This article examines the changing role of the Swedish state in employment and welfare regulation in an environment that has become more market driven, commodified, and Europeanized. It begins with a theoretical reflection on the role of the state in capitalist development and a review of the recent debate on the spatiality of state regulation: the state as employer, redistributor, and arbiter, and as a shaper of employment relations and welfare. In the latter role, the state is conceptualized as employer, guarantor of employment rights, and procedural regulator, as intermediating neo-corporatist processes, as macroeconomic manager, and as welfare state. From this theoretical basis, the paper identifies changes in state employment and welfare regulation by comparing two periods: the original and mainly nation-state-based founding stage of the Swedish welfare and employment model as it developed after the 1938 Saltsjöbaden Agreement, and the period after Sweden’s accession to the European Union in 1995.

During World War II, Japan, as occupying power, mobilized thousands of labourers in South East Asia. While the history of Allied prisoners of war (POWs) deployed as forced labourers on the Burma-Siam “Death Railway” is well known, the coercive labour recruitment of local inhabitants as so-called rōmusha has, until today, remained an almost completely untold story. This article introduces rōmusha, with a particular focus on the Burma-Siam Railway, and presents the methods used by the occupying powers to recruit local inhabitants in Java, Malaya, and Singapore, initially as volunteers, and increasingly using force. We look, too, at the tactics and strategies of avoidance the locals were able to deploy. The article offers insights into the poor working conditions on the railway, discusses the body count, and gives an idea of the huge impact of the forced labour recruitment not only in economic terms, but also in terms of the effect it had on the social structure at both the micro and macro levels.

This article examines the main changes in the policies of the Portuguese state in relation to Mozambique and its labour force during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, stemming from political changes within the Portuguese Empire (i.e. the independence of Brazil in 1821), the European political scene (i.e. the Berlin Conference, 1884–1885), and the Southern African context (i.e. the growing British, French, and German presence). By becoming a principle mobilizer and employer of labour power in the territory, an allocator of labour to neighbouring colonial states, and by granting private companies authority to play identical roles, the Portuguese state brought about important shifts in labour relations in Mozambique. Slave and tributary labour were replaced by new forms of indentured labour (initially termed serviçais and latter contratados) and forced labour (compelidos). The period also saw an increase in commodified labour in the form of wage labour (voluntários), self-employment among peasant and settler farmers, and migrant labour to neighbouring colonies.

This article analyses the changes in the organization of labour during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in colonial Charcas, present-day Bolivia, focusing on the role that different colonial authorities played in this process and its consequences. The Spanish took advantage of the pre-Hispanic organization of labour from the beginning of their conquest. However, in a colonial context, labour relations changed significantly, and the architect of those alterations was Viceroy Francisco de Toledo. We examine the transformations in mine labour carried out by the Spanish colonial polity; these had a significant effect not only on mining, but also on all labour relations in the southern colonial Andes.

This article investigates developments in labour policies and social norms on gender and work from a colonial perspective. It aims to analyse the extent to which state policies and societal norms influenced gendered labour relations in the Netherlands and its colony, the Netherlands Indies (present-day Indonesia). In order to investigate the influence of the state on gender and household labour relations in the Dutch empire, this paper compares as well as connects social interventions related to work and welfare in the Netherlands and the Netherlands Indies from the early nineteenth century up until World War II. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, work was seen as a means to morally discipline the poor, both in the Netherlands and the Netherlands Indies. Parallel initiatives were taken by Johannes van den Bosch, who, in 1815, established “peat colonies” in the Netherlands, aiming to transform the urban poor into industrious agrarian workers, and in 1830 introduced the Cultivation System in the Netherlands Indies, likewise to increase the industriousness of Javanese peasants. While norms were similar, the scope of changing labour relations was much vaster in the colony than in the metropole.

During the nineteenth century, ideals and practices of the male breadwinner started to pervade Dutch households, and children’s and women’s labour laws were enacted. Although in practice many Dutch working-class women and children continued to work, their official numbers dropped significantly. In contrast to the metropole, the official number of working (married) women in the colony was very high, and rising over the period. Protection for women and children was introduced very late in the Netherlands Indies and only under intense pressure from the international community. Not only did Dutch politicians consider it “natural” for Indonesian women and children to work, their assumptions regarding inherent differences between Indonesian and Dutch women served to justify the protection of the latter: a fine example of what Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper have called a “grammar of difference”.

Despite its prominent position in today's medical research, popular culture and everyday life, cancer's history is relatively unwritten. Compared to the other great ‘plagues’ – cholera, tuberculosis or tropical fevers, to name but a scant handful – cancer has few dedicated pages in the general surveys, and its specialists have largely failed to convince the broader community of medical historians – or indeed historians of anything at all – that histories of the disease can tell us fundamental things about the science and practice of medicine, both past and present. Moreover, cancer has a remarkably stable profile over time, at least in terms of its definition, language and terminology – a detail that only makes the disease's absence from historical literature more surprising.

This article contributes to the debate on the persistence of forced labour within capitalist development. It focuses on Spain, which has been deeply rooted in the global economy, firstly as a colonial metropolis, and later as part of the European Union. In the first place, I analyse the different modalities of unfree labour that are included in the taxonomy established by the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, taking into account the different political regimes in which they are inserted. Therefore, the legal framework regarding unfree labour is analysed for four different political contexts: liberal revolution with colonial empire (1812–1874); liberal parliamentarism with colonial empire (1874–1936); civil war and fascist dictatorship, with decolonization (1936–1975); and parliamentary democracy within globalization (1975–2014). The article goes on to deal with the importance of the main economic reasons driving the demand for forced labour: relative labour shortage and the search for increasing profits. In the conclusion, and taking the Spanish case as a basis, I suggest a series of challenges for furthering the global debate on the role of forced labour under capitalism.

This paper (1) reviews the history of sealing and whaling in the Southern Ocean to illustrate how market demands combined with no or ineffective regulation of catches led to the overexploitation and near extinction of southern fur seals, southern elephant seals and all but one of the Southern Ocean populations of large whales; (2) indicates how the overexploitation and depletion of krill-eating whales led to the Krill Surplus Hypothesis, and the development of the Antarctic krill fishery and the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR); (3) points out how misinterpretation of the reference to ‘rational use’ in CCAMLR Article II(2), combined with consensus decision-making and the potential growth of markets for Antarctic krill, could lead to ineffective regulation of the krill fishery and adverse effects on the krill resource, on recovery of depleted populations of krill-dependent whales, and on other ecologically related species and populations; and (4) identifies reasonable actions that could be taken cooperatively by the International Whaling Commission and the CCAMLR Commission to minimise the risk that the krill fishery will prevent or impede recovery of depleted populations of krill-dependent whales.