mill village in northeastern China have been employed i n wage labor each year. Because a vast number of household laborers (i.e. husbands, sons, and daughters) have nonagricultural jobs outside the village, daily agricultural tasks are performed by married women and elderly men, who are fondly described by the villagers of Stone Mill as “Troop Number 3860” (3860 budut). The number 38 refers to International Women's Day, March 8, representing the women in the village's agricultural labor force, while the number 60 represents the minimum age of the elderly agricultural workers.

In the context of the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, in this article, we relate the analysis of precarious work in Portugal to the state, in particular, as a direct participant functioning as both employer and mediator. In the second part, we present a short overview of the evolution of casualization in the context of employment and unemployment in contemporary Portugal (1974–2014). In the third section, we discuss state policies on labour relations, particularly in the context of the welfare state. Finally, we compare this present analysis with Swedish research done from the perspective of the state as a direct participant and mediator over the past four decades.

Paris and its Commune have so completely dominated historians' accounts of what transpired in France during the spring of 1871 that until the last decade scant attention was paid to the behavior of the provinces. Next to Paris, it was Lyon that produced probably the most significant movement – the Commune of March 22nd-25th and its sequel, the insurrection in the quarter of La Guillotière on April 30th. In each of these incidents legal proceedings and investigations were begun by the regular judicial authorities, but the Army took over the trial proceedings by virtue of a decree of August 8, 1870, which had placed the Department of the Rhône in a state of siege. The affairs were given separate trials before a conseil de guerre in 1871. Dossiers were compiled on all those individuals killed or ordered arrested in connection with the revolutionary events of March and April and were deposited in the Archives Départementales du Rhône, Series R, under the incident's name and date. There were enough judicial investigations undertaken, and fortunately done in such a thorough manner, that the author found in them the basis for a most fascinating crowd study.

This article explores the juncture between historical time and space in the context of socialist feminism, primarily through the memoir of an Indian woman activist who spent four years in East Berlin as the Asian Secretary at the Women's International Democratic Federation. This primary source material is drawn from a longer history of Indian leftist women's participation in political mobilizations and organizational work, the literary tradition of travel writing, found especially in Bengal, and academic histories of socialist feminism.

“Jewish protection rights” (Judenschutzrechte) — the legal category according to which Jews were tolerated in a few territories of the old German Empire during the early modern period — made it difficult for Jewish subjects to establish a secure existence. There were, above all, two reasons for this. First, the personalized nature of protection rights enabled the respective authorities to develop selective settlement policies oriented consistently towards the fiscal interests of the state. The direct results of this were increased tributary payments and the withdrawal of one's “protection document” (Schutzbrief) if taxes were not paid. Second, legislators for the territories developed a multiplicity of restrictive decrees concerning the gainful employment of Jews. Consequently, there were only a few economic niches n i which “privileged Jews” (Scbutzjuden) were permitted to earn a living. In the countryside — which is where such settlements were mainly situated in the early modern period — Jews were thus dependent upon peddling foods, textiles and cattle as well as upon lending money. The specific methods of business which developed from this were reflected in the anti-Jewish legend of the deceptive travelling salesman who, by awakening ever new consumer needs, brought his Christian customers into increasing debt. If one confronts this legend with reality, one finds two characteristic methods of business which arose out of necessity: the cultivation of a varied palette of goods offered, and the development of a differentiated system of payment by instalments. At the same time, these business methods accorded with the model of an “economy of makeshift”. In the sense of such “makeshift trade”, Jewish peddlers were prepared to travel for days in order to make even the most insignificant profits.