By the end of the Second World War, the professional class presided over a massive alignment of national and global institutions with virtue capitalism. This global ‘welfare state’ moment makes it seem that virtue capitalism went hand in hand with state control. However, professionals were often ambivalent about their connection to the state. When Canada first ventured into nationalised healthcare, for example, doctors in Saskatchewan went on strike to avoid it. Despite often rejecting state interference, which many professionals feared might impede the integrity of their work, professionals held a moral relationship between knowing and doing, where they sought to use expertise to effect material change in the world and in individual lives. Such technocratic planning was fundamentally moral, embedding into mid-twentieth century capitalism the internalized, disciplining practices known as governmentality. Professionals were, to use Giorgio Agamben’s framing of the governmental economy, angels of the state. Human capital investment entangled industry, military, and education but, perhaps most importantly, led to an internalized, universal industriousness. The material effects of this ‘angelic’ work were sometimes deeply damaging, building social and economic ‘dependencies’ through the economy that mirrored, in individual lives, the hierarchies constructed by the colonial world.

This introductory chapter makes a case for a gender-inclusive approach to the history of work. The ‘early modern’ period witnessed unprecedented growth in parts of Europe and elsewhere, linked both to the global redistribution of resources and to new ways of organizing labour. This chapter surveys the rich scholarship on the history of women’s work in Europe and its implications for narratives of macroeconomic change and assessments of economic performance. It also discusses the insights brought by feminist economics to the conceptualization of work and highlights new methodologies for analysing divisions of labour in the past. Finally, it lays out arguments for why women’s work was as important as men’s in producing change.

This chapter explores the formation of an early ‘constitutionalist’ liberal current, by concentrating on Greek political economy. It starts by discussing the diffusion in the Greek world of an economic idiom, inspired by J. B. Say and Saint-Simonism, that concentrated on values such as industriousness and frugality as the organising principles of economy and society. It shows how this idiom complemented that of ‘public economy’ that informed Bavarian policies. The chapter then turns to Ioannis Soutsos, discussing how, from the 1840s onwards, he raised concerns about the obsession with economic virtues and argued for the benefits of institutional change and political participation. Drawing on the republican thought of Simonde de Sismondi and Pellegrino Rossi, Soutsos related industrie to political rights, called for large-scale reforms (including land redistribution) and associated political economy with the science of government. These calls increasingly targeted the monarchy, as reforms ground to a halt and the issue of land took on explosive dimensions. The chapter shows that ideas about state intervention in the economy and the view of economics as a science of government remained in fashion long after 1848, when they had lost their appeal elsewhere.

Chapter 3 examines post-1873 depression-era Ottoman novels and plays that articulate a language of difference by juxtaposing the success of industrious heroes against the failure of consumerist dandy anti-heroes. The representation of industrious and dandy characters in fin-de-siècle Istanbul shows the interconnectedness and interdependence between novels and the discourses and practices of productivity, in sharing the same new moral universe. Differing from the normative and distant language of the morality authors, or the authoritative and punitive language of the bureaucratic reforms explored in Chapters 1 and 2, the playful voices of novelists displayed dynamic and at times ambivalent representations of the idle and dandy, as an alternate, yet socially undesirable form of self-fashioning. By pitting a hardworking and upwardly mobile hero against the dandy anti-hero, novels thematized the period’s concern with valuing work as a constitutive element of character and nation-building, and also drew boundaries that defined who was and was not included in the nation. As a forum in which citizenship was debated, fiction established difference using ridicule, marginalization, and even criminalization as a social intervention.