This introduction highlights the main subjects and research questions addressed in the articles making up this Special Issue on the labour histories of transport in the Global South. Although historiographical interest in the history of transport labour is growing, scientific knowledge on the subject is still very limited. This is especially true for histories from outside Europe and North America. Important topics and research problems covered here are: (1) transport labour as facilitating the exchange and mobility of goods but also of peoples and ideas – as such transport constitutes a noteworthy element of social history; (2) transport labour as a factor of production which is relevant for industrial and agrarian societies, as well as for market-driven and socialist economies; (3) the extent to which the processes of globalization, imperial expansion, and the emergence of global capitalism owe a debt to transport labour of the global south and its micro-histories.

After World War II, French and British administrations in the African continent were in theory obliged to end forced labour. According to the rhetoric, compulsory labour practices disappeared altogether. However, the scrutiny of processes on the ground, comparing French Equatorial Africa and Northern Rhodesia under British rule, shows that the practicalities of the abolition of such labour practices were far more complex. In the French case, colonial officials actively planned for the reorganization of compulsory labour through the back door, mainly through the battle against “vagrancy” and “African laziness”. British administrators continued with practices organized by “native chiefs”, and attempted to maintain involuntary labour through a generous definition of “emergency situations”. In both cases, more profound analysis of the late colonial mind shows interesting continuities in the commitment of European officials to forced labour, which are likely to have been transferred, in part, into the views of the agents of postcolonial states.

In September 1896, the city of Bombay witnessed the beginning of a long-drawn-out epidemic crisis, with the outbreak of bubonic plague. This article investigates one particular dimension of this crisis – its effects upon the city's cotton textile mills, and its profound, though temporary, alteration of the relations between employers and workers. It argues that the structure of industrial relations in the textile mills in the second half of the nineteenth century rested upon the retention of wage arrears by mill managements, which forced workers into permanent debt, and bound them to the mill and their employers. The demographic and industrial crisis ushered in during the plague years, the article shows, cracked open this structure of industrial control, and workers were able to sustain a new, fleeting system of industrial “regulation from below”, based on the daily payment of wages. Through a study of the tensions in textile mills in 1897, situated within the broader context of a crisis of urban labour relations, the article shows the ways in which industrial relations were both deconstructed and reconstituted in a new form.

This article follows the administrative usage of the term “labour” and its political effects in the period from roughly 1918–1924 in Madras Presidency, India. In this short period, I will argue, fundamental tensions in the ability of the concept to refer coherently to its object came violently to the surface. The prevailing tension in both governmental discourse and in the sphere of political representation concerned the extent to which either caste status or economic class were to be understood as the primary determinant of the meaning of labour. At the nub of this conflict lay the contested status of the descendants of hereditarily unfree labourers who supplied the bulk of the Presidency's labour requirements and were referred to in this period as Adi-Dravidas. Should they be construed as ritually disadvantaged caste subjects who also happened to labour, or as paradigmatic labourers who were also subjected to caste discrimination? Adi-Dravidas provoked both the anxiety of the elite political classes who wished to incorporate them into larger nationalist projects, as well as the reformist zeal of the colonial state, throwing the category “labour” into crisis. By navigating the use to which “labour” was put by caste elites, state officials, and Adi-Dravidas themselves, I will reflect on the coherence of caste and class as analytic concepts for political and social struggles of the kind I am describing.

The Nieboer-Domar hypothesis has proved to be a powerful tool for identifying the economic conditions under which slavery was more likely to emerge as a dominant form of labour. It states that in cases of land abundance and labour shortages the use of slavery was likely to become a vital alternative means of increasing production. These conditions have been identified for large parts of pre-colonial and semi-colonial Africa. The Nieboer-Domar hypothesis has been used by a number of historians and economic historians to analyse the role of slavery and bonded labour in Africa. The hypothesis is not, however, uncontested. Scholars have criticized it on both theoretical and empirical grounds. This article discusses the validity of the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis using the eighteenth-century Cape Colony as our point of departure. We show that the hypothesis holds in part, but also that it needs to be modified. First, slavery emerged as an urban phenomenon. Second, the use of slaves increased in parallel with other forms of labour, and the role of slaves can be understood only in relation to a wide range of existing labour contracts. Once established, slavery came to play a significant role in facilitating increased production on the settler farms in the eighteenth century. Capacity for surplus production was the key factor, but why slavery became a major form of labour was partly a consequence of its existence in the urban areas and partly of how it could be combined with other forms of labour.

In the period between the 1760s and the 1850s boatmen were the most important transport workers in early colonial eastern India, at least numerically. Unfortunately, they have received little scholarly attention so far. By looking at the regime of work, which surprisingly had strong bases in the notion of contract from as early as the 1770s, this article explores the nature of work, work organization, and resistance by boatmen. It argues that although work was structured according to the wage or hire-based (thika) contract regime, the social, political, and ecological conditions in which contract operated were equally crucial. The centrality of contract was premised upon how effectively it was enforceable and, in fact, historically enforced. Boatmen being one of the most important “native” groups with which the British were left on their often long journeys, this article suggests that contract helps to understand the formal “structure of work”, and the minute details of the journey help to understand the “world of work”, of which clandestine trade, weather, wind, rain, torrents, tracking, mooring, internal squabbling, and, not least, preparing food were some of the main components.

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.

