Successful mortgage lending is often said to require a system of registration, which records the ownership of, and any encumbrances on, a particular piece of real estate. Here we analyse how Sweden's Riksens Ständers Bank handled the uncertainties of the mortgage lending market c. 1680–1700, when there was no coherent system of property registration. The bank tried to make registration compulsory, but when influential groups opposed this move, the bank had to modify its lending practices. The study thus sheds light on the somewhat fraught initial stages of the shifts in the credit system, which from the latter half of the seventeenth century onwards, saw personal trust replaced by system trust, and private credit replaced by institutional credit.

In 1268–1269 Spalding Priory created an inventory of its male serfs in Weston and the whereabouts of their offspring. Historical demographers have long laboured over this unique document, but their efforts have brought more confusion than consensus. Aiming to revive the historical utility of the Weston inventory, this article provides context for the inventory and access to the text itself. It also reorients analysis of the inventory away from a focus on households and families (both unsatisfactorily reported) and towards the extensive information it contains about how a generation of serf children grew into adulthood.

This article examines the history of immigrant business proprietors in England and Wales between 1851 and 1911. The newly available electronic version of the Census (I-CeM) allows all business proprietors in each Census year to be identified, and provides birthplace information that allows entrepreneurs from different countries to be compared to each other and to business proprietors born in the United Kingdom. Immigrant populations had higher rates of business proprietorship than the English and Welsh-born population. This article argues that this was caused by labour market structure and demography rather than cultural differences between English- and foreign-born business proprietors.

Focusing on the shipping sector, this article discusses the influence of labour migrants from rural areas on economic development in Copenhagen and Stockholm during the long eighteenth century. During this period, the two cities developed in markedly different ways; Copenhagen flourished while Stockholm stagnated, and the qualitative and quantitative contribution of migrants was essential in facilitating these differences. Both capitals were maritime hubs that relied on a constant influx of mariners who originated from the two cities’ rural hinterlands. By examining different characteristics of the migrant mariners and the improvements of mariners’ human capital across the eighteenth century, this article emphasises the importance of the shipping sector as well as labour migration in the socio-economic development of Copenhagen and Stockholm.

A study of the parish records of St Peter upon Cornhill in London from 1580 to 1605 revealed that children suffered a greater increase in mortality than adults in the plague years of 1593 and 1603, and servants accounted for the majority of deaths within the 15–24 age group. Some family groups avoided the plague altogether, others suffered a single burial, however in some cases, individuals within the same family household were buried within a short period of each other. The epidemiological pattern is complex and is moderated by social and demographic networks. Comparisons are made with modern epidemics caused by Yersinia pestis.

The article explores the history of the Employees’ State Insurance Act of 1948 (ESI), a law enacted in the first year of Indian independence. Global trends in social policy had influenced debates on a social insurance for Indian workers since the 1920s. Transformations of Indian industry, World War II, the post-war crisis, and the emerging economic policy of the postcolonial State then created conditions for legislation. Just as the international welfare discourse, Indian contributions included, converged on social welfare as a universal citizen right, the regulatory content of the health insurance scheme devised for India diverged from this normative consensus: the ESI Act remained strictly employment-based, contributed to an emerging structure of graded entitlements, and to the hardening of boundaries between what would later be called “formal” and “informal” labour. Simultaneously, it also generated horizons of expectation that continue to inform labour struggles.

Revolutions need people. How do these people connect with each other, and how can the revolutionary message pass from one person to another? This article aims to answer these questions by examining the revolutionaries who participated in the Finnish Civil War on the rebellious Red side in 1918. We have chosen Red women from a particular district in Finland in order to analyse their connections and the networks created by membership of the labour movement, place of residence, and kinship. In order to see the layers of those connections, we utilize historical social network analysis rooted in digital history. This allows us to observe the significance and impact of regional, social networks and improves our understanding of structural factors affecting the intra-group dynamics among these revolutionary women. Our results support the claim that historical network analysis is a suitable tool for exploring interaction patterns and social structures in the past, and to gain new insights into historical phenomena.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the two convict-built European settler colonial projects in Oceania, French New Caledonia and British Australia, were geographically close yet ideologically distant. Observers in the Australian colonies regularly characterized French colonization as backward, inhumane, and uncivilized, often pointing to the penal colony in New Caledonia as evidence. Conversely, French commentators, while acknowledging that Britain's transportation of convicts to Australia had inspired their own penal colonial designs in the South Pacific, insisted that theirs was a significantly different venture, built on modern, carefully preconceived methods. Thus, both sides engaged in an active practice of denying comparability; a practice that historians, in neglecting the interconnections that existed between Australia and New Caledonia, have effectively perpetuated. This article draws attention to some of the strategies of spatial and temporal distance deployed by the Australian colonies in relation to the bagne in New Caledonia and examines the nation-building ends that these strategies served. It outlines the basic context and contours of the policy of convict transportation for the British and the French and analyses discursive attempts to emphasize the distinctions between Australia and New Caledonia. Particular focus is placed on the moral panic in Australian newspapers about the alleged dangerous proximity of New Caledonia to the east coast of Australia. I argue that this moral panic arose at a time when Britain's colonies in Australia, in the process of being granted autonomy and not yet unified as a federated nation, sought recognition as reputable settlements of morally virtuous populations. The panic simultaneously emphasized the New Caledonian penal colony's geographical closeness to and ideological distance from Australia, thereby enabling Australia's own penal history to be safely quarantined in the past.

