The British educated classes have long worried and fantasized about working-class religious belief and unbelief. Anglican churchmen feared Methodist “enthusiasm” in the eighteenth century, radicalism in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and urban, industrial irreligion after the 1851 Religious Census on churchgoing. In a mirror image of these old anxieties, most labour historians have wished away Christianity in the twentieth century. The long-standing shared socialist teleology of Marxists and Fabians leads to the modern, socialist labour movement. In this Marxian take on secularization theory, a new, more cohesive proletariat or singular “working class” forms, with an anti-capitalist, “socialist” consciousness reflected in the political, trade union, and co-operative institutions of the “labour movement”. Suddenly, economic, social, and political history find a single, unified subject. At the level of belief, socialism displaces those old Victorian pretenders for working-class hearts and minds: conservatism, liberalism, and Christianity. Sometime between 1914 and 1918, the Christian religion disappears from ordinary lives, as in Selina Todd's recent, The People, where popular religious faith is barely worth talking about.

Inequality has increased in most Western countries since the early 1980s. In a recent report, the international non-governmental organization Oxfam noted that the twenty-six richest people in the world own as much wealth as the poorest fifty per cent of the world's population. Discontent with the growing disparities in wealth and income has soared in recent years, especially in the wake of the 2007/2008 financial crisis and the “Great Recession” that followed. The Occupy movement protested against the greed of the “one per cent”, referring to the highly skewed income distribution in the US. Former US president Barack Obama proclaimed the growth of within-country economic inequality as “the defining challenge of our time”. Yet, he enacted few policies that reduced inequality during his two terms in office; the Gini coefficient in the US actually increased slightly between 2007 and 2016. His successor, whose election has often been explained as a consequence of these high levels of inequality, has slashed taxes for the wealthy, probably causing further rises in inequality in the future. In this essay, I will review two recent economic history books that examine the historical roots of within-country inequality on a global scale: Branko Milanovic's Global Inequality (2016) and Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler (2017). Formerly a lead economist at the World Bank, Milanovic is a well-known scholar working in the field of economic inequality, while Scheidel has a background as a specialist in the economic, social, and demographic history of antiquity.

Military labor played a key role in conquering and preserving ports as nodes in trading networks. This article treats the military labor of the British occupation of Manila from 1762 to 1764, during the Seven Years War. It examines the motley crew that formed the British forces, exploring British categories of military laborers sent from Madras. The particular combination of forces composed for this expedition had more to do with the East India Company's concerns in Madras than with what was thought to be needed to take and hold Manila. These military laborers were sometimes unruly, insisting on better pay, and deserting when it was not forthcoming. The story of the British occupation of Manila highlights how ideas about desertion traveled along with military laborers from one port city to another in the Indian Ocean world, and what happened when they did.

This article examines the social and spatial embedding of the Indonesian prison island of Nusakambangan within the colonial society of the Dutch East Indies. It challenges the conception of the colonial prison site as an unquestioned symbol of discipline and control in the hands of the authorities, doing so by studying the various images, reputations, and stigmas of the island that circulated in the colony. Its reputation was established and disseminated by journalists, politicians, and other “informed outsiders”, who paid short authorized visits to the island, and their conclusions and evaluations determined, to a large extent, the effectiveness of Nusakambangan as a deterrent and as a symbol of colonial discipline and control.

Havana's status as a colonial port shaped both its infrastructure needs and the patterns of labor recruitment and coercion used to build it. The port city's initial economic and political orientation was maritime, with capital and labor invested largely in defense and shipbuilding. By the nineteenth century, Cuba had become a plantation colony based on African enslavement, exporting increasing quantities of sugar to Europe and North America. Because the island was relatively underpopulated, workers for infrastructure projects and plantations had to be imported through global circuits of coerced labor, such as the transatlantic slave trade, the transportation of prisoners, and, in the 1800s, indentured workers from Europe, Mexico, or Asia. Cuban elites and colonial officials in charge of transportation projects experimented with different mixes of workers, who labored on the roads and railways under various degrees of coercion, but always within the socio-economic and cultural framework of a society based on the enslavement of people considered racially distinct. Thus, the indenture of white workers became a crucial supplement to other forms of labor coercion in the building of rail lines in the 1830s, but Cuban elites determined that these workers’ whiteness was too great a risk to the racial hierarchy of the Cuban labor market and therefore sought more racially distinct contract workers after 1840.