This article examines the rise of an irrigation economy in Hetao along the Yellow River during the nineteenth century, and uses it as a case study to illustrate how the periphery played a major and hitherto overlooked role in the development of the Chinese economy, which confounds the conventional view of a Chinese path of development that replicated smallholder farming. I focus on a group of Han entrepreneurs known as land merchants (dishang) who combined capital and expertise in irrigation development, and introduced a new set of property regime and socio-technical arrangements that fundamentally changed the frontier society. By linking the changes in local society to regional and global processes, this study demonstrates the centrality of the periphery as not only a zone of possibility and experimentation, but more importantly, a “contact zone” that facilitated China's integration into a new global market system.

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.

This article explores the chasm between party leaders and rank-and-file workers within the postwar Italian Socialist Party and Polish Socialist Party between 1944 and 1947. So far only studied in the context of communist parties, existing historiography on this theme has observed a deep rift between the radicalization amongst grassroots activists defending the self-management workers had won during the final days of World War II and the moderation practised by party leaders desperate to demonstrate their trustworthiness as government partners. Based on an analysis of the sentiments amongst socialist workers in Łódż and Sesto San Giovanni, and of the visions espoused by provincial and national socialist leaders, this article argues that the dynamics within socialist parties were exactly the other way around. Whereas socialist leaders ascribed a crucial role to grassroots participatory structures in their efforts to teach the working classes democracy, socialist workers were more concerned with day-to-day survival than with participation, self-management, or any other question.

This article analyses the establishment of a network of hostels for unemployed workers in Yugoslavia between the two world wars. The analysis investigates the legal, political, and institutional background to these hostels, and how they were conceived and financed. By looking at the development of a new public social policy from the perspective of the jobless, the article aims to examine the nature, goals, and especially the boundaries of a modern provision for Yugoslav workers, namely its strategies and practices of social inclusion and exclusion. The article reveals how a modern concept of unemployment gradually emerged. These hostels were not part of a traditional policy on poverty; they were the expression of a new and more modern form of social policy. The article further shows how new social differences and distances between “non-working” people were created, and what specific impact those differences and distances had on the functioning of these institutions.

In 1802, several “country ships” arrived in London from Bengal, their lascar crews having suffered severe casualties due to fatigue, exposure, and starvation. Aboard the Union, the officers’ treatment of the crew was so bad that the lascars and a sympathetic English sailor alerted the East India Company. Their testimony, recorded by the Company's Committee of Shipping, provides new insights into lascar living and working conditions – in particular the problem of undermanning ships – reminding us how the management–labour dynamic aboard a ship at sea always favoured owners and officers rather than workers.

This article examines the roles of Mongolian monasteries and lamas in transportation between the Qing Chinese (1636–1911) and Russian Romanov (1613–1917) empires during the latter half of the nineteenth century. A series of treaties between 1858 and 1882 granted Russian subjects the right to trade in Mongolian territories under Qing sovereignty, and the resultant increase of Russian trade across Mongolia provided new wage-earning opportunities. Larger monasteries, with their access to pack animals and laborers, acted as brokers, while for poorer lamas haulage was one of the few sources of paid labor available in Mongolian territories, making working in transportation a strategy of survival for many Mongolian lamas. Mongolian porters provide a window on to how the broad processes of nineteenth-century imperialism in the Qing empire affected labor on the Sino–Russian frontier, and on to how imperialism was experienced in one of the most remote corners of the Qing empire.

Historical research on domestic servants has a long tradition. Research, however, has become more systematic from the 1960s onwards thanks to social historians, historians focusing on the family, historical demographers and (particularly from the 1970s) women's and gender historians. For a long time, scholars assumed that domestic service (especially by live-in workers) would decline, or even disappear, because of household modernization, social progress, and development of the welfare state. The (largely unexpected) “revival” of paid domestic and care work in the past three decades has prompted sociologists and other social scientists to focus on the theme, opening new opportunities for exchange between historians and social scientists. This article provides a review of the research on these issues at a global level, though with a focus on Europe and the (former) European colonies, over the past fifty years, illustrating the different approaches and their results.

This article shows how ideas of Arab nationalism, socialism, and communism spread to the Arab Gulf states. It outlines how migrant workers, teachers, students returning from abroad, and the emergence of a print culture filled with Arab nationalist and leftist ideas in the 1940s created the basis for widespread political mobilization in the oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. After major strikes in 1953 and 1956 and a harsh crackdown, leftist activists moved underground and into exile. They continued to be active clandestinely and gathered in various capitals in the region. Members of the Shia Muslim minority in the Eastern Province played a special role in the labour movement and secular opposition groups. The latter promised the Shia inclusion in a larger political project and thus they were seen as an antidote to sectarian discrimination against this minority. The article emphasizes the importance of transnational networks, organizational resources such as libraries and social clubs, and a radicalized public sphere for political mobilization.

In the nineteenth century, colonial officials relied heavily on coercion to recruit “coolie” labour for “public works” and to provide various support services in the North-East Frontier of British India. “Treaties” with defeated chiefs and the subsequent population enumeration and taxation were strongly oriented to the mobilization of labour for road building and porterage. Forced labour provided the colonial officials with a steady supply of coolies to work on the roads as well as carriers for military expeditions. In mobilizing labour resources, however, colonial officials had to create and draw upon native agents such as the headmen and interpreters who came to play a crucial role in the colonial order of things. Focusing on the Naga Hills, this article will examine the efforts of the colonial state to secure a large circulating labour force, the forms of labour relations that emerged from the need to build colonial infrastructure and the demand for coolies in military expeditions, the response of the hill people to labour conscription and its impact on the hill “tribes”.