Across the twentieth century, hundreds of women worked as nurses, cooks, cleaners, and teachers on Mexico’s railroads. They have been overlooked in histories of the railroads and Mexican industrialization more broadly, their limited number perhaps suggesting that their work is not of analytical importance in understanding processes of economic development and class formation. On the contrary, these women’s work constituted many of the most coveted labor rights of the postrevolutionary railroad workforce, itself a symbolic vanguard of Mexico’s working class and one of the most important beneficiaries of the expansion of social and economic rights ushered in by the Mexican Revolution. The gendered division of labor characteristic of the railroads was neither accidental nor insignificant. Railroads used the feminization of the work of social reproduction to write off structural failures and predictable shortcomings in welfare provision as failures of femininity. Women became scapegoats for the consistent violation of workers’ rights through underfunding and understaffing. In tracing this process, the article models a historiographical and methodological intervention with broader relevance. It suggests that the social and labor rights that expanded around the world in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries must be studied not only from the vantage of legal or political history, but as themselves questions of social and labor history. Making these rights real depended on socially reproductive work that has often been marginal in accounts of industrialization and economic development. It is impossible to understand the political economy of social and economic rights without understanding women’s work.

In this article, we examine the labor activism and struggle of Armenian women working in the silk industry around Adapazarı, to the east of Istanbul, in the early 1910s. Although labor activism in the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution of 1908 has received ample attention of scholars, these women and their struggle remained un(der)examined.

We focus on how these female workers organized and in particular on the Adapazarı Silk Workers’ Union (in Armenian: Adapazarı Medaksi Kordzaworagan Miutiwn) and its relations with the (male dominated) Armenian socialist activist organizations of the period. As such, it contextualizes these women’s activism within the broader social activism of post-revolutionary Ottoman society. We show that these women not only stood up against the factory owners but, at times, also against Armenian socialists from whom they on the one hand received support but who, on the other hand, tried to control them by denying them autonomy.

The article sits at the crossroad of social, labor and women’s history and the history of one of the larger ethno-religious communities in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians. Using Armenian- and French-language sources, it significantly expands our knowledge about a hitherto ignored group of women workers and their activism in the late Ottoman Empire. Moreover, as the workers, socialist activists, and factory owners were mainly Armenians, the article also enhances our knowledge on labor activism and revolutionary politics within the Armenian community and how these were located within the broader society of the late Ottoman Empire.

This article examines the large and modern sugar factories established in Egypt in the 1870s as multi-phased production sites that combined coerced peasant labor with the deployment of state of the art steam technology. These factories possessed the capacity to produce 7.5% of global sugar output from sugarcane at the time. Yet their scale, combined with their reliance on forced labor, have been neglected in Egypt’s labor historiography. The article argues that the forms of resistance enacted by coerced workers on these worksites co-shaped the emergence of peasant wage labor in subsequent decades. Drawing on the analytical perspectives of sugar history and Global Labor History (GLH), it demonstrates how wage labor took shape on industrial worksites in rural regions—challenging earlier labor histories that treat urban wage labor as the starting point of modern Egypt’s labor history. In doing so, it shows that rural labor strikes predated the conventional periodization of labor strikes and working-class formation in Egypt’s cities during the 1880s–90s. Finally, this global microhistory argues that the materiality and temporality of sugar production, when combined with the resources-demanding and labor-intensive technology of the factories, complicate Egypt’s late nineteenth-century position as a commodity frontier for Europe’s industrial capitalism.

In their 2007 essay “‘The Body’ as a Useful Category for Working-Class History,” feminist scholars Ava Baron and Eileen Boris urged labor historians to consider “Why and in what ways … bodies matter for studies of work and the working class.” While scholars have written histories attentive to cultural assumptions about bodies at work, the impact of employment on the human body, and people’s experiences of their working bodies, little consideration has been given to the ways bodies matter for unemployed workers. This article uses Baron and Boris’s invitation to labor historians as a point of departure, but asks, in what ways do bodies matter for studies of people without work? Specifically, in what ways did bodies matter for unemployed working-class men in 1930s Britain? Using parliamentary papers and debates, published first-person narratives, and government documents, I demonstrate that prolonged unemployment was a bodily crisis for working-class men, who expected—and were expected—to direct their bodies and minds to productive labor. Critical Disability Studies scholars’ have emphasized the need to interrogate ableist norms that produce a “corporeal standard,” which for working-class men meant bodies and minds able to perform productive work. Ableist structures, policies, and practices, intersecting in the 1930s British case predominantly with gender and class identities and norms, challenged unemployed men, who experienced unemployment in ways that situated them outside the working-class masculine corporeal standard. To explore these issues, I focus on two closely linked concepts: fitness and employability. During the 1930s, British politicians, bureaucrats, and unemployed men assumed that men who had been without work for prolonged periods of time would not have the physical and mental fitness to be re-employed. I introduce the concept “embodying unemployment” to capture the relationships among discourses, bodily and emotional processes, and material conditions that shaped policy decisions, unemployed men’s experiences, and practices to enhance fitness and employability, highlighting the various perceptions of what caused unemployed men’s bodies and minds to deteriorate from the ableist norm and what strategies might slow or arrest the feared changes.

