Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory (2022) accomplishes in just under two hundred pages what many other books twice that length have struggled with: assembling a concise yet readable introductory map to the global, fragmented, and too-often hidden landscape of digitally-mediated capitalism. But the digital factory itself is an incomplete concept, almost always requiring us to look for the external and contingent labor support hidden just outside of its supposedly totalizing network of logistics, robotics and algorithms.

In 1975, the National Coal Board (NCB) produced a short film, “People Will Always Need Coal”, to encourage recruitment into mining. It was extraordinarily attention-grabbing, presenting miners as cosmopolitan playboys. It defined the industry in hyper-masculine terms, encouraging would-be recruits to “be a miner”. This article uses the film as a starting point for a discussion of the complex interactions between the material realities of masculinity, class, and culture within Britain's coalfields in the period 1975–1983. A critical reading of the film is complemented by archival research and oral testimony drawn from interviews with 96 former miners and their families. At a time when the industry was positioning itself as an employer with a long-term future, mining was presented on screen as a modern masculine occupation that was far removed from the dominant imagery of coal for much of the twentieth century. The National Union of Mineworkers’ (NUM) victories in the strikes of 1972 and 1974, the drafting of a Government Plan for Coal, and rising living standards, created a short period of optimism before the cataclysmic closures of the 1980s and 1990s. This was a time when masculinity in the coalfields was being reproduced, modified, contested, and subverted. The years 1975–1983 offer valuable insight into such masculinity and the ways it was mediated and challenged through work, the domestic sphere, leisure, and popular culture.

This response to the comments on The Digital Factory discusses why and how the concepts of the digital factory and digital Taylorism have been applied in the book, as well as the question of the relationship between digital control and workers' resistance to algorithmic management technologies. While agreeing with the comments that point to the limitations of the concepts used, this response argues that these can be productive precisely by drawing our attention to aspects that are otherwise difficult to bring to light. In terms of the potential for workers' resistance, many collective and individual forms of such resistance remain possible in labour regimes under algorithmic management, as well as in other coexisting labour regimes.

Theories about the impact of digital technology on society and the development of capitalism and debates about the influence of digital information technologies on the future of work have been abundant since the end of the twentieth century. Most of the academic debate has taken place outside labour history, leaving the actual effects of digital technologies on human work and labour relations often overlooked. Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory: The Human Labor of Automation focuses precisely on these effects, and as such provides a good opportunity to engage with these debates from a labour history perspective. This Review Dossier includes four comments on Altenried's book, by Bridget Kenny, Nico Pizzolato, Görkem Akgöz, and Greg Downey, to which the author responds. The contributors focus on different aspects of The Digital Factory depending on their own perspective on recent developments in the digital economy in the larger context of global capitalism.

A growing body of literature is challenging techno-fetishistic perspectives on digital capitalism, as well as claims of the start of a new era characterized by total automation. This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the implications of digital technology for the future of labour by reading Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory (2022) through the lens of labour history. The use of digital factory and digital Taylorism as integrative tools significantly improves empirical evaluations of different digital labour environments. However, because of their high degree of abstraction, there are a number of limitations when applying these concepts to describe wildly disparate work environments. To illustrate these limits, I use examples from twentieth-century debates on technology and work autonomy, and (1) argue that a labour history perspective warns us against overgeneralizing the effects of technology on labour control and worker autonomy, and (2) broaden the discussion to larger issues of labour control before and during digitalization, incorporating new theoretical questions such as our understanding of classical Taylorism and, by extension, capitalism.

Although the contours of fidei laesio (pleas for debt in ecclesiastical courts) were established by Helmholz and suggestions about the wider impact on credit relationships were offered by Briggs, there still remains scope for a detailed examination of the causes in an ecclesiastical court to establish precisely the extent of the litigation in those fora, the composition of the litigants, the character of the debts, and the incentives and impediments to actions (although Helmholz broadly indicated these issues). Accordingly, an examination has been undertaken of two extant registers of the Lichfield consistory court (1464–1478) which survive for the period of maximum referral to these courts by lay (and clerical) creditors and debtors. The information allows a new perspective on the character of the credit relationships prosecuted in the consistory court.

