The history of sugar is that of a commodity that has played a central and contested role in the development of global agro-industrial capitalism. In my introduction to this “Suggestions and Debates” collection, the theoretical underpinnings of The World of Sugar will be explained. Reference is made to the agenda of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative, which was published in the Journal of Global History in 2021, and of which I was a co-author. Inspired by the work of Friedmann and McMichael, a key element of this agenda is the notion of successive commodity regimes, separated by systemic frictions and phases of intense innovation to overcome them. Moreover, the argument is made that The World of Sugar can be read as an invitation to explore new directions in global labour history. My introduction concludes with an exhortation to overcome the limitations of single-commodity histories and to give more attention to the agency of workers in shaping the trajectories of global capitalism.

The World of Sugar, Ulbe Bosma’s compelling historical narrative on how sugar became a global commodity, and the accompanying introductory article in the International Review of Social History raise many fascinating points for further reflection and debate. In this commentary, I wish to highlight several points that resonate strongly with my own work at the Transnational Institute (TNI), a global think tank based in Amsterdam that connects social movements with academics and policymakers. These points of reflection are informed by TNI’s mission and practice of “scholar-activism”: the fact that we seek not only to interpret the world, but also to change it for the better, in particular for those exploited and oppressed classes and social groups. As my work principally involves collaboration with transnational agrarian movements, I pay particular attention to areas of Bosma’s analysis that carry implications for rural working people and for agrarian and environmental justice. This includes the role of sugar in the global land rush, the rise of sugar cane as a “flex crop and commodity”, and the ways in which “rural sugars” can be supported in peasant- and smallholder-based economies and livelihood strategies.

In this article, which has a strong methodological focus, we establish the labour relations that characterized the urban population of the Swedish town of Västerås in 1820. Several sources are combined: the so-called Tabellverket (an early form of demographic statistics) and observations made in, primarily, local court records. To assign labour relations as defined by the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations project, the preliminary picture based on the Tabellverket is complemented by systematically adding information from court records analysed in the Gender and Work project. This information captures both what people did and also, to some extent, what labour relations they were involved in. Subsequently, all the information is collated to estimate the labour relations characterizing the whole population in the selected town. The result of this experiment is a much more encompassing and richer picture of the labour relations within the selected community, one that acknowledges both women’s work and multiple employments. In a broader perspective, the case study contributes to our understanding of the gradual increase of commodified labour in the world.

The article begins by understanding Karl Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation (PA) as a historical process integrated by both internal and external components. Situating itself within the Marxist tradition that views PA as an originating, historical process that experienced closure by the end of the colonial period, it draws on history and theory to delineate how the external dimension of PA, British colonialism, unfolded in Punjab. Operating in cahoots with local actors, this colonial form of the “original sin” succeeded in subordinating the pre-capitalist modes of production to capitalism and established a new private property order as well as permanent agricultural settlements, using political, legal, ideological, and coercive means. It makes a distinctive contribution to the debates around PA by arguing that the external of PA (in British Punjab) differed radically from its internal (in England): the accumulation project involved mass sedentarization as opposed to mass expropriation. The article concludes by examining how the dialectics between dissolution and conservation form the dominant feature of colonialist PA in Punjab and how that can help us redefine PA in colonies.

This article contributes to the understanding of the scales of global capitalism by addressing labour relations from a historical perspective. Firstly, it suggests that the problem of the deadly cost of the expansion and shifting of commodity frontiers can be resolved only with an approach that scrutinizes humans’ consumption habits and lifestyles. Secondly, it proposes to explore the making of commodity frontiers through the respective sites of immobilization as well as workers’ means of escaping such immobilization. Thirdly, it explores the nexus of health, food, and labour by considering the agricultural production of commodities as toxic frontiers against which workers’ unions have historically organized to protect their safety. Finally, it sheds light on the ways in which the global scale of capitalism has met the micro scale of particles owing to the toxicity of twenty-first-century commodity frontiers.

