Although non-monetary benefits remain an important component of most workers’ wages in today's industrial economies, development economists and economic historians tend to view such payments as a remnant of older, obsolete labour regimes. But when in-kind wages are assumed to be exploitative, an outcome of market inefficiencies, or simply the result of limited supply of coinage, their actual economic functions can be obscured. Once we drop the constraints imposed by such assumptions and look at the historical evidence, we are forced to confront the possibility that workers actually used them to their advantage.

In this article, I analyse how in-kind wages functioned in certain historical contexts, and conclude that available explanations are far too limited. As the historical cases studied show, the different forms of in-kind payments must be examined because those forms – not just overall wage levels – helped determine labour supply, social and occupational mobility, and even capital formation.

The goods and services that made up in-kind payments also provide a fuller understanding of gender wage gaps. Non-monetary wages gave workers options that cash wages did not, and so created and reproduced fundamental inequalities among different groups.

In the past twenty years or so, the Nordic countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland) have seen a “renewal” in labour history. Thanks to exchanges outside the Nordic sphere and the “global turn” in labour history, new questions have been raised and topics addressed. Increased attention has been paid to the variations of labour and labour relations (including coerced labour), to working lives and the workplace, and to gender. The studies under review in this essay testify to the ongoing evolution of labour movement history in the Nordic countries in recent years.