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.

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.

Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood is now over 50 years old, but it holds its place as a pioneering study of childhood, education and the family. Furthermore, Ariès’s use of images continues to attract comment. This article reflects on the role of visual material in Aries's narrative, subsequent criticism, and more recent work in the field by both historians and art historians. Building on an important discussion of the same subject by Anthony Burton, published in Continuity and Change in 1989, it explores ongoing issues around the role of images as evidence for the histories of children and childhood.

In the context of the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, in this article, we relate the analysis of precarious work in Portugal to the state, in particular, as a direct participant functioning as both employer and mediator. In the second part, we present a short overview of the evolution of casualization in the context of employment and unemployment in contemporary Portugal (1974–2014). In the third section, we discuss state policies on labour relations, particularly in the context of the welfare state. Finally, we compare this present analysis with Swedish research done from the perspective of the state as a direct participant and mediator over the past four decades.

Labour relations in the silver mines of Potosí are almost synonymous with the mita, a system of unfree work that lasted from the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, behind this continuity there were important changes, but also other forms of work, both free and self-employed. The analysis here is focused on how the “polity” contributed to shape labour relations, especially from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. This article scrutinizes the labour policies of the Spanish monarchy on the one hand, which favoured certain economic sectors and regions to ensure revenue, and on the other the initiatives both of mine entrepreneurs and workers – unfree, free, and self-employed – who all contributed to changing the system of labour.

This article addresses the system of state-organized and state-controlled tributary labour in the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century. On the basis of the taxpayers’ registry of 1795, it focuses on the social groups obliged to perform military service or labour directly for the polity. They included the numerous “service class” of the southern and eastern frontier regions, including Russian, Ukrainian (mainly Cossack), and indigenous (Bashkir and Kalmyk) communities, and the group of pripisnye, peasants “bound” to industries and shipyards to work for their taxes. The rationale behind the use of this type of labour relation was, on the one hand, the need of the state to secure the support of labour in distant and poorly populated regions, and, on the other, that the communes of labourers saw performing work for the state as a strong guarantee of their landowning privileges.

This article provides an overview of the evolution of the commons in the Italian peninsula during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It focuses on the connection between the phenomenon of growing community debt, the loss of property held in common and the evolution of the institutions appointed to govern such properties. The later sections of the article will discuss the situation found in each of the Italian States: Venice, Spanish Lombardy, the Kingdom of Naples and the Papal States. Two models will be used for reference; one characterised by state intervention; the second by the growth of institutions of self-governance.

The introductory article to this volume offers an analytical framework for the capacities in which states have historically affected labour relations. The framework captures the full range of possible manifestations of state power, including early states, empires, regional authorities, and city states. It distinguishes between the state as a direct actor or participant, carrying out tasks deemed essential for its functioning, and the state as an arbiter, redistributor, or regulator. As conquerors or employers, states are confronted with a basic dilemma: how to extract and allocate the labour resources required to accomplish state tasks. Borrowing from Charles Tilly, the two broad categories of capital and coercion are used as a heuristic device to bring order to the ways in which states have solved this dilemma. Contrary to Tilly’s trajectories of state formation, states’ reliance on capital or coercion is subject to a great degree of flexibility, both over time and across space. In their capacities as mediators and regulators, modern states came to have an even more profound impact on labour relations, as state building moved away from the single focus on organizing the extraction of resources to a wider mission of fostering welfare, economic development, and human capital formation.

This study analyses the shifts in labour relations due to state intervention, first during the conquest of the Ming empire between 1600 and 1644 by its Manchurian contenders, and thereafter until about 1780, as the Manchurian Qing dynasty established itself and drove the Chinese empire to its greatest expansion. The main focus lies on the socio-military formation of the Eight Banners, the institution that, for about 200 years, epitomized the domination of the Chinese empire by a small elite group of about two per cent of the population. These findings will be contextualized in the larger setting of labour relations of the early and mid-Qing, when state intervention occurred in the form of arbitration in labour conflicts, but also, in a much more aggressive manner, in the decimation of the Qing rulers’ Dzungharian rivals. In the framework of Charles Tilly’s paradigm of capital versus coercion, while both are present in the Chinese case, the capital-oriented path seems more distinct.

In most cases, and particularly in the cases of Greece and Turkey, political transformation from multinational empire to nation state has been experienced to a great extent in urban centres. In Ankara, Bursa, and Salonica, the cities selected for this article, the consequences of state-making were drastic for all their inhabitants; Ankara and Bursa had strong Greek communities, while in the 1840s Salonica was the Jewish metropolis of the eastern Mediterranean, with a lively Muslim community. However, by the 1940s, Ankara and Bursa had lost almost all their non-Muslim inhabitants and Salonica had lost almost all its Muslims. This article analyses the occupational structures of those three cities in the mid-nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, tracing the role of the state as an employer and the effects of radical political change on the city-level historical dynamics of labour relations.