This paper investigates two New Kingdom Egyptian texts pertaining to labour regulation: the Karnak Decree of Horemheb and the Nauri Decree of Seti I. They focus on combating the unauthorized diverting of manpower and represent the oldest Egyptian texts (fourteenth–thirteenth century BCE) explicitly concerned with the legal dimension of managing the workforce. After a brief historical overview, the paper outlines each text's key content and stylistic features. It shows that while some of these are likely native to Egypt, others may have been imported from Mesopotamia. More specifically, it appears that the sentence structure is native Egyptian, but the sanctions deployed are likely of foreign origin, aligning more closely to the contemporary punitive tradition of Mesopotamia. This is probably no coincidence, given the close contact between Egypt and the broader Near East at that time. This uptake of foreign ideas may have achieved more efficient labour regulation by enforcing stricter rules for non-compliance while simultaneously maintaining a veneer of Egyptian authenticity in line with official state ideology.

In the past four decades or so, China scholars have shone a new light on the history of labour in late imperial China, particularly on the role of the household as a unit of production and on the contribution of women to commercial production and family income. Beyond members of the kin group itself, attention is seldom paid to the individuals brought into the Chinese households solely to provide additional manpower. To “break the carapace” of the late imperial Chinese household, this article focuses on the often-omitted “household workers”, that is, on its enslaved (nubi) and hired (gugong) constituents. It approaches the topic from the angle of the vulnerability of these non-kin “workers” to punishments and violence. To evaluate their vulnerability to punishment and gauge the disciplinary powers of the household heads, it examines the relationship between punishments and “household workers” in Ming law. It then explores lineage regulations, before moving closer to the ground by mobilizing a wider variety of day-to-day sources, such as contracts and narrative sources produced in the context of the late Ming and early Qing crisis.

With the abolition of the guild system and the rise of a new legal regime based on free contract, a central dilemma emerged in Europe: how to enforce labour control in this new era of individual economic freedom. This article examines how this issue was addressed in the State of Milan, where ideas about freedom of contract championed by state reformers such as Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria were met with continued requests from merchant-manufacturers to apply corporal punishment and threat of imprisonment to ensure workers’ attendance. Analysing the new regulations, the ideological credos of the new regime, and the effectiveness of the reforms as they played out on the ground in the silk industry, this article shows that the chance that labour relations could be managed within a civil law regime appeared to be in direct contrast with the dominant conception of workers’ conditions, in particular their lack of propriety and good faith. As credit-debt bonds and limitations to weavers’ mobility stood as the most effective means to ensure labour coercion, a closer look at the daily interactions in the workshop allows us to shed new light on the rationality of workers’ practices like Saint Monday, cast by contemporary commentators in merely moralistic terms.

The central and associated county or district chambers of agriculture have attracted little attention from historians. Their origins have been attributed to the perceived lack of a national coordinating body for agriculture highlighted by the 1865–7 cattle plague. This article based on the records of the Shropshire Chamber of Agriculture, newspapers and printed histories reconsiders their role. Members were initially drawn from landowning society and larger tenant farmers, although membership widened with the growth of rival organisations. Activities included lectures, talks and debates on agricultural subjects, visits to farms, factories and the county agricultural college and farm institute, dinners and social occasions at which those interested in agriculture could meet. By foregrounding the people and politics of the chambers of agriculture, it is argued they need to be incorporated more fully into the historiography of agricultural and rural politics of Britain during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The literature about the nutrition transition has been discussing the existence of different paths. The case of Uruguay is introduced as a different case of transition. We focus on the period 1900–70 when the country shifted from an agricultural-based economy to industrialisation through import substitution. We estimate the annual historical time series of per capita consumption of the main food items in the Uruguayan diet using the commodity flow approach complemented by the FAO’s Food Balance Sheets methodology. We identify the major trends in food consumption and discuss the main explanatory factors. We find that Uruguay showed a transition from a very high animal food-based diet towards a more diversified pattern with more milk, cereals, and vegetables. On top of that, we sustain that not only income is important to explain the major shifts in food diet, but also preferences, changes in relative prices, and productivity.

A social history of Ireland (encompassing rural communities) is needed if historians are to fully come to terms with what really happened between 1914 and 1918 and to properly tackle the question of ‘consent’ and ‘constraint’ in relation to the war effort. In addition, historians need to devote a comprehensive book-length research to the April 1918 Conscription Crisis in Ulster (but more generally to the anti-conscription movement in Ulster), determining if the urban/rural – Belfast/countryside divide existed (and, if so, what its magnitude was). Finally, in a few years’ time, anyone will be able to say if the Republic of Ireland of today opted to anchor the global conflict in the collective memory of its people, or if the Centenary of the First World War was just a politically motivated parenthesis to commemorate a lost generation that still struggles to find its rightful place in modern Irish history.

The article presents a trend in rural and small-town architecture, in central Poland, consisting in the reuse of material from river-going vessels. As part of the research, twenty objects (existing and non-extant) were identified that had been constructed using material from wooden vessels that had navigated the Vistula River in the past (nineteenth and twentieth centuries). There was also a reinterpretation of the origin of construction material from a farm building that had been moved in the 1980s from near the Vistula to one of Polish open-air museums. The results indicate that these are probably the last material traces of a boat mill that operated on the Vistula in the late nineteenth century. Also, many preserved millstones embedded in buildings located near the Vistula seem to confirm this conclusion.

Historians of medieval society tend to emphasise the roles of either individual peasants or the village community. They also debate the importance of the market in the peasant economy. Here the focus is on partnership, defined as two or more people pursuing common objectives in a mutual co-operative relationship. Peasants sometimes held land jointly, and new land might be cleared by two or more people. Pairs of peasants regularly took on paid work. It is argued that a likely explanation for occasional flurries of litigation was a breakdown of partnerships. The multiple legal disputes suggest the range of collaborative activities undertaken by peasants, from domestic bread making to the management of pastures. Partnerships may have contributed to the resilience of peasant holdings, especially in the period 1370–1420. Local courts and communities responded with peace-making measures if former partners lapsed into extreme hostility.

In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, Europe developed a deep interest in both natural resources and agroecosystems. Experts began to explore the rural hinterland and shores of the Mediterranean. These travellers described completely new settings, agroecosystems, and cultures through the lens of their own backgrounds. This article analyses the development of Mediterranean rural societies as an object of study of Western agricultural science. It describes the reports of travellers to rural lands in Spain, Italy and Lebanon, comparing their observations and representations, evaluating if there are common patterns in their reports and what features are still found in rural practices today.