By tracing mentions of the English radical thinker Thomas Spence (1750–1814), his revolutionary “Plan”, and his disciples (the “Spencean Philanthropists”) in digitized collections of English-language Irish, Caribbean, Indian, Australian, Canadian, and US-American newspapers in the 1790s–1840s, this article explores the dissemination of the ideas and militancy inspired by Spence (“Spenceanism”) across the British Empire and the United States. By applying Digital Humanities methods to investigate British radical history from a transnational perspective, the global reception of Spenceanism is reconstructed by examining and comparing a corpus of 275 newspaper articles through text-mining methods such as keyword analysis, co-occurrences, and sentiment analysis. These methods enable the identification of key themes in references to Spenceanism and advance hypotheses concerning both their geographical and chronological distribution: not only when and where Spence and the Spenceans were alluded to and commented upon, but also how a newspaper's geographical location may have impacted its rhetoric in a specific year and historical context. By combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, this article contributes new insights regarding the global circulation of radical ideas across the nineteenth-century English-reading world.

While scholarship on “women's liberation” under historically existing socialism focuses on heroic women making inroads into male-dominated domains, this article explores a previously overlooked group of women in socialist China. Known as jiashu in Chinese, these women are the female dependents (wives, mothers, and in-laws) of both male and female employees in a workplace. Specifically, it centers on the experiences of the jiashu of textile workers in the city of Zhengzhou from 1949 to 1962. It argues that, despite being portrayed as “parasitizing” off formal workers, jiashu performed a wide range of work, both paid and unpaid, inside and outside the household. Similar to their counterparts under capitalism and other state-socialist regimes, these Chinese women's unpaid domestic work sustained the daily and generational reproduction of the labor force and was thus essential to industrial accumulation. Moreover, jiashu also worked on the shopfloor and in collectivized service facilities as paid laborers. Such remunerated work also subsidized accumulation, and the resistance from these women contributed to the eventual collapse of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). This research advances the field in two ways. First, it expands theories about the relationship between women's work, social reproduction, and capital accumulation to include work that is both reproductive in nature and remunerated – a previously understudied form of labor. Second, while existing literature focuses on structural analysis and explains why women's work is functional to accumulation, this study gives equal attention to women's agency, showing how interactions between the two shaped historical trajectories.

Histories of Third Worldism have received renewed attention from historians in the past decade. Much of the resulting scholarship has focused on the international to the exclusion of the national. This article addresses this relative neglect by focusing on a particular iteration of Third World nation-state-building: co-operative socialism in Forbes Burnham's Guyana. Refuting the argument that co-operative socialism was imitative and implemented for reasons of political expediency only, the article contends that Burnham's doctrine should be regarded as a meaningful attempt at remaking Guyana's society and economy through its core principles of self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and self-discipline. These principles gave rise to a specific conception of citizenship in 1970s Guyana, where the People's National Congress (PNC) sought to link political belonging and participation with a moral ethic premised on the notion of hard work in service of the nation. The article examines how this collectivist understanding of citizenship gave rise to a particular set of struggles at the turn of the 1980s, as the co-operative republic began to collapse. What emerged from these struggles was an alternate but parallel imagining of citizenship espoused by the Working People's Alliance (WPA), which rejected the PNC's vanguardism in favour of empowering the Guyanese people through the creation of non-hierarchical systems of collective authority. The article concludes by arguing that the failure of the WPA's attempt to overthrow the PNC through popular revolt signified the ends of decolonization and Third Worldism in the Caribbean, and the beginnings of new struggles against new forms of coloniality in the guise of the emerging neoliberal and good governance agendas.

Campaigns on behalf of Russian political prisoners stretch from the revolutionary “nihilists” of the 1880s to the dissidents of the 1970s. While the efforts of political émigrés and their Western sympathizers – to promote awareness, raise funds, and pressure governments – met with decidedly mixed success, there were several watershed moments. This article examines how one such breakthrough, the compilation and publication of Letters from Russian Prisons in 1925, resulted in the formation of the International Committee for Political Prisoners (ICPP) as the first ever transnational amnesty NGO. Along with 300 pages of harrowing accounts of Soviet prisons, camps, and exile, the book featured endorsements by “Twenty-Two Well-Known European and American Authors”. The disputatious process of this volume's compilation and the controversy greeting its issuance show the challenges of extending civil liberties advocacy to include criticism of the Soviet Union among left and liberal figures in the interwar period. In establishing a new field of endeavor – universalist transnational activism to aid political detainees – the ICPP navigated a complex network of relationships among a diverse array of political and intellectual figures.

