In Japan, the transformation of labour relations from medieval forms of serfdom, lifelong service, and corvée labour to short-term contracts and wage labour was already under way by the seventeenth century. In the second half of the seventeenth century short-term employment based on contracts became common. Indentured labour gradually changed into wage labour. Government policies included enabling greater mobility for the workers, while also trying to set limits to migration flow to the cities. Some Confucian scholars welcomed this new form of labour relations; others condemned them. The few sources about the work ethics of waged workers imply mockery about their loose morals and work attitudes, but also complaints about workloads and exploitation.

This article addresses two separate but interlinked questions relating to India in Mughal times (sixteenth to early eighteenth century). First, the terms on which labour was rendered, taking perfect market conditions as standard; and, second, the perceptions of labour held by the higher classes and the labourers themselves. As to forms of labour, one may well describe conditions as those of an imperfect market. Slave labour was restricted largely to domestic service. Rural wage rates were depressed owing to the caste system and the “village community” mechanism. In the city, the monopoly of resources by the ruling class necessarily depressed wages through the market mechanism itself. While theories of hierarchy were dominant, there are indications sometimes of a tolerant attitude towards manual labour and the labouring poor among the dominant classes. What seems most striking is the defiant assertion of their status in relation to God and society made on behalf of peasants and workers in northern India in certain religious cults in the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries.

In Mughal India, accounts were kept by individuals and institutions for purposes of reference and planning. Accountancy required a set of objectives and techniques for collecting, organizing, and presenting information so that it could then be put to use. It also fostered learning. Subsisting on formal or informal training, professional accountants equipped themselves with linguistic and mathematical skills, the art of notation, mnemonic devices, and the ability to translate loosely defined units into precise terms and numbers. Accountants were an important component of the state apparatus, village administration, and elite household management. In the seventeenth century manuals were produced in Persian by private individuals for the guidance of persons seeking to acquire proficiency in accountancy (siyaq) and clerical work. No study has been made so far of the manuals themselves nor of the people who compiled or used them. This introductory essay examines the manuals (generally titled Dasturu-l Amal) and the information they contain about the system of accountancy as well as about the professional ethics and norms of ideal behaviour of the secretarial class.

During the two first centuries of Portuguese colonization in America there was an intense debate about the legitimacy of enslaving Africans and Indians. In Portuguese America, the mission to spread the Christian faith was connected with the subjection of populations on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean to an ideology that considered labour as God's punishment for Adam's sin. In that sense, the justification of the unfree labour inflicted upon Indians and Africans in Portuguese America was a product of the same ideology, one that condemned manual work as rendering a man dishonourable. The purpose of this article is to review the debate from its medieval origins in Portugal, and to examine what effect the arrival of the Jesuits in America had on that debate, until the final prohibition of Indian enslavement in the mid-eighteenth century, documented by letters, reports, and sermons.

This article analyses free and unfree labour in mining centres in the Andes during early Spanish colonial times. It focuses on two themes: the condition of indigenous or “native” people as “free labourers”, and the mita system of unfree labour. For that purpose I shall consider the cases of Potosí, the most important mining centre in the Andes, and San Antonio del Nuevo Mundo in southern Bolivia, a large mine unaffected by the mita system of labour obligations.