For two decades, real wage comparisons have been centre stage in global socio-economic history studies of comparative development, offering a tractable – if oversimplified – gauge of living standards. But critics argue that these studies have leaned too heavily on the earnings of male, urban, unskilled, daily wage labourers, overlooking wage disparities between social groups and the mechanics of how wages were paid. This Special Issue attempts to shift the focus to overlooked groups and “wage systems” – the methods behind pay determination – and their role in deepening or mitigating inequality. This introduction attempts a global overview of the long-term developments in real wage studies, highlighting methodological innovations and challenges over recent decades. It also explains how the various articles in this Special Issue, spanning topics from medieval Europe to colonial India, contribute to this field. We argue that wage systems – and the inequalities they breed – played out in ways as varied as history itself, so comparing material living standards across time and space remains a complex calculation. We plead for a two-pronged approach: the continued study of all types of income of all working people, alongside a new focus on the social norms, institutions, and systems that determine the opportunities for individuals to acquire an income. A consolidated bibliography of all references in this Special Issue may help future research.

The history of work is marred by the fact that the meaning of “labour” or “work” changed with the arrival of modern society, making it difficult to draw comparisons across time. There has been a shift from understanding work as any activity that may secure continued living and well-being, to seeing it as paid, full-time, specialized employment. This transformation has obscured the work of some groups in society (notably women but also others) and work in the form of multiple employments (which often means multiple labour relations). The methods and sources presented in this Special Theme offer valuable tools for historians seeking to address and navigate these issues.

This article suggests that classification exercises were the quintessential modality for both the narrative and labour–management relations of occupational health and safety in Indian mines for the period 1895–1970. The extant literature has underestimated the cause-and-effect relationship that such classification practices had, including punitive safety regulation clauses, compensation clauses, the public image of firms, forms of knowledge, and stakeholder bargaining. The narrative of work hazards fundamentally forged casualty classification patterns. The ascertainment techniques applied to casualty, perceptions of occupational risk, and the politics of restitution shaped the narratives and defined patterns of casualty classification. Management devised various ways to present a decent picture of mining through casualty statistics. Later, critiques of this business practice exposed statistical discrepancies and flaws in the classification system, challenging the built-in business-blindness. From the late 1920s, the informed, organized mineworkers articulated their experiences of workplace risk; they confronted the managerial discourse of “unavoidable” work hazards and mineworkers’ liability for casualty. The mineworkers’ publicists and the government of the Republic of India took an interest in research on occupational health and safety and its regulation. They aimed at industrial efficiency and national reconstruction by creating a healthy, contented, and experienced workforce. All this steered the classification exercises of industrialists and public authorities towards favourable changes. The twin forces of capital and working people converged on the restitution measures articulated within the utilitarian paradigm. The latter, ironically, contributed to valorizing the narrative of risk and sacrifice in the lives of mineworkers.

In Spanish America, the enslavement of Africans was just one of several widespread forms of bonded labour. This article explains the different forms of colonial obligations that limited the freedom of the Indigenous population. It compares the situation in the viceroyalties of New Spain (Mexico) and Peru, with a special focus on two types of dependent labourer: the laboríos in New Spain and the yanaconas in Peru. Although the origin of both categorizations was different, they were functionally comparable. Both generally worked in mines, haciendas, cattle farms, and in textile or sugar mills. It has been argued that by migrating to their workplace, they cut ties with their communities of origin – a hypothesis that was often, but not always, true. This article shows that both categorizations could be temporary as well as permanent and hereditary. On occasion, people could change to other, “neighbouring” categorizations, such as “sedentary” Indigenous people living in Indigenous communities or free mulattos – the latter being more frequent in New Spain. To explain these phenomena and highlight the agency of the colonial population, we examine petitions as a strategy to change fiscal categorization in order to gain greater freedom. Examples from Cajamarca in northern Peru and Michoacán in western Mexico are presented; both regions lay outside the traditional mining centres in relation to which bonded labour has been most often analysed in the respective viceroyalties. We argue that developments towards the end of the colonial period differed between the regions.

Forced labour in the Middle Congo was characterized in the interwar period by, on the one hand, a declining role of the notorious French concession companies, and, on the other hand, the growing importance of forced recruitment and forced labour orchestrated by the colonial state. The article attempts to analyse and understand the overall setup of overburdening created by these conditions. Based on new French and Congolese archival resources, it discusses the effects of this overburdening, linking it to the responses shown by local populations, notably through flight and evasion. In a last step, the discussion focuses on the role of intermediaries and their impact on the violence that was locally experienced. The analysis includes a wider perspective into the changes and continuities during the years of World War II, and on the challenges for the forced labour system due to its official abolition in 1946 and the decline of clandestine practices of continuity until 1948.

