In September 1896, the city of Bombay witnessed the beginning of a long-drawn-out epidemic crisis, with the outbreak of bubonic plague. This article investigates one particular dimension of this crisis – its effects upon the city's cotton textile mills, and its profound, though temporary, alteration of the relations between employers and workers. It argues that the structure of industrial relations in the textile mills in the second half of the nineteenth century rested upon the retention of wage arrears by mill managements, which forced workers into permanent debt, and bound them to the mill and their employers. The demographic and industrial crisis ushered in during the plague years, the article shows, cracked open this structure of industrial control, and workers were able to sustain a new, fleeting system of industrial “regulation from below”, based on the daily payment of wages. Through a study of the tensions in textile mills in 1897, situated within the broader context of a crisis of urban labour relations, the article shows the ways in which industrial relations were both deconstructed and reconstituted in a new form.

This article examines the rise of an irrigation economy in Hetao along the Yellow River during the nineteenth century, and uses it as a case study to illustrate how the periphery played a major and hitherto overlooked role in the development of the Chinese economy, which confounds the conventional view of a Chinese path of development that replicated smallholder farming. I focus on a group of Han entrepreneurs known as land merchants (dishang) who combined capital and expertise in irrigation development, and introduced a new set of property regime and socio-technical arrangements that fundamentally changed the frontier society. By linking the changes in local society to regional and global processes, this study demonstrates the centrality of the periphery as not only a zone of possibility and experimentation, but more importantly, a “contact zone” that facilitated China's integration into a new global market system.

In the second half of the twentieth century small family businesses were still widespread in France. An important reason for this resilience was the share of unpaid work performed by kin in producing for the market. The unpaid work of family members in a range of craft and commercial family businesses – particularly by spouses, sons, and daughters – contributed to both the survival of the businesses and the well-being of the families, as is testified to in numerous sources, albeit statistically undocumented. Although social rights in France are considered to be some of the most advanced in Europe, the French Parliament was extremely slow to define the legal status of these family workers. It was not until 1982 that a law was finally enacted to bestow occupational status on collaborating spouses and to define a procedure optionally to register this unpaid work and to secure social security benefits for those carrying it out. This article focuses on the process that led to a new definition of the demarcation between the marital duty to assist, and work that exceeds this moral and legal obligation, thus creating a legal right to be compensated. Two empirical perspectives, involving an analysis of the reasons behind the shifting position of trade associations on this issue, and an assessment of the influence of long-standing gendered institutions, such as marital authority, on the formal and informal rules regulating family business are used to illustrate this slow and tortuous process of acquiring occupational rights for family workers.

Historical research on domestic servants has a long tradition. Research, however, has become more systematic from the 1960s onwards thanks to social historians, historians focusing on the family, historical demographers and (particularly from the 1970s) women's and gender historians. For a long time, scholars assumed that domestic service (especially by live-in workers) would decline, or even disappear, because of household modernization, social progress, and development of the welfare state. The (largely unexpected) “revival” of paid domestic and care work in the past three decades has prompted sociologists and other social scientists to focus on the theme, opening new opportunities for exchange between historians and social scientists. This article provides a review of the research on these issues at a global level, though with a focus on Europe and the (former) European colonies, over the past fifty years, illustrating the different approaches and their results.