This article traces corporal and collective punishment in relation to the labour control of slaves and other dependent persons during the Ur III period (c.2100–2000 BCE). Slaves and other dependent persons often worked in related contexts with some overlap in treatment. Persons of different statuses could be detained and forced to work. Persons of various statuses also received rations and other benefits, but the evidence suggests that the most extreme forms of corporal punishment were reserved for slaves. This article, however, contextualizes these threats of mutilation and the death penalty, demonstrating that such punishments should be considered the exception and not the norm.

Recent research offers good reason to think that various psychedelic drugs—including psilocybin, ayahuasca, ketamine, MDMA, and LSD—may have significant therapeutic potential in the treatment of various mental health conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, existential distress, and addiction. Although the use of psychoactive drugs, such as Diazepam or Ritalin, is well established, psychedelics arguably represent a therapeutic step change. As experiential therapies, their value would seem to lie in the subjective experiences they induce. As it is the only way for trainee psychedelic therapists to fully understand their subjective effects, some have suggested that firsthand experience of psychedelics should form part of training programs. We question this notion. First, we consider whether the epistemic benefits offered by drug-induced psychedelic experience are as unique as is supposed. We then reflect on the value it might have in regard to the training of psychedelic therapists. We conclude that, absent stronger evidence of the contribution drug-induced experiences make to the training of psychedelic therapists, requiring trainees to take psychedelic drugs does not seem ethically legitimate. However, given the potential for epistemic benefit cannot be entirely ruled out, permitting trainees who wish to gain first-hand experience of psychedelics may be permissible.

What is the historical role of punishment in the management of labour? This is the central question of this Special Issue of the International Review of Social History (IRSH), “Punishing Workers, Managing Labour”. Through a close reading of the diverse range of articles included in this Special Issue and by addressing the relatively extensive but highly fragmented scholarship on the subject, this introduction argues that the key to labour management lay in the interplay of differentiated forms of punishment with distinct labour relations, rather than in the imposition of one punitive regime onto an undifferentiated workforce. In other words, the effective management of labour required the systematic differentiation of the workforce; to that end, the imposition of diversified forms of punishment did not merely reflect existing labour distinctions, but also contributed to creating them. This point leads us to address broader methodological and theoretical issues about how we can analyse such complex interactions: how we can compare the role of punishment in the management of labour across space and time, and how our findings can be used to explain short- and long-term historical changes.

This article examines the experience of minors at the intersection of guardianship, domestic servitude (free and unfree labour), and punitive violence in Charcas (Bolivia) in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The author proposes that the study of the role of punishment in the lives of working children and adolescents allows us to question how practices that occurred under the legal cloak of guardianship – in which many members of colonial society participated – were used as a hidden practice of domination that sought to reproduce servitude based on certain origins from an early age. In this context, punitive violence exercised by masters and lords would have been at the core of prevailing prejudices about ethnic and racial difference.

This article presents an analysis of the paper- and office work at two South Asian corners in the early modern Dutch empire. The article engages with current approaches to the histories of bureaucracy and empire that emphasize the lived experience of “paperwork” in order to gain a localized understanding of what constituted empire. The article focuses on the production and use of pattas, olas, and thombos in the offices of the Dutch zamindar-fiscaal in Chinsurah (Bengal) and the Dutch disāva in Jaffna (Sri Lanka). Dutch bureaucracy in these spaces was entrenched in local practices, and created through processes of layering and blending, as evidenced by material and linguistic characteristics. The deeds and registers recorded essential aspects of life such as labor, marriage, and transactions of property, and the article shows how such paperwork mattered to villagers in Chinsurah and Jaffna. The production of the deeds and registers itself could include a public spectacle, and we argue that this performative aspect of the local bureaucracy added to the perceived relevance of the paperwork. Furthermore, through an analysis of legal cases we reconstruct the use and abuse of these bureaucracies by Dutch officials and local inhabitants, which signifies a parasitical relationship that is characteristic of so many imperial and colonial spaces. Through a focus on the local bureaucratic practices, the authors shed new light on questions about the character of the Dutch empire, where things never turned out to be exactly as they appeared at first sight.

In the song cycle Libro de cantares (1987), Spanish-Cuban composer Julián Orbón (1925–91) entered into a dialogue with the work of two other men who, like him, were displaced under the Franco regime: he re-used Asturian folk songs compiled by Eduardo Martínez Torner in 1920; and he followed compositional models deployed by Manuel de Falla in Siete canciones populares españolas (1914). In this article I argue how, by doing so, Orbón engaged in individual and collective memory-building processes that matched to an extent but also diverged from similar processes that were then underway in Spain in the 1980s (following the end of the Franco regime in 1975) and, particularly, in Orbón's natal region of Asturias. I also argue that Orbón's understandings of memory and modernity are unique within the context of displaced twentieth-century Spanish composers, and as such afford us opportunities to reconsider these crucial categories.

In the nineteenth century, when Italy was undergoing significant institutional and socio-economic changes, the bourgeoisie affirmed its principles of ‘respectability’. In this context, the spread of prostitution among the poorest and most disadvantaged classes of the South became a real obsession for bourgeois society. Through the study of primary sources relating to various health institutions, this paper aims to assess the role of the Opere Pie in the control and management of prostitution. It furthermore highlights the hybrid function of the re-education, assistance and segregation of those women who represented a danger to bourgeois morality and order. Finally, it sheds light on the living conditions and social environment of young prostitutes.