This article follows the administrative usage of the term “labour” and its political effects in the period from roughly 1918–1924 in Madras Presidency, India. In this short period, I will argue, fundamental tensions in the ability of the concept to refer coherently to its object came violently to the surface. The prevailing tension in both governmental discourse and in the sphere of political representation concerned the extent to which either caste status or economic class were to be understood as the primary determinant of the meaning of labour. At the nub of this conflict lay the contested status of the descendants of hereditarily unfree labourers who supplied the bulk of the Presidency's labour requirements and were referred to in this period as Adi-Dravidas. Should they be construed as ritually disadvantaged caste subjects who also happened to labour, or as paradigmatic labourers who were also subjected to caste discrimination? Adi-Dravidas provoked both the anxiety of the elite political classes who wished to incorporate them into larger nationalist projects, as well as the reformist zeal of the colonial state, throwing the category “labour” into crisis. By navigating the use to which “labour” was put by caste elites, state officials, and Adi-Dravidas themselves, I will reflect on the coherence of caste and class as analytic concepts for political and social struggles of the kind I am describing.

The Nieboer-Domar hypothesis has proved to be a powerful tool for identifying the economic conditions under which slavery was more likely to emerge as a dominant form of labour. It states that in cases of land abundance and labour shortages the use of slavery was likely to become a vital alternative means of increasing production. These conditions have been identified for large parts of pre-colonial and semi-colonial Africa. The Nieboer-Domar hypothesis has been used by a number of historians and economic historians to analyse the role of slavery and bonded labour in Africa. The hypothesis is not, however, uncontested. Scholars have criticized it on both theoretical and empirical grounds. This article discusses the validity of the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis using the eighteenth-century Cape Colony as our point of departure. We show that the hypothesis holds in part, but also that it needs to be modified. First, slavery emerged as an urban phenomenon. Second, the use of slaves increased in parallel with other forms of labour, and the role of slaves can be understood only in relation to a wide range of existing labour contracts. Once established, slavery came to play a significant role in facilitating increased production on the settler farms in the eighteenth century. Capacity for surplus production was the key factor, but why slavery became a major form of labour was partly a consequence of its existence in the urban areas and partly of how it could be combined with other forms of labour.

This article explores the chasm between party leaders and rank-and-file workers within the postwar Italian Socialist Party and Polish Socialist Party between 1944 and 1947. So far only studied in the context of communist parties, existing historiography on this theme has observed a deep rift between the radicalization amongst grassroots activists defending the self-management workers had won during the final days of World War II and the moderation practised by party leaders desperate to demonstrate their trustworthiness as government partners. Based on an analysis of the sentiments amongst socialist workers in Łódż and Sesto San Giovanni, and of the visions espoused by provincial and national socialist leaders, this article argues that the dynamics within socialist parties were exactly the other way around. Whereas socialist leaders ascribed a crucial role to grassroots participatory structures in their efforts to teach the working classes democracy, socialist workers were more concerned with day-to-day survival than with participation, self-management, or any other question.