Raymond Williams’ concept of “structure of feelings” with particular reference to the residual form, underpins experiences of deindustrialization in the embodiment of industry, gendering identities, and community values. This is a complex relationship between work, health, community and culture, where working life reached beyond the coalface. This article analyzes the significance of these interconnecting factors through the oral history accounts of former miners and residents within the Kent Coalfield. In drawing on Williams’ concept of “structure of feelings” with particular reference to “residual culture,” it reveals how ill-health was seen as “remarkable” and “traumatic,” yet equally “unremarkable” and “normal.” Having recognized the expectant inevitability of these issues, the discussion focuses on a particular understanding of community culture, social interactions and memories within the context of health and illness, which highlights the centrality embodiment in understanding deindustrialization as a process of change.

Australian workers mobilised precociously to win the eight-hour day. Building workers in Melbourne secured the standard in 1856. They inspired and helped to lead a wider movement that shared in the victory over subsequent decades. By the early 1890s the “eight-hour day” was widely embraced as a social norm. Australian successes were contemplated in a range of international publications.

Australian employees in several trades secured an eight-hour day from the middle 1850s. By the 1890s, Australian advances had attracted considerable international attention. But these precocious Australian successes have not yet been satisfactorily explained. The dominant explanations focus especially on a propitious environment in the middle 1850s, buoyed by the wealth of a gold rush and characterised by labour shortages. These accounts overestimate the persistence of favourable market conditions and underestimate the import of the political context and of creative and determined collective struggle.

This article offers a new interpretation. It suggests that the Australian campaign for eight-hours is best understood as a social movement. It then applies five key concepts drawn from the field of social-movement studies to examine the campaign and to explain its successes: political opportunities; framing; strategy; repertoire; and mobilising structures.

The article aims not only to explain the Australian eight-hours campaign, but also to demonstrate the value of concepts and approaches drawn from “social-movement studies” to the study of labour history. It is based on a substantial source base, including union records, scores of newspapers, parliamentary debates, contemporary pamphlets, and government reports.

The English weavers who organized what would become a flourishing cooperative business in 1844 remain famous worldwide. In the second half of the nineteenth century, their story traveled through a newly international labor press, inspiring workers to build cooperatives in the template set forth by the so-called “Rochdale Pioneers.” While scholars have detailed the Rochdale model’s impact on the cooperative movement itself, historians have missed its significance as a vector for wider changes in working-class politics. Drawing on cooperative movement literature and organizational records, this essay traces the transnational circulation of the Rochdale story from Britain to the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. I explore how the Rochdale method’s influence simultaneously standardized cooperative practices, and reflected a protracted shift in anti-capitalist struggles. Against the backdrop of land dispossession and anti-labor violence, the Rochdale experiment captured hopes for a cooperative economic strategy fit to survive in the modern era. Focusing on the rise of consumers’ cooperation in the United States, I show how organizers mobilized a cooperative vision for a post-enclosure world—one consistent with the structure, if not the spirit, of private property and commodity markets. This article explores how the cooperative movement became a vital site for reimagining economic autonomy as industrial capitalism conscripted ever more people into wage labor.

Although Franco’s dictatorship in Spain was rooted in the repression of the labor movement and the working class, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed political and social changes that enabled the anti-Franco unions to achieve better conditions for workers. However, domestic workers were denied these improvements due to their exclusion from the formal labor system. This exclusion kept domestic workers in the informal sector and ensured their continued feminization and precarity. This article contributes to debates on the level of coercion in non-productive work by examining labor discipline in the Spanish domestic service during the 1960s and 1970s. It follows Marcel van der Linden’s proposal to focus on three defining stages of labor discipline: entry, work and exit. Although the working conditions and identities of Spanish domestic workers in the 1960s and 1970s have been studied, coercion and resistance have rarely been put at the center of analysis. Doing so introduces Spanish domestic labor into the study of coerced work, showing how it was affected by global features such as migration, feminization, all-day work, and control over workers’ bodies. This paper sees labor discipline as dialectically constructed, shaped by both adherence to and negation of established norms. Therefore, it is important to study both how domestic workers complied with rules set by employers and how everyday forms of resistance challenged labor discipline and thus contributed to its refinement. Some of these forms of resistance (petty theft, change of employment) caused confrontation, while others (marriage) fell within accepted moral and legal boundaries. The article is based on a wide range of sources, including surveys and reports by Catholic working-class organizations, letters sent by domestic workers to the Elena Francis radio advice program, and court records and newspaper reports about domestic workers’ theft. These sources make it possible to analyze labor discipline from different perspectives, showing variation in mistresses’ coercive measures, domestic workers’ attitude towards coercion, and autonomous practices against household discipline. While this paper focuses specifically on the intersection between class and gender in late Franco Spain, it contributes to labor and coercion studies in other geographical and historical contexts.

