This chapter unpacks a critical moment in Salvadoran history: from the coup on October 15, 1979, to the start of the civil war and mass repression during the latter part of 1980. The coup installed a military–civilian junta (the Junta Revolucionaria de Gobierno or JRG) that included moderate leftists who promised a reformist solution to the economic, social, and political crisis, a solution that would prevent a looming civil war. These reforms included land reform, union rights, and an end to political repression. However, disjunction between revolutionary rhetoric and grassroots struggles and necessities impeded an alliance between the JRG and popular organizations. The JRG itself dissolved and re-formed as rightists pushed out representatives of the Left. This chapter discusses the factors that led up to the coup then summarizes the three successive JRGs and how sectors of the military and civil society responded to their reforms, setting the stage for the twelve-year civil war.

Natural rights can justify legal rights to control and dispose of those resources exclusively – that is, rights of ownership. Ownership is justified on moral grounds when it seems likely in practice to help people acquire and use resources more effectively than alternate regimes would – especially, a system in which resources were open for everyone’s access and use and people enjoyed them with usufructs. This chapter studies four core or paradigm cases in which ownership facilitates use enough to be legitimate. One (associated with Aristotle) stresses ownership’s tendency to reduce disputes over property; another (associated with St. Thomas Aquinas) focuses on how ownership encourages careful management of resources; a third (Locke) focuses on how ownership incentivizes people labor and productivity; and the last (James Madison and other American founders) focuses on ownership’s securing privacy and autonomy for owners’ own preferred uses. This chapter considers egalitarian critiques of ownership, especially by Jeremy Waldron, Joseph Singer, G.A. Cohen, Liam Murphy, and Thomas Nagel. To define ownership, this chapter relies on conceptual work by A.M. Honore and J.E. Penner.

This chapter studies the elements of an interest-based natural property right. To acquire a prima facie right in a resource, the claimant must use it productively and claim exclusivity to its use in terms others will understand. But the prima facie right may be overridden by either of two provisos. The sufficiency proviso limits property rights when a proprietor’s use of a resource does not leave others sufficient access to the same type of resource for their own needs. The necessity proviso limits natural rights when someone who does not hold property in a resource needs access to it to repel some serious threat to life or property. This chapter illustrates legal doctrines for capturing animals and other articles of personal property, occupying unowned land, and appropriating water flow by use. This chapter contrasts productive use with Locke’s treatments of labor, waste, and spoliation, and it contrasts claim communication with Pufendorf and Grotius’s treatments of possession. This chapter also considers familiar criticisms of rights-based property theories, involving hypotheticals with radioactive tomato juice or ham sandwiches embedded in cement.

This chapter asks how religion has been understood in Chicanx literature by connecting the performance of syncretic spiritual labor with the task of telling stories about the exploitation of Chicanx labor. It takes Tomás Rivera’s 1971 … y no se lo tragó la tierra (Tierra) and Denise Chávez’s 1994 novel Face of an Angel (Angel) as test cases. By closely revisiting a work of criticism that is emblematic of the way Chicanx literary criticism approaches the role of religion in literature, this chapter shows how reproductive labor, service labor, and syncretic religious labor are inadvertently obscured by the urgency of attending to class identity and farm labor in the case of Tierra, or non-religious spirituality and fetishized indigeneity in the case of Angel. In particular, the chapter returns to Ramón Saldívar’s germinal reading of Rivera’s novel and Theresa Delgadillo’s incisive interpretation of Chávez’s novel to explore how subtly and entirely certain subjectivities become illegible. Drawing inspiration from scholars such as Judith Butler, the chapter scrutinizes notions of agency within gender performance and advocates for a paradigm shift that acknowledges the deeper significance found in seemingly menial tasks, such as washing dishes or clearing used plates.

Chapter 5, focusing mainly on Mauritius and British Guiana, examines the ongoing dialogue between indentured workers, magistrates, public commentators, and colonial administrators over the laws governing labor and their underlying principles. By the 1860s and 1870s, the increasing dissonance between Indians’ perceptions of justice and their legal entitlements and magistrates’ hardening line toward labor discipline and public order had prompted more-direct resistance on the part of laborers. State representatives, in response, defended their actions by portraying Indian indentured workers as a largely docile population that benefited from the colonial labor system but was veined through with moral failings and subject to the cynical influence of disruptive individuals. The fissures between the overseer-state and its charges, already apparent even in its early years, were growing into a yawning chasm as a system that billed itself as supportive of “free labor,” Liberal principles, and moral colonial rule increasingly abandoned its paternalist guise to advocate and practice coercion, restriction of labor mobility, and, when deemed necessary, violent suppression of collective action.

Behind the black boxes of algorithms promoting or adding friction to posts, technical design decisions made to affect behavior, and institutions stood up to make decisions about content online, it can be easy to lose track of the heteromation involved, the humans spreading disinformation and, on the other side, moderating or choosing not to moderate it. This can be aptly shown in the case of the spread of misinformation on WhatsApp during Brazil’s 2018 general elections. Since WhatsApp runs on a peer-to-peer architecture, there was no algorithm curating content according to the characteristics or demographics of the users, which is how filter bubbles work on Facebook. Instead, a human infrastructure was assembled to create a pro-Bolsonaro environment on WhatsApp and spread misinformation to bolster his candidacy. In this paper, we articulate the labor executed by the human infrastructure of misinformation as hetoromation.

This chapter reviews how historians and economists have thought about the economic history of Europe. It notes that internal explanations that paid little attention to the non-European world have been dominant for more than a century and reviews some of the reasons for that Eurocentrism. Such navel-gazing, however, has also been increasingly challenged for some time now, at first especially by non-European scholars and activists. The latter parts of the chapter explore current debates within the discipline and its increasing acknowledgment of the interactions between European and non-European economies. Two areas of discussion that have played a crucial role in this evolution are detailed in particular: The question of the role of slavery in European economic development and the rich debates taking place in the relatively new field of global labor history. Overall, efforts to write the economic history of Europe confined to its own ill-defined boundaries might serve particular political needs, but they are, in fact, historically inaccurate.

In contrast to anthropocentric readings of the Georgics, chapter 3 argues that Vergil is interested in farming as a way of considering the entangled lives of humans and nonhumans. The chapter contextualizes Vergil’s ecological thinking – highlighting influences from ancient philosophy, ethnography, Hesiod, and Roman agricultural treatises – and differentiates this reading from interpretations that shoehorn the relations of humans and nonhumans into a nature–culture binary. The chapter examines how the poem discloses agriculture as a practice of managing ecological relations. The second half of the chapter then queries the status of the human within its ecologies. While much of the poem denies human exceptionality, it does recognize ways in which humans stand out from the rest of the world, above all in their unparalleled ability to transform their environments – epitomized by the world-altering activities of Rome and Caesar. Ultimately, the chapter connects the peculiar status of the human to the didactic aims of the poem. By relaying and explaining the signa of the world, the Georgics offers the fantasy of an expertise that can better embed humans in their environments.

This chapter explores the reasons why workers would stay in or run from a factory, as well as the traps and perceived appeal of temporary employment and day labor jobs. It discusses the role of employment service agencies and their networks of job intermediaries in sustaining factories’ power and control over workers and in making workers more vulnerable and more susceptible to informal and temporary employment.