Over the course of the nineteenth century, major changes transformed the transport of people and freight in Rio de Janeiro, the capital of Brazil during this period. These transformations involved both technological change, as transport evolved first from carriages and carts to horse-drawn trams and then to electric trams, as well as economic developments, such as the establishment of the first tram companies, many of which became important vehicles for foreign capital to enter Brazil. Although there has been extensive research from various angles into the changes undergone by the city's transport sector, there remains, however, a significant lacuna in the existing literature: the workers involved in that sector. The aim of this article is to analyse the workforce of the urban transport sector in Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century, and to understand the labour that these workers provided, how they were affected by the transformations in the sector, and, at the same time, how they responded to those transformations. During this period, issues such as the connections between free and unfree labour, ethnic conflicts, and work regulation were very important in transport work in Rio de Janeiro, and they are explored in the text.

This article tells the hitherto unknown history of the rickshaw in the Philippines. The Filipinos’ encounter with this transport mode was brief and largely revolved around a failed rickshaw business in Manila in 1902. The venture quickly fizzled out, but not without controversy, deeply rooted in the colliding socio-political forces in the city at that time: the reliance on a non-motorized transport system; the consolidation of American colonial rule against the backdrop of an ongoing revolution; the birth of the first Filipino labor federation; and the implementation of a law banning the employment of Chinese workers from unskilled trades. The controversy turned the rickshaw into a disputed symbol. On the one hand, the rickshaw enterprise was criticized by Filipino carriage drivers and nationalist labor leaders, who viewed the vehicle as an essentially foreign apparatus that would enslave Filipinos. On the other hand, the Americans used the Filipinos’ opposition to the rickshaw to prove the supposed un-modernity of the lazy native workers, who failed to grasp the idea of the dignity of labor. These disputes were inextricably linked to the clash of discourses between Filipino nationalism and colonial modernity, two competing perspectives both influenced by a comparative transnational frame.

By analysing the first great railway strike in São Paulo (Brazil), this article aims to understand the role of the Companhia Paulista railway workers’ movement and its impact on labour relations in the São Paulo state. To that end, I have examined selected newspapers, the minutes of workers’ meetings, police investigations into the strike, and the reports of the Companhia Paulista's directors. Differing from the views of other historians who have tended to see the 1906 railway strike as a relatively inconsequential conflict about wages, I interpret it both as rooted in deeper grievances about labour conditions and as a starting point for a period of heightened militancy and changing labour-management relations.

The emergence of drivers’ unions in the 1920s and 1930s highlights the wide range of strategies for social and economic organization available to workers in the Gold Coast. Particularly among workers who operated outside the conventional categories of the colonial economy, unions provided only one of many models for labor organization. This article argues that self-employed drivers appropriated unions and an international discourse of labor organization in the early twentieth century in order to best represent their interests to the colonial government. However, their understanding of the function and organization of unions reflected a much broader repertoire of social and economic organizing practices. Rather than representing any exceptional form of labor organization, drivers highlight the circulation of multiple ideas surrounding labor organization in the early decades of the twentieth century, which informed the ways in which Africans engaged in the wage labor economy and implicitly challenged British colonial assumptions about labor, authority, and control.

The flag post mail relay runners, a communications system established in Cameroon during British colonial rule, laid the foundations for the communications structure of this colonial state. They were a remnant of a pre-colonial communications system and, with the advancement of “modern” communications structures such as roads, telephone lines, and post houses, the flag post runner gradually disappeared. This article explores the role of the runners for the colonial administration in Cameroon and is based mostly on archival research. It describes the runners’ system and how it influenced the colonial communications landscape. In addition, the questions of how these runners were involved in the colonial state and what forms of resistance emerged among runners are analysed. Finally, the article discusses the degree to which the subsequent construction of roads, telegraphic communications, and postal networks reflected the role played by mail runners in the British colonial period up to the 1950s.