The paper examines the case of branch cutters, the only female workers employed in Soviet logging brigades, focusing on the marginalization of women into physically demanding yet technologically stagnant roles. Branch cutters’ primary duty was to turn felled pine trees into logs by manually chopping off boughs, branches, and knots. By the mid-1960s, this task remained the only non-mechanized job in Soviet logging. Female branch cutters worked with axes alongside male workers equipped with modern logging equipment—chainsaws, tractors, loaders, and haulers. Adding to previous studies that highlight wage disparities and occupational segregation, this paper analyzes how labor protection regulations aimed not merely at safeguarding but also at systematically excluding women from technologically complex labor, confined them to (relatively) low-paying, dangerous, and low-status jobs. The article traces in detail how Soviet labor policies of the 1930s–1980s explored the idea of women as physically weaker workers and deliberately constructed a discourse of gendered labor based on the categories of “ease” and “hardship.” Labor protection bodies, trade unions, and enterprises constantly restricted women’s access to mechanized, high-paying jobs based on this division, bolstering their exclusion from upward mobility. The study thus expands our understanding of gendered labor dynamics in Soviet industry, illustrating how technological stratification reinforced occupational and gender segregation. By centering women’s experiences in an underexplored sector of Soviet industry, the research offers new insights into the complexities of labor inequality and gendered power structures in the Soviet Union.

The article examines the labor activism of women workers at the Újpest jute factory in pre-1914 Hungary, focusing on the organizing efforts and strikes led by a young worker, Klára Balázs, and a locksmith and future author, Lajos Kassák. It situates the events within the broader history of the labor movement, exploring the tensions between workers in leading sectors and marginalized groups. To better situate Kassák’s and Balázs’s work in its historical context, the article also examines the major jute factory strikes (1896, 1903) leading up to the stoppages they spearheaded in 1908, explaining how Social Democratic discourses often oversimplified these strikes and sidelined women’s active roles in grassroots organizing. At the same time, instead of exclusively addressing the everyday sexism inscribed in the sources, the article places the events within the broader trends of late-19th-century industrialization in the region, highlighting some of the main structural conditions that prevented women workers from achieving long-term organizing successes in the factory. Through a critical reading of primary sources, including Kassák’s semi-autobiographical novel, Egy ember élete and Social Democratic news reports, the article contextualizes these struggles in the pre-First World War movement dynamics of Budapest’s outskirts, while also offering a structuralist account of the economic factors that influenced the successes and failures of the workers’ activism. This analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of early-20th-century labor struggles, offering insights into the intersections of gender, class, and labor activism in the context of industrialization and social change in Eastern Europe.

Nadakkal Parameswaran Pillai, a worker at the Indian Coffee House (ICH) in Trichur, later recalled that the cooperative found its place in history through its “martyrdom” at the hands of Sanjay Gandhi during India’s Emergency (1975–1977). Before the state demolished its Connaught Place location in 1976, that flagship café in New Delhi became the largest and most visible expression of workers’ confidence. From selling coffee on the street, they collectively acquired prime urban property and created a central meeting place for ministers, bureaucrats, intellectuals, artists, and political activists. That ICH emerged as a site of resistance during the Emergency appears puzzling given its origins as a colonial Coffee Board enterprise. Yet its transformation into a workers’ cooperative reshaped both its clientele and its political significance, turning it by the 1970s into a space of oppositional sociability. The cooperative form itself was unexpected. In the decades before 1957, when ICH formally became a workers’ cooperative, Communist Party of India (CPI) leaders and union organizers had pursued nationalization as part of a broader vision of socialist development. After prolonged agitation, however, the CPI accepted the organization of newly unemployed Coffee Board workers into a cooperative rather than a state-owned enterprise—an outcome that disappointed many rank-and-file activists. Drawing on archival materials, memoirs, and oral histories from multiple continents, this article reconstructs the history of the ICH workers’ movement from the 1930s through the Emergency, explaining why workers first occupied and appropriated a colonial institution and ultimately compromised with the Nehruvian state.

New fiscal histories of the United States are in a state of efflorescence. Revisionist work infused with economic heterodoxy and social histories of capitalism have rescued fiscal topics from staid institutionalists, producing work that should enrich the study of inequalities of all stripes. By assembling a collection of recent works on money, public debt, and taxation—subjects treated in isolation within the literature, but which form a totality in practice—this review attempts a composite portrait of the United States’ fiscal state formation in the long run. Present in the foreground and at each stage is real estate: the iconic plot of farmland or single-family home.