The 1922 Rand Rebellion was the only instance of worker protest in the twentieth century in which a modern state used tanks and military airplanes, as well as mounted infantry, to suppress striking workers. These circumstances were unprecedented in their own time and for most of the century. The compressed and intensely violent rebellion of twenty thousand white mineworkers in South Africa’s gold mines had several overlapping features. Within a matter of days—from 6 to 12 March—it went from a general strike to a racial pogrom and insurrection against the government of Prime Minister Jan Smuts. Throughout all these twists and turns, the battle standard remained, “Workers of the world unite and fight for a White South Africa!” Race and violence were integral features of South Africa’s industrial history, but they do not explain the moments when discrete groups of people chose to use them as weapons or bargaining tools. At the close of the First World War, for instance, South Africa’s white mine workers demanded a more comprehensive distribution of the privileges of white supremacy, but in a manner that was both violent and contentious. Consequently, South Africa’s immediate postwar period became one of the most violent moments in its history.

Through an ethnographic rendering of the Catholic Church at the Detroit-Windsor borderland, this article foregrounds the ways elemental forces, including water, earth/soil, and air, form an interconnected entity that constitutes part of the theopolitical and religious scaffolding of Holy Infrastructures. We argue that the repetitive inscription of social and affective flows within an urban terrain generates infrastructure projects that contract forces of variable intensity into alliance or disjuncture. The interrelation of these forces as Holy Infrastructure, offers vital information on (dis/en)abling racialized forms of hosting and being hosted by the divine within urban settings, specifically as it pertains to theological labor at multiple scales. Indeed, we understand holiness in Catholic Detroit as a performative sovereignty of partition that mediates a desire for unbrokenness and spatiotemporal rapture. The topologies of Holy Infrastructure thus give rise to overlapping but divergent “wholes” within the racialized urban terrain, offering insight into the Church as a loose network of horizontal alliances that may enforce or subvert hierarchy. Our focus on elemental forces allows us to move beyond abstractions and focus on how theological projects take shape in physical space within an urban ecology. Indeed, Holy Infrastructures come into focus most clearly in relation to the intersection of theology with environmental, climatic, and territorial projects. By approaching Church and State as co-constitutive, we show how Holy Infrastructures offer insight into the racialized and gendered terrain of contemporary Detroit.

How did it become possible to think of a racism without racists? This article tackles this question by looking at the contested interpretation of a racist incident in France. In 1969, Jewish shop owners in Orléans were baselessly accused of kidnapping women in fitting rooms and trafficking them into sexual slavery. This antisemitic agitation rapidly attracted the attention of local authorities, national media, and social scientists, led by sociologist Edgar Morin. Morin’s study made these events into a famous case-study in disinformation, the “rumor of Orléans.” But Morin was only one of several actors who attributed different causes to racism in Orléans. All of them agreed that racism was a serious problem, but they could not agree on its causes. Compared to other incidents at the time which grabbed media attention, the uncertainty of events in Orléans allowed people to debate this. Morin’s contribution was to turn to communications and social psychology to deploy the concept of “rumor.” He dissolved the problem of racism into a problem of communication. This suggests that in order to understand the emergence of “racism without racists,” we have to pay close attention to the context in which theories emerged to make it thinkable, and to the relationship between analyses of racism and communication.

The economic success of the intensive poultry and pork sectors is a milestone in the Spanish economic history of the past seven decades. This work analyses the boom in the chicken and pork businesses in Spain, verifying the strengths and weaknesses of both livestock models, and drawing conclusions in relation to the agribusiness system. The influence of chicken and pork in the booming Spanish meat sector is analysed from the perspectives of livestock farming and agroindustry, followed by the impact of both forms of intensive livestock farming on Spain’s domestic consumption and foreign trade. The similarities and differences in their evolution are identified from the perspective of two food supply models: a predominance of economies of scale until the 1980s, and of so-called economies of scope since that time. While the development of mass production in both intensive livestock businesses followed a similar pattern, the progressive segmentation of the market towards higher quality, more artisanal and sustainable products has greatly favoured the sector more deeply rooted in rural tradition: pork.