This article examines the role of cooperatives and mutual aid societies in shaping the political agency of skilled workers in Second Empire France, with a particular focus on the reports drafted by Parisian trade delegates at the 1867 Universal Exposition. Moving beyond the historiographical dichotomy between respectability and resistance, the study posits that workers articulated a distinctive politics of dignity, an assertion of self-worth rooted in collective moral and social values rather than mere assimilation into the norms promoted by the dominant classes. The trade delegates placed strong emphasis on morality in their reports. However, this language was not just a strategy for social acceptance. Rather, it served as a means through which workers asserted an alternative hierarchy of values and challenged dominant power structures. In a context where the Second Empire sought to promote industrial capitalism and threatened customary trade regulations, workers’ associationism became a crucial vehicle for identity formation and collective action. As the economic and social landscape rapidly evolved, cooperatives and mutual aid societies, alongside civil rights advocacy and trade unionism, developed as interconnected strategies to secure spaces of autonomy and envision an alternative order where workers could lead dignified lives.

It has long been recognized that, in order to understand economies in the past, we need better information about women's work and tertiary sector work. It is also well known that, while valuable in many ways, nineteenth-century censuses give incomplete information about women's contributions to the economy. Consequently, censuses are a poor basis for estimating the occupational structure. This article offers a solution to these problems by triangulating census data with qualitative information extracted from court records. The result is a more reasonable estimate of the first-level occupational structure in a Swedish local society (Västerås and its surroundings) around 1880. This estimate suggests that just before the onset of industrialization, around eighty per cent of the adult population, women and men, were active in primary and tertiary sector work. Compared to the census, the analysis sets women's share in the primary and the tertiary sectors at higher levels. The article has a strong methodological focus and describes in detail how the court records were analysed and adjusted to be comparable with the census.

Although real wages have long been a cornerstone of our understanding of the premodern economy, in recent years historians have become sceptical about their usefulness as a proxy for living standards. One of the main concerns is that, before industrialization, most households did not depend on wages but were self-employed. This article therefore proposes a new methodology to test the representativeness of real wage series for the general population by comparing changes in the purchasing power of builders’ wages with the relative position of building labourers in tax lists. Not surprisingly, it confirms their exceptional position, which evolved according to remuneration. Instead of disregarding the unreal wages, the methodology shows a promising path forward. The relationship between changes in wage income and the relative position in fiscal sources can be exploited to identify other groups who were or became dependent on this type of labour. Accordingly, it holds the potential to retrace shifts in the functional distribution of income and the wage systems for different groups in the premodern economy.

This article examines socialist globalization from the perspective of technical-labor internationalism in Mozambique, focusing on the final stage of the Cold War. First, it analyzes the four main pathways through which international technicians arrived in Mozambique: Latin American exile, socialist intergovernmental cooperation, European postcolonial humanitarianism, and African regionalism. It offers a cosmopolitan perspective on the relations that socialist Mozambique forged with the world. It then provides an inventory of the models of integration of these international technicians into the Mozambican state apparatus, presenting a framework emphasizing organizational rather than ideological aspects. It concludes that, while these paths were singular, they were not mutually exclusive. More importantly, they were instrumental in shaping the political affinities and frictions between international technicians in that cosmopolitan universe.

The history of sugar is that of a commodity that has played a central and contested role in the development of global agro-industrial capitalism. In my introduction to this “Suggestions and Debates” collection, the theoretical underpinnings of The World of Sugar will be explained. Reference is made to the agenda of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative, which was published in the Journal of Global History in 2021, and of which I was a co-author. Inspired by the work of Friedmann and McMichael, a key element of this agenda is the notion of successive commodity regimes, separated by systemic frictions and phases of intense innovation to overcome them. Moreover, the argument is made that The World of Sugar can be read as an invitation to explore new directions in global labour history. My introduction concludes with an exhortation to overcome the limitations of single-commodity histories and to give more attention to the agency of workers in shaping the trajectories of global capitalism.

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.

In this article, which has a strong methodological focus, we establish the labour relations that characterized the urban population of the Swedish town of Västerås in 1820. Several sources are combined: the so-called Tabellverket (an early form of demographic statistics) and observations made in, primarily, local court records. To assign labour relations as defined by the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations project, the preliminary picture based on the Tabellverket is complemented by systematically adding information from court records analysed in the Gender and Work project. This information captures both what people did and also, to some extent, what labour relations they were involved in. Subsequently, all the information is collated to estimate the labour relations characterizing the whole population in the selected town. The result of this experiment is a much more encompassing and richer picture of the labour relations within the selected community, one that acknowledges both women’s work and multiple employments. In a broader perspective, the case study contributes to our understanding of the gradual increase of commodified labour in the world.

