This symposium issue is first and foremost about crossing boundaries. The people readers have met in these pages—enslavers and enslaved, traders and purchasers, abolitionists and insurrectionaries—were mobile, and their mobility had consequences. The slave traders who changed flags as they moved across international waters are only the most visible exemplars of this phenomenon. Crossing geographic borders often meant crossing boundaries of race and status as well. All of these articles in one form or another address the question of what it means to cross lines: between “slave” and “free,” “legal” and “illegal,” “past” and “present.”

This article clarifies the differences between occupational health and workplace health and reveals how the two overlap. It unravels a multi-layered narrative about cotton textile workers’ understandings and experiences of ill-health at work in America and Britain, utilizing a combination of oral histories, government documents, company and union records, and the trade press. It aims to identify the multiple influences on contemporary debates about health at work. Contrary to current historiography, I argue that gender was only occasionally important to such discussions among workers, and that gender did not significantly influence their responses to unhealthy conditions. Workers’ understandings of, and responses to, workplace hazards were individual and related to knowledge about risk, ill-health and socioeconomic factors. American and British workers’ understandings of and responses to their working environment reveals more convergence than divergence, suggesting a universal human response to the health risks of work that is not significantly influenced by national or industrial constraints, or by gender.

Today, millions of migrant workers, some of them caught in debt bondage, some victims of fraud or forced migration, and others simply desperate for a better life elsewhere but instead finding themselves working for below subsistence wages or no pay at all, could be called modern-day slaves. Campaigns to end modern-day slavery have taken many forms. Most visibly, what is sometimes called “the new abolitionism,” constitutes a strand of modern antislavery and antitrafficking movements that draws often on the analogy between these workers’ plight and chattel slavery in the Atlantic world.

The crop lien was more than a strange fruit of emancipation, a hard-fought compromise, or a pragmatic choice. Its legal logic rested on several generations’ experience with capitalist social relations in the antebellum North, where intense pressures on land use in urban cores and their agricultural hinterlands promoted contestation and experimentation in the ancient body of landlord–tenant law. Northerners designed the crop lien as a way to disentangle contract from property: to strip the lease of its common law guarantee of exclusive possession and shift the burden onto tenants to bargain for it.1

The article describes and analyses contrasting forms of protest employed by handloom weavers in South India at two key points in time – the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Following Tilly, it examines how changes in the state’s regulatory regime influenced modes of resistance, but extends this analysis to the influence of production structures and social/cultural factors such as caste. It also maps internal structures of solidarity and the changing role of caste and class in shaping them. It tries to show how repertoires of resistance altered with changes, not just in the regulatory regime, but the broader socio-economic context, and foregrounds their adaptability and dynamism. It explores forms of protest and organization shared by weavers with workers from a wide range of occupations (including factory workers). Above all, it questions the notion of the unchanging character of “primordial” identities while seeking to provide a fuller understanding of the emerging dynamic of collective consciousness amongst non-factory workers in modern India.