The commodity frontiers framework describes well the movement of sugar cultivation across the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Caribbean. But it is less effective when explaining the evolution of sugar in nineteenth-century Tamil Nadu. In Tamil Nadu, the high costs of cultivation discouraged many peasants and landowners from planting sugar cane. As a consequence, despite British pressure to plant more cane, there was little increase in the crop before the twentieth century. In Tamil Nadu, sugar made from palmyra juice was a viable and popular substitute for cane sugar and this further discouraged the expansion of cane cultivation. The jaggery made from palm juice satisfied the demand for sweetener from most consumers in the region. From the mid-nineteenth century, palm jaggery was the raw material for making white sugar and distilling arrack in the sugar mills that were built in the region. Regional conditions shaped the development of sugar cultivation and manufacturing in Tamil Nadu. It is not a story of interaction between the local and the global as is found in the commodity frontiers framework. The region is a scale of activity that possesses great explanatory power, as the case of nineteenth-century South India shows.

The history of work is marred by the fact that the meaning of “labour” or “work” changed with the arrival of modern society, making it difficult to draw comparisons across time. There has been a shift from understanding work as any activity that may secure continued living and well-being, to seeing it as paid, full-time, specialized employment. This transformation has obscured the work of some groups in society (notably women but also others) and work in the form of multiple employments (which often means multiple labour relations). The methods and sources presented in this Special Theme offer valuable tools for historians seeking to address and navigate these issues.

Forced labour in the Middle Congo was characterized in the interwar period by, on the one hand, a declining role of the notorious French concession companies, and, on the other hand, the growing importance of forced recruitment and forced labour orchestrated by the colonial state. The article attempts to analyse and understand the overall setup of overburdening created by these conditions. Based on new French and Congolese archival resources, it discusses the effects of this overburdening, linking it to the responses shown by local populations, notably through flight and evasion. In a last step, the discussion focuses on the role of intermediaries and their impact on the violence that was locally experienced. The analysis includes a wider perspective into the changes and continuities during the years of World War II, and on the challenges for the forced labour system due to its official abolition in 1946 and the decline of clandestine practices of continuity until 1948.

This review essay focuses on the intimate, yet contingent, historical relationships between capitalism, democracy and the welfare state in the OECD region. Six landmark studies, published over the past decade, are reviewed: Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty and The Narrow Corridor: How Nations Struggle for Liberty; Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology; Torben Iversen and David Soskice’s Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism through a Turbulent Century; Peter H. Lindert’s Making Social Spending Work; and Ayşe Buğra’s Social Policy in Capitalist History. All these books reveal the independent effect of historical political factors on the rise of the welfare state across advanced capitalist democracies. Contrary to received wisdom, the central argument put forward is that there is no trade-off between capitalism and democracy and, more importantly, that the welfare state has become an existentially important lubricant buttressing both advanced capitalism and liberal democracy.

This article examines socialist globalization from the perspective of technical-labor internationalism in Mozambique, focusing on the final stage of the Cold War. First, it analyzes the four main pathways through which international technicians arrived in Mozambique: Latin American exile, socialist intergovernmental cooperation, European postcolonial humanitarianism, and African regionalism. It offers a cosmopolitan perspective on the relations that socialist Mozambique forged with the world. It then provides an inventory of the models of integration of these international technicians into the Mozambican state apparatus, presenting a framework emphasizing organizational rather than ideological aspects. It concludes that, while these paths were singular, they were not mutually exclusive. More importantly, they were instrumental in shaping the political affinities and frictions between international technicians in that cosmopolitan universe.

This article suggests that classification exercises were the quintessential modality for both the narrative and labour–management relations of occupational health and safety in Indian mines for the period 1895–1970. The extant literature has underestimated the cause-and-effect relationship that such classification practices had, including punitive safety regulation clauses, compensation clauses, the public image of firms, forms of knowledge, and stakeholder bargaining. The narrative of work hazards fundamentally forged casualty classification patterns. The ascertainment techniques applied to casualty, perceptions of occupational risk, and the politics of restitution shaped the narratives and defined patterns of casualty classification. Management devised various ways to present a decent picture of mining through casualty statistics. Later, critiques of this business practice exposed statistical discrepancies and flaws in the classification system, challenging the built-in business-blindness. From the late 1920s, the informed, organized mineworkers articulated their experiences of workplace risk; they confronted the managerial discourse of “unavoidable” work hazards and mineworkers’ liability for casualty. The mineworkers’ publicists and the government of the Republic of India took an interest in research on occupational health and safety and its regulation. They aimed at industrial efficiency and national reconstruction by creating a healthy, contented, and experienced workforce. All this steered the classification exercises of industrialists and public authorities towards favourable changes. The twin forces of capital and working people converged on the restitution measures articulated within the utilitarian paradigm. The latter, ironically, contributed to valorizing the narrative of risk and sacrifice in the lives of mineworkers.