Armando Palacio Valdés characterised the Asturian village of Sama de Langreo in his novel La aldea perdida (1903), as an unusual example of an industrialised population entity through four variables: the sale of fresh meat, the existence of street lighting, cafés, and public greenspaces. The aim of this article is to verify the author’s approach by comparing the state of the rest of the Asturian parishes at the time of the novel (1879). To do this, a methodology combining the use of literary sources and the analysis of historical documentary sources will be applied. The results obtained confirm the Asturian author’s assessment of the industrialisation process in Sama as an exceptional milestone for the province, as well as evidencing the slow pace of industrialisation in the rest of the Asturian parishes.

This study deals with shared ideas about the countryside and its inhabitants during the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. It identifies the most significant sources of contemporary representations of the rural. These include, besides historical ideas pre-dating the regime, the party-state itself, expert structures, the arts, and pop culture. In many cases, representations encompassed efforts to transform the countryside, or society, or to maintain the status quo, and, following de Certeau, we can consider such activities to be strategies. On the other hand, villagers approached these representations and strategies using their own tactics. This study demonstrates that rural policymaking was not just in the hands of power structures; the effects it had depended a great deal on the dominated rural inhabitants.

The nutritional transition, together with the demographic and epidemiological transitions, stands as one of the most crucial phenomena shaping societies in the 20th century. A prominent characteristic of the nutritional transition is the increased consumption of animal-origin protein, particularly meat. Within this context, the present article utilises Spain as a case study to provide a close examination of the nutritional transition during the latter half of the 20th century. Spain’s significance lies in its late but rapid development of this transition. In the 1960s, meat consumption was relatively low compared to other European countries; however, within just two decades, it surpassed that of many developed nations. On one hand, the article offers a detailed insight into how budget constraints were eased to foster meat consumption among various consumer groups. On the other hand, the study aims to quantify the influence of income, prices, and preferences in driving this process

This article explores peasant women’s labour activism in 1890s Hungary, in the southeastern part of the Habsburg Empire, where repeated harvesters’ strikes and peasant uprisings took place during the second half of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries, making it the first centre of agrarian workers’ socialist organizing in Hungary. Informed by a more inclusive approach to women’s activist histories and subaltern studies, this article develops a new perspective on the periodization and geography of the international and Hungarian history of women’s social movements, to contribute to the historiographies of peasant women’s labour activism in the Eastern European countryside.

Historians credit the interwar period with the demise of the great agricultural estates but many survived, reduced in area and refocussed on new priorities. Three estates lying in close proximity in north Hampshire and south Berkshire had very divergent interests, but there were similarities, and significant differences, in the manner in which they survived the interwar period. One invested in a programme of renewal of houses and farm buildings, and another adopted a more commercial approach to managing its diverse interests and the third retrenched, cutting investment but maintaining the status quo as an agricultural and shooting estate. All three survived, relatively intact and financially stable, and remain in operation today. An examination of estate financial performance before and after the Great War provides the context to the strategies pursued by the owners and their Land Agents, and their place in the broader rural landscape of the 1920s and 1930s.

On 17 December 2010, the self-immolation of a young street vendor in Sidi Bouzid, a town in inland Tunisia, instigated the uprisings that became known as the Arab Spring or the Arab Revolutions – a wording that I will use here as a translation from the Arabic al-thawrât al-`arabiyya. Observers were shocked at the radical protests arising in these regions, where authoritarian regimes had crushed all serious opposition over the decades. Conflicts governed by geopolitics, in particular the ongoing Israeli–Arab and Israeli–Palestinian hostilities, and the focus on political Islam and jihadism as the only globalized locus of political protest, have arrogated any attention for societies, their transformation, and their mobilization.