This article explores the influence of worker resistance to Taylorism on industrial relations in Sweden. By analysing archival material from workers at the Separator Corporate Group, the Metal Workers’ Union, and the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, this article highlights the interplay between shop floor activism, discussions within trade unions, and central labour market relations. It demonstrates how rank-and-file activism compelled union leadership and the central labour market organizations to adopt a series of agreements in the 1940s aimed at addressing worker resistance to Taylorism.

Despite worker discontent, scientific management spread during the 1930s and 1940s. This eventually contributed to the Metal Strike of 1945, which had significant impact on labour–capital relations. According to the metal workers, scientific management, particularly time-motion studies, reduced their bargaining power by concealing labour processes and methods for wage determination, thereby allowing management a monopoly on knowledge.

Following the strike, negotiations between the Trade Union Confederation and the Swedish Employers’ Association resulted in the 1948 Work Studies Agreement. This agreement provided a platform for resolving conflicts and encouraging workers’ support of rationalization via the Work Studies Council. Worker resistance consequently drove Swedish labour market centralization, inadvertently promoting closer labour–capital cooperation.

This article argues, among other things, that although worker resistance failed to upend scientific management, it resulted in it being regulated within a corporatist framework. This highlights the important historical role local trade union activism has played in shaping labour market institutions and the broader political economy.

This essay takes up the project of engendering capitalism by turning to the household. It situates a gendered analysis of capitalism within recent histories of capitalism, feminist analyses of social reproduction, histories of family and industrialism, histories of sexuality, and histories of women's labor. It argues that to analyze capitalism from a household perspective clarifies three core elements of capitalist political economy. First, capitalism depended on reproductive and productive labor inside the household, from early industrialization through its most recent incarnations. Second, reproductive labor, historically anchored in the household, has served as a crucial site for development of capitalist labor relations. Third, that intensified commodification of reproductive labor has driven capitalist accumulation as well as capitalist social relations, whether that labor occurs within the household or is located beyond it.

It has long been recognized that, in order to understand economies in the past, we need better information about women's work and tertiary sector work. It is also well known that, while valuable in many ways, nineteenth-century censuses give incomplete information about women's contributions to the economy. Consequently, censuses are a poor basis for estimating the occupational structure. This article offers a solution to these problems by triangulating census data with qualitative information extracted from court records. The result is a more reasonable estimate of the first-level occupational structure in a Swedish local society (Västerås and its surroundings) around 1880. This estimate suggests that just before the onset of industrialization, around eighty per cent of the adult population, women and men, were active in primary and tertiary sector work. Compared to the census, the analysis sets women's share in the primary and the tertiary sectors at higher levels. The article has a strong methodological focus and describes in detail how the court records were analysed and adjusted to be comparable with the census.

“Direct action” emerged as a central concept in labour-movement politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article traces and explains that process of invention. In doing so, it seeks to settle three currently unresolved historical problems: the problem of the meaning of direct action; the problem of its relative novelty; and the problem of its relationship to nation. The article draws upon pamphlets and newspapers published on four continents in English, French, Spanish, and German. It argues that the concept of direct action was used in several analytically distinguishable ways: categorical; performative; and strategic. While aspects of direct action were evident in many nations over several decades, French activists played a decisive and catalytic role in the development of the concept. They welded the categorical, performative, and strategic together. They assembled key performances into an agreed repertoire. And they underlined the revolutionary significance of this combination. This new assemblage was then widely taken up across the global labour movement.