The article explores the evolution of household income in India before the late nineteenth century. At a time when criticism of estimates of global real wages challenges the assumptions arising from the Great Divergence Debate, we aim to provide alternative ways of contributing to the discussion. By looking at individual and household income, as well as consumption levels in different parts of India, we found that members of the household other than the head (namely women) supplied a larger part of its total income than an analysis of wage differentials would suggest. Moreover, we argue that India, in the centuries under review, had a functioning labour market, despite several impediments. This adds to the value of our data as building blocks to reconstruct real wages and, consequently, to better understand welfare levels. Nevertheless, the decline in the Indian skill premium suggests that channels of social mobility decreased over time. The implications of all these findings for the Great Divergence Debate depend on the extent to which our approach also has consequences for our view on household income in other parts of Eurasia. Certainly, they call for a nuanced approach to Indian economic development during the period.

This article makes use of nearly 25,000 observations representing over 95,000 paid workdays across over 300 years to investigate individual work patterns, work availability, and the changes in work seasonality over time. This sample is comprised of workers in the construction industry, and includes unskilled men and women as well as skilled building craftsmen – the industry that is often used to estimate comparative real wages through early modern Europe. Data come predominantly from Scania, the southernmost region in modern day Sweden, and especially from Malmö, the largest town in the region.

Findings indicate that workers probably do not engage in paid labour on a purely labour-supply-based schedule, but are strongly impacted by the demand for construction labour, which was highly seasonal and impacted by local labour institutions. Seasonality was stronger further back in the past, indicating that finding long-term work may have been more difficult in earlier periods. A typical work year could probably not have been longer than 150 days, and would be made up of shorter work spells at several different sites. This is not enough work to meet standard assumptions of 250 days, or enough work for an unskilled man to support his family at a respectable level. Individual workers rarely worked more than a handful of days in a year on a construction site, even when labour demand was high, indicating that they did not maximize their income from waged labour.

For two decades, real wage comparisons have been centre stage in global socio-economic history studies of comparative development, offering a tractable – if oversimplified – gauge of living standards. But critics argue that these studies have leaned too heavily on the earnings of male, urban, unskilled, daily wage labourers, overlooking wage disparities between social groups and the mechanics of how wages were paid. This Special Issue attempts to shift the focus to overlooked groups and “wage systems” – the methods behind pay determination – and their role in deepening or mitigating inequality. This introduction attempts a global overview of the long-term developments in real wage studies, highlighting methodological innovations and challenges over recent decades. It also explains how the various articles in this Special Issue, spanning topics from medieval Europe to colonial India, contribute to this field. We argue that wage systems – and the inequalities they breed – played out in ways as varied as history itself, so comparing material living standards across time and space remains a complex calculation. We plead for a two-pronged approach: the continued study of all types of income of all working people, alongside a new focus on the social norms, institutions, and systems that determine the opportunities for individuals to acquire an income. A consolidated bibliography of all references in this Special Issue may help future research.

Studies on household income and consumption in Southern Europe have primarily focused on rural areas and factory workers. In this study, we aim to incorporate evidence of household income, considering the earnings of all household members and not just the male wage, using the population list of Zaragoza (Spain) from 1924. This population list is the first (and the last) to systematically record the wages of all citizens regardless of their family role or age. Our results confirm that, in 1924, most working-class households still required the labour of women and/or children to meet basic consumption needs (on average, they contributed nearly sixty per cent of the household income). Based on different food consumption baskets, the results also show that, with household income, the majority of working-class families could afford a basic consumption basket but not a nutritionally more complete basket.