Existing scholarship on China's industrial politics in the early post-Mao era has not paid adequate attention to the tension between two seemingly contradictory tendencies: the reform drives to consolidate managerial despotism in urban public enterprises, and policy endeavors to strengthen formal institutional channels for workers to participate in their enterprises’ democratic management. Focusing on the city of Wuhan in 1984–1985, this article examines the policy logic behind these two overlapping tendencies and how workers experienced and reacted to them. It argues that, on the one hand, Wuhan's local authorities merely intended the institutional formalities of democracy to facilitate and build popular support for the inauguration of managerial despotism. On the other hand, workers’ very involvement in this façade of democracy accidentally emboldened many of them to air grievances, make subversive demands, assert agency, and even resist managerial despotism. These findings shed light on the nuanced historicity of 1980s China and contribute to a rethinking of the meaning of workplace democracy.

This paper investigates the labour market for female servants in England and Wales between 1780 and 1834, using previously unexplored archival materials alongside qualitative sources. After introducing the dataset, the study provides a micro-level analysis of wage determinants and traces the sources and evolution of employer market power. The findings show that real wages fell substantially during the early decades of the nineteenth century and stagnated throughout the period from 1780 to 1834. Amid rising cost-of-living pressures in the early 1800s, declining real wages were accompanied by increased nominal wage bunching, suggesting greater employer market power. These trends are contextualized with insights from servants’ autobiographies and household manuals. The combined quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests that service labour markets were highly localized, employers coordinated wage-setting and working conditions, and servants faced barriers to job mobility due to living in tied housing, difficulties in recovering unpaid wages, and the critical role of character references. The results indicate that employers in the largest segment of the labour market had considerable wage-setting power, which intensified during the early years of industrialization.

The commodity frontiers framework describes well the movement of sugar cultivation across the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Caribbean. But it is less effective when explaining the evolution of sugar in nineteenth-century Tamil Nadu. In Tamil Nadu, the high costs of cultivation discouraged many peasants and landowners from planting sugar cane. As a consequence, despite British pressure to plant more cane, there was little increase in the crop before the twentieth century. In Tamil Nadu, sugar made from palmyra juice was a viable and popular substitute for cane sugar and this further discouraged the expansion of cane cultivation. The jaggery made from palm juice satisfied the demand for sweetener from most consumers in the region. From the mid-nineteenth century, palm jaggery was the raw material for making white sugar and distilling arrack in the sugar mills that were built in the region. Regional conditions shaped the development of sugar cultivation and manufacturing in Tamil Nadu. It is not a story of interaction between the local and the global as is found in the commodity frontiers framework. The region is a scale of activity that possesses great explanatory power, as the case of nineteenth-century South India shows.

This article reflects on the pitfalls of the combined search for big and better data and argues for more attention to everyday experiences and incidental evidence. It proposes that including spatial aspects, perspectives from cultural, colonial, and women’s history, as well as widening the source base helps to remedy these challenges, and encourages historians to abandon their hesitations and embrace the uncertainties in doing so. It draws on the results of a research project at the University of Amsterdam that utilizes incidental evidence to enhance our understanding of gendered spatial patterns in premodern cities.

This study investigates the wages and labour contracts of Khoe workers in Graaff Reinet, a district on the Cape Colony's eastern frontier in the early nineteenth century. Using wage registers from 1801 to 1810, we offer the first individual-level analysis of wages for both male and female Khoe workers, examining payment forms, socio-economic stratification, and gendered wage dynamics. The findings highlight a persistently high reliance on in-kind payments – aligned with the pastoral economy and cultural preferences of the Khoe – but reveal a gradual shift towards cash wages, driven by the colonial administration's efforts to reduce labour coercion. Gender disparities emerge as a critical theme, with female labourers experiencing higher wage inequality and receiving a larger proportion of in-kind wages. The analysis underscores the intersection of colonial economic policies, labour practices, and social inequalities, challenging aggregate approaches to understanding inequality and living standards in colonial Africa. These insights expand our knowledge of coercive labour systems and frontier economies.

This review essay focuses on the intimate, yet contingent, historical relationships between capitalism, democracy and the welfare state in the OECD region. Six landmark studies, published over the past decade, are reviewed: Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty and The Narrow Corridor: How Nations Struggle for Liberty; Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology; Torben Iversen and David Soskice’s Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism through a Turbulent Century; Peter H. Lindert’s Making Social Spending Work; and Ayşe Buğra’s Social Policy in Capitalist History. All these books reveal the independent effect of historical political factors on the rise of the welfare state across advanced capitalist democracies. Contrary to received wisdom, the central argument put forward is that there is no trade-off between capitalism and democracy and, more importantly, that the welfare state has become an existentially important lubricant buttressing both advanced capitalism and liberal democracy.