Inequality has increased in most Western countries since the early 1980s. In a recent report, the international non-governmental organization Oxfam noted that the twenty-six richest people in the world own as much wealth as the poorest fifty per cent of the world's population. Discontent with the growing disparities in wealth and income has soared in recent years, especially in the wake of the 2007/2008 financial crisis and the “Great Recession” that followed. The Occupy movement protested against the greed of the “one per cent”, referring to the highly skewed income distribution in the US. Former US president Barack Obama proclaimed the growth of within-country economic inequality as “the defining challenge of our time”. Yet, he enacted few policies that reduced inequality during his two terms in office; the Gini coefficient in the US actually increased slightly between 2007 and 2016. His successor, whose election has often been explained as a consequence of these high levels of inequality, has slashed taxes for the wealthy, probably causing further rises in inequality in the future. In this essay, I will review two recent economic history books that examine the historical roots of within-country inequality on a global scale: Branko Milanovic's Global Inequality (2016) and Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler (2017). Formerly a lead economist at the World Bank, Milanovic is a well-known scholar working in the field of economic inequality, while Scheidel has a background as a specialist in the economic, social, and demographic history of antiquity.

In the late 1930s, three mobile penal camps were established in the French colony of Senegal in order to assemble convicts with long sentences and compel them to work outside the prison. Senegalese penal camps were thus a place both of confinement and of circulation for convicts who constantly moved out of the prison to work on the roads. This article argues that the penal camps were spaces of multiple and antagonistic forms of mobility that blurred the divide between the “inside” and the “outside” world. The mobility of penal camps played a key role in the hazardous living and working conditions that penal labourers experienced. However, convict labourers were not unresponsive and a range of protests emerged, from breakout to self-mutilation. These individual and intentional forms of mobility and immobility threw a spanner in the works of the day-to-day functioning of Senegalese penal camps and, more broadly, in the colonial project of mise en valeur.

The International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) was a radical trans-Atlantic network for the propagation of black proletarian internationalism, established by the Red International of Labour Unions in 1928. Its key mastermind was James W. Ford, an African American communist labour union activist who was in charge of the organization and its operations until the autumn of 1931. This article critically highlights Ford's ambitions as well as the early phase of the organization. Both in terms of its agenda and objective as well as in its outreach among black workers in the Black Atlantic, the ITUCNW and its main propagators stressed the “class-before-race” argument of the Comintern rather than the pan-Africanist “race-before-class” approach. This is not surprising as the ITUCNW was one of the organizations that had been established when the Comintern and the RILU had started to apply the “class-against-class” doctrine, which left no room for cooperation between communists and radical pan-Africanists.

Capturing people, sometimes by taking relatives hostage, is a common practice for purposes of conscription and law enforcement in the Wa State of Myanmar. Given the unreliability of the local census, as well as the relative weakness of civil government, and registration in a de facto state governed by an insurgent army, the personal politics of capture provides a functional equivalent to state legibility. This personal politics operates based on the reorganization of personal networks between representatives of the military state and ordinary people: first, circles of acquaintances within the military state that provide access to local knowledge, and second, relationships of patronage formed on the basis of those new acquaintanceships, as well as connections of kinship and co-residence. Conscription by capture, however, also requires anonymity; that is, the passive non-recognition of mutuality with strangers and the active refusal of mutuality with acquaintances. This article describes the historical emergence of networks of acquaintances and relationships of patronage as a combination of Maoist state-building and local institutions of war capture and adoption. It demonstrates how conscription by capture relies on relationships of acquaintances and non-recognition, as well as on patronage and the refusal of mutuality. The politics of conscription by capture are contrasted with conscription in imperial states and contemporary nation-states.

From 2007–2012, a dramatic upsurge in maritime piracy off the coast of Somalia captivated global attention. Over three hundred merchant vessels and some three thousand seafarers were held hostage with ransom amounts ranging from $200,000 to $10 million being paid to release these ships. Somali piracy operated exclusively on a kidnap-and-ransom model with crew, cargo, and ship held captive until a ransom was secured. Ransom, unlike theft or seizure, requires willing parties and systems of exchange. Ransom economies, therefore, bring together disparate actors and make visible the centrality of protection as a mode of accumulation and jurisdiction. As an analytic, this article proposes an anthropology of protection to undercut divides between legality and illegality, trade and finance, piracy and counter piracy. It argues that protection is key to apprehending processes of mobility and interruption central to global capitalism.