How can we explain the demise of the new postwar moral framework of anti-racism and equality and the subsequent rise of integration pessimism in Western Europe in the 1980s, a pessimism that led to the widely accepted idea, from left to right, that “multiculturalism” has failed? And how does this square with the simultaneous establishment of an extraordinary free migration regime within Europe that enables EU citizens to move and pick up work in any other member state? Answers to these questions can be found in three very different, yet complimentary studies that help us to understand more deeply the current alarmist public view of migration and integration, as well as its historical roots: The Crisis of Multiculturalism by Rita Chin, based in Ann Arbor; The European Migration Regime by Emmanuel Comte, from Berkeley; and Steven Jensen's (Danish Institute for Human Rights) The Making of International Human Rights. The studies by Chin and Comte offer a representative gauge of the blossoming field of migration studies and, in particular, show how this specialist niche can enrich insights into much broader (political, cultural, economic, and social) postwar developments in Europe and beyond. Jensen's innovative and critical book on the postwar “humanitarian turn” is highly relevant for migration studies, as it places the establishment of the United Nations (UN) and a number of its institutions, such as UNHCR and UNESCO, in a new light. Although many more books have been published on these topics in recent years, these three complement each other and provide a useful building block for a new understanding of the emergence of the postwar European migration regime, its paradoxes and consequences. In this review, I will first sketch the wider context and then detail the three books and how they relate to each other.

From 1834 to 1850, Latin America's first penitentiary, the Casa de Correção in Rio de Janeiro, was a construction site where slaves, “liberated Africans”, convicts, and unfree workers interacted daily, forged identities, and deployed resistance strategies against the pressures of confinement and the demands of Brazil's eclectic labor regimes. This article examines the utilization of this motley crew of workers, the interactions among “liberated Africans”, slaves, and convict laborers, and the government's intervention between 1848 and 1850 to restrict slave labor at the prison in favor of free waged workers. It asserts that the abolition of the slave trade in 1850 and the subsequent inauguration of the penitentiary augured profound changes in Rio's labor landscape, from a predominantly unfree to a free wage labor force.

This article explores the transportation of Indian convicts to the port cities of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean during the period 1789 to 1866. It considers the relationship between East India Company transportation and earlier and concurrent British Crown transportation to the Americas and Australia. It is concerned in particular with the interconnection between convictism and enslavement in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Examining the roots of transportation in South Asia in the repressive policies of the East India Company, especially in relation to its occupation of land and expropriation of resources, it moves on to discuss aspects of convicts’ lives in Moulmein, Singapore, Mauritius, and Aden. This includes their labour regime and their relationship to other workers. It argues that Indian convict transportation was part of a carceral circuit of repression and coerced labour extraction that was intertwined with the expansion of East India Company governance and trade. The Company used transportation as a means of removing resistant subjects from their homes, and of supplying an unfree labour force to develop commodity exports and to build the infrastructure necessary for the establishment, population, and connection of littoral nodes. However, the close confinement and association of convicts during transportation rendered the punishment a vector for the development of transregional political solidarities, centred in and around the Company's port cities.

This article focuses on African women (Quitandeiras) who worked in the food sector of the fast-growing port city of Rio de Janeiro during the first half of the nineteenth century. The growing need to supply the harbour workers as well as the crews and captives on the slave ships stimulated the food economy in Rio de Janeiro. The absence of effective government food infrastructure offered opportunities for small businesses. The maritime world on a ship was, in many ways, male. However, there were a high number of female workers in the ports, especially in the informal food sector, frequently mentioned by contemporary authors. This article analyses the involvement of these women as part of a growing working class, who contributed to Rio de Janeiro's crucial role in global networks. The research also focuses on the formation of self-organized groups of female vendors. Thus, it provides further insights into strategies of local actors. By grouping together, the women gained some measure of protection, which empowered them to survive in a difficult and highly competitive market. Through their activities, they also changed the urban space of the port area, leaving their mark on it. They acted as crucial vectors for establishing different diaspora dishes, which met huge demand among many consumers. In doing so, they contributed to the formation of an African-American food culture on the streets of Rio de Janeiro.