This article seeks to enhance our understanding of the nature of socialist internationalism, in particular by considering the place of the nation in its functioning and essence. For this purpose, the concept of inter-nationalism is used to study the particular case of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) during Spain's Second Republic. In the first section, we focus on the meeting of the executive of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) in Madrid in 1931, and the subsequent May Day celebrations in the city. In the second, we analyse the use of internationalism by the PSOE in the debates on the decentralization of the Republican state. This article will argue that the PSOE made use of internationalist events to further the internal and external consolidation of the Republic, and its own position in government. Furthermore, internationalism served to uphold the unity and unique qualities of Spanish politics and culture. These considerations enable us to point to both the political and cultural dimensions of the PSOE's identification with Spanish nationalism, and to assert both the nation's importance in socialist internationalism and its role in socialist political culture during the interwar period.

This article deals with a paradox. Evidence for the punishment of workers during the early Middle Ages is richer in the earlier period (sixth and seventh centuries), when rural workers are generally thought to have been the least oppressed; by contrast, direct discussion of the subject largely drops out of the record in the Carolingian era (eighth to tenth centuries), despite clear evidence for renewed intensification of economic exploitation by both lay and religious lordships over the same period. Whereas the punishment of slaves had once provided a richly productive metaphor for thinking through issues of moral authority and legitimate leadership, Carolingian moralists and commentators no longer took the punishment of workers as a meaningful model for other, more morally or religiously motivated practices of punishment. Despite interest in punishment in other, non-exploitative contexts, lords’ practices of punishment of their workers were no longer taken as productive of meaning, whether positive or negative. The relationship of lords with their lowest-ranking dependents no longer defined or illustrated their power in the way that it had for the earlier Roman and late antique paterfamilias. One reason for this was the increasing tension perceived between profit-seeking and the correct, justified exercise of punishment: the two were kept at arms’ length by Carolingian writers to a surprising extent.

The processes of control and collection are prominent themes throughout pharaonic history. However, the extent that the central regime attempted to administer agricultural fields to collect revenues directly from the farmer who actually worked the land is unclear during the pharaonic period (c.2686–1069). Relations between those involved in agricultural cultivation and local headships of extended families and wider kinship groups were deeply embedded within a broad range of interpersonal discourses, behaviours, and practices. Village headmen and officials at all levels of an impersonalized “state” hierarchy were themselves landholders who drew income from the land and were held responsible for collecting revenues from their fields. It is therefore necessary to define, with a focus on the imperatives of a subsistence economy, who was working the land and what the relationship was between them, the headmen, and those from within outside power structures (in the context of direct intervention against specific groups of the population). To address these points, I will focus on revenue extraction as a “state” process, how it was connected to the role of punishment, and its impact on local hierarchies (the targets of revenue extraction).

What is the historical role of punishment in the management of labour? This is the central question of this Special Issue of the International Review of Social History (IRSH), “Punishing Workers, Managing Labour”. Through a close reading of the diverse range of articles included in this Special Issue and by addressing the relatively extensive but highly fragmented scholarship on the subject, this introduction argues that the key to labour management lay in the interplay of differentiated forms of punishment with distinct labour relations, rather than in the imposition of one punitive regime onto an undifferentiated workforce. In other words, the effective management of labour required the systematic differentiation of the workforce; to that end, the imposition of diversified forms of punishment did not merely reflect existing labour distinctions, but also contributed to creating them. This point leads us to address broader methodological and theoretical issues about how we can analyse such complex interactions: how we can compare the role of punishment in the management of labour across space and time, and how our findings can be used to explain short- and long-term historical changes.

This article analyzes slave resistance, capital crimes, and state violence in the Mississippi Valley and the Paraíba Valley – two of the most dynamic plantation economies of the nineteenth century. The research focused on the intersection between slavery and criminal law in Brazil and the United States. The analysis of capital crimes committed by enslaved people in Natchez and Vassouras revealed changing patterns of resistance and judicial punishment through the decades. This investigation demonstrated that local experiences of violence on plantations and in courtrooms were connected to the dynamics of national politics and the world economy. Moreover, this comparative study illuminated differences between these racialized slave societies and their political systems and revealed the essence of distinct regimes of racial violence in the Americas.

