This article makes use of nearly 25,000 observations representing over 95,000 paid workdays across over 300 years to investigate individual work patterns, work availability, and the changes in work seasonality over time. This sample is comprised of workers in the construction industry, and includes unskilled men and women as well as skilled building craftsmen – the industry that is often used to estimate comparative real wages through early modern Europe. Data come predominantly from Scania, the southernmost region in modern day Sweden, and especially from Malmö, the largest town in the region.

Findings indicate that workers probably do not engage in paid labour on a purely labour-supply-based schedule, but are strongly impacted by the demand for construction labour, which was highly seasonal and impacted by local labour institutions. Seasonality was stronger further back in the past, indicating that finding long-term work may have been more difficult in earlier periods. A typical work year could probably not have been longer than 150 days, and would be made up of shorter work spells at several different sites. This is not enough work to meet standard assumptions of 250 days, or enough work for an unskilled man to support his family at a respectable level. Individual workers rarely worked more than a handful of days in a year on a construction site, even when labour demand was high, indicating that they did not maximize their income from waged labour.

The article explores the evolution of household income in India before the late nineteenth century. At a time when criticism of estimates of global real wages challenges the assumptions arising from the Great Divergence Debate, we aim to provide alternative ways of contributing to the discussion. By looking at individual and household income, as well as consumption levels in different parts of India, we found that members of the household other than the head (namely women) supplied a larger part of its total income than an analysis of wage differentials would suggest. Moreover, we argue that India, in the centuries under review, had a functioning labour market, despite several impediments. This adds to the value of our data as building blocks to reconstruct real wages and, consequently, to better understand welfare levels. Nevertheless, the decline in the Indian skill premium suggests that channels of social mobility decreased over time. The implications of all these findings for the Great Divergence Debate depend on the extent to which our approach also has consequences for our view on household income in other parts of Eurasia. Certainly, they call for a nuanced approach to Indian economic development during the period.

This paper provides an account of a specific operation – the removal of the thymus gland (thymectomy) to treat the rare neurological condition myasthenia gravis – from its first performance in 1936, by the American surgeon Alfred Blalock, to the publication in 2016 of an international multicentre randomised controlled trial (RCT) of the technique. Thymectomy was the subject of a transatlantic controversy in the 1950s, in which the main players were the English surgeon Geoffrey Keynes, and American neurologists and surgeons from New York, Boston, and the Mayo Clinic. The resolution of this controversy involved the use of increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques, but also crucially other influences including the social transformation of thoracic surgery, and competition between the leading American centres. The consensus achieved after this controversy was challenged in the late 1970s, eventually prompting the implementation of a trial acceptable to twenty-first-century evidence-based medicine. This account will demonstrate that surgical innovation in the period covered required increasing attention to the statistical basis of patient selection and outcome evaluation; that the processes of technical innovation cannot be regarded as separate from developments in the professional culture of surgery, and that one of the consequences of these changes has been the gradual eclipse of the prestigious autonomous surgeon.

Puerto Rico’s seven hundred miles of coastline are the most dynamic, biodiverse, heavily populated, and hotly contested part of the archipelago. Hurricanes beat the island from the ocean side while luxury tourist developments encroach from the land. These forces converge in the zona marítimo terrestre (ZMT), which includes littoral areas and navigable portions of waterways in which, according to Puerto Rican law, tides and the biggest waves from storms can be felt. This clunky legal term, notable for its shifting and affective dimension, has become part of everyday conversations and creative practices in contemporary Puerto Rico, but no academic study has considered its cultural significance. This article brings together insights from the fields of environmental justice and environmental humanities to propose that works of art and literature in the ZMT are autogestiones acuáticas, or independently imagined and managed shoreline activities that contest coastal displacement and articulate a decolonial sense of place within nonsovereign dynamics.

Attending to our responsibility to the dead in our present historical moment of danger, this lecture stages three distinct reading experiments in “living together with the dead” with special attention to Palestine and Algeria. The first scene contemplates the times of war and death that constitute what Jalal Toufic refers to as “the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster.” The second scene explores artistic resurrection in literature by examining antiphonic burial during colonial war while juxtaposing philosophical conceptions of the relationship between death, burial, and history writing. I thus elaborate a concept of death as non-secular and theological, and of history writing as a form of anamnesis that inhabits the isthmus between the Terrestrial realm and the realm of the Unseen. The final scene is a meditation on poetry under conditions of colonial and postcolonial catastrophe. Throughout, theology and poetry serve as provocations to the discipline of history.

This article uses letters from BL, ms Lansdowne 99 to explore how a diverse group of individuals experiencing mental and emotional distress utilised religious ideas as a primary means of interpreting their experience and expressing themselves to those in authority in Elizabethan England. It shifts emphasis away from the causes and towards the construction and experience of distress. It argues that such letters shed important light on the character and progress of the English Reformation by the closing decades of the sixteenth century, as well as on the operation of the process of Reformation itself.

Social scientists have long been interested in elite cohesion in American society, recognizing its potential implications for democracy and governance. While empirical research has focused on corporate elites and, in particular, on cohesion derived from shared board memberships, cohesion among those in the highest positions in the American state and historical change in that cohesion have been little studied. Drawing on a novel dataset of the career histories of 2,221 people who were appointed to these elite positions between 1898 and 1998, I examine whether administrative elites, prior to their elite appointment, attended the same educational institutions or worked in the same agencies of the federal government at the same time. I find evidence of increasing elite cohesion during the twentieth century. Educational cohesion increases significantly in the three decades following the World War II and then declines slightly toward the end of the century. This increase goes hand in hand with a change from college to graduate education as the primary site generating educational cohesion. Federal government workplace cohesion increases markedly in the 1930s and 1940s and then remains high. As people are appointed to different organizations within the American state, their educational and workplace connections create inter-agency networks that, it is expected, facilitate mutual understanding and coordination and thus help integrate the American administrative state.