In the past few decades, caregivers, such as nursing assistants and home health aides, have come to compose the fastest-growing segment of the paid workforce in the United States. At the same time, corporate caretakers of workers’ savings, such as pension funds and mutual funds, have become the nation's largest investors, bound by fiduciary duties of trust. And unprecedented numbers of elder employees and retirees have become the biggest supposed beneficiaries of both care labor and trust capital, depending on health workers and asset managers in their daily lives. At the center of this emerging structure of work, wealth, and welfare lies the pension system, a telling crucible of class relations in our time. Several recent books across different disciplines examine the shifting politics of pensions in the United States and around the world. The spate of new studies presents an opportunity to explore the remarkable role of retirement funds in reorganizing labor and finance over the past fifty years. Rather than offering a historiographical critique of current work, this expository essay surveys the main findings of a larger and longer body of scholarship on organized labor and investment related to pensions. Though focused on the United States, it places the American story in a comparative context. The survey points to a fertile field for further study: as retirees have increasingly relied on professional asset managers and caregivers, the finance and health sectors have undergone converging crises over fiduciary duty and elder care, posing parallel challenges for organized labor.

This paper investigates two New Kingdom Egyptian texts pertaining to labour regulation: the Karnak Decree of Horemheb and the Nauri Decree of Seti I. They focus on combating the unauthorized diverting of manpower and represent the oldest Egyptian texts (fourteenth–thirteenth century BCE) explicitly concerned with the legal dimension of managing the workforce. After a brief historical overview, the paper outlines each text's key content and stylistic features. It shows that while some of these are likely native to Egypt, others may have been imported from Mesopotamia. More specifically, it appears that the sentence structure is native Egyptian, but the sanctions deployed are likely of foreign origin, aligning more closely to the contemporary punitive tradition of Mesopotamia. This is probably no coincidence, given the close contact between Egypt and the broader Near East at that time. This uptake of foreign ideas may have achieved more efficient labour regulation by enforcing stricter rules for non-compliance while simultaneously maintaining a veneer of Egyptian authenticity in line with official state ideology.

With the abolition of the guild system and the rise of a new legal regime based on free contract, a central dilemma emerged in Europe: how to enforce labour control in this new era of individual economic freedom. This article examines how this issue was addressed in the State of Milan, where ideas about freedom of contract championed by state reformers such as Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria were met with continued requests from merchant-manufacturers to apply corporal punishment and threat of imprisonment to ensure workers’ attendance. Analysing the new regulations, the ideological credos of the new regime, and the effectiveness of the reforms as they played out on the ground in the silk industry, this article shows that the chance that labour relations could be managed within a civil law regime appeared to be in direct contrast with the dominant conception of workers’ conditions, in particular their lack of propriety and good faith. As credit-debt bonds and limitations to weavers’ mobility stood as the most effective means to ensure labour coercion, a closer look at the daily interactions in the workshop allows us to shed new light on the rationality of workers’ practices like Saint Monday, cast by contemporary commentators in merely moralistic terms.

In the past four decades or so, China scholars have shone a new light on the history of labour in late imperial China, particularly on the role of the household as a unit of production and on the contribution of women to commercial production and family income. Beyond members of the kin group itself, attention is seldom paid to the individuals brought into the Chinese households solely to provide additional manpower. To “break the carapace” of the late imperial Chinese household, this article focuses on the often-omitted “household workers”, that is, on its enslaved (nubi) and hired (gugong) constituents. It approaches the topic from the angle of the vulnerability of these non-kin “workers” to punishments and violence. To evaluate their vulnerability to punishment and gauge the disciplinary powers of the household heads, it examines the relationship between punishments and “household workers” in Ming law. It then explores lineage regulations, before moving closer to the ground by mobilizing a wider variety of day-to-day sources, such as contracts and narrative sources produced in the context of the late Ming and early Qing crisis.

Forced labour was central to the provision of public infrastructure in African colonies. Whereas current historiography focuses on the role of external drivers, such as humanitarian organizations or the Forced Labour Convention of 1930, in triggering change, no attention has been paid to the local initiatives that contributed to the end of forced labour. This article explores the transition to paid voluntary labour in the context of road building and maintenance in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, a region where incentives to resort to compulsion were very high due to the lack of alternative sources of revenue to finance public works. The article shows that movements away from forced labour were shaped by local conditions, and rural populations played a crucial part in the shifts in labour relations.