Differences between models of industrialization are increasingly recognized as an important element of global economic history, and the quality of jobs is receiving new interest as a better indicator of living standards than income alone. This paper considers the implications of historical development models for job quality using the spinning section of textile manufacture in the early United States as a case study. The three factory systems that originated in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and around Philadelphia varied in technical choice, management practices, and establishment size, and exhibited heterogeneity in components of job quality. The paper uses quantitative evidence, including more than 2000 observations of early industrial workers’ wages, qualitative material from government investigations, worker letters, and company correspondence, and the Historical Job Quality Indicators to analyse work quality for spinning workers and to explore variation between the three industrial models. Workers in the more competitive Philadelphia model had lower real earnings, less job security, and higher work intensity than employees of the paternalistic Massachusetts mills. The paper highlights the importance of considering variation by location when evaluating historical living standards and the implications of industrialization strategies for quality of life.

Existing scholarship on China's industrial politics in the early post-Mao era has not paid adequate attention to the tension between two seemingly contradictory tendencies: the reform drives to consolidate managerial despotism in urban public enterprises, and policy endeavors to strengthen formal institutional channels for workers to participate in their enterprises’ democratic management. Focusing on the city of Wuhan in 1984–1985, this article examines the policy logic behind these two overlapping tendencies and how workers experienced and reacted to them. It argues that, on the one hand, Wuhan's local authorities merely intended the institutional formalities of democracy to facilitate and build popular support for the inauguration of managerial despotism. On the other hand, workers’ very involvement in this façade of democracy accidentally emboldened many of them to air grievances, make subversive demands, assert agency, and even resist managerial despotism. These findings shed light on the nuanced historicity of 1980s China and contribute to a rethinking of the meaning of workplace democracy.

This study investigates the wages and labour contracts of Khoe workers in Graaff Reinet, a district on the Cape Colony's eastern frontier in the early nineteenth century. Using wage registers from 1801 to 1810, we offer the first individual-level analysis of wages for both male and female Khoe workers, examining payment forms, socio-economic stratification, and gendered wage dynamics. The findings highlight a persistently high reliance on in-kind payments – aligned with the pastoral economy and cultural preferences of the Khoe – but reveal a gradual shift towards cash wages, driven by the colonial administration's efforts to reduce labour coercion. Gender disparities emerge as a critical theme, with female labourers experiencing higher wage inequality and receiving a larger proportion of in-kind wages. The analysis underscores the intersection of colonial economic policies, labour practices, and social inequalities, challenging aggregate approaches to understanding inequality and living standards in colonial Africa. These insights expand our knowledge of coercive labour systems and frontier economies.

Socialist Yugoslavia and Zambia became dynamic Cold War partners in the Non-Aligned Movement, with extensive cooperation in economic development, national defence, and international diplomacy. This article explores the roots of this “East–South” cooperation by looking at the pioneering contacts between North Rhodesian and Yugoslav trade unions in the late 1950s and early 1960s, showing how Yugoslav trade union officials opened up new perspectives for the Yugoslav organized labour movement as it reached out to the “global” at a time of rising decolonization and incipient non-alignment. Further, it offers a nuanced perspective on Cold War trade union internationalism and sheds new light on the politicization of the Zambian labour movement. The article shows that the national trade union federations and their officials on both sides were proactive sociopolitical actors, paving the way for future diplomatic contacts akin to “workers’ proto-diplomacy”.

Although real wages have long been a cornerstone of our understanding of the premodern economy, in recent years historians have become sceptical about their usefulness as a proxy for living standards. One of the main concerns is that, before industrialization, most households did not depend on wages but were self-employed. This article therefore proposes a new methodology to test the representativeness of real wage series for the general population by comparing changes in the purchasing power of builders’ wages with the relative position of building labourers in tax lists. Not surprisingly, it confirms their exceptional position, which evolved according to remuneration. Instead of disregarding the unreal wages, the methodology shows a promising path forward. The relationship between changes in wage income and the relative position in fiscal sources can be exploited to identify other groups who were or became dependent on this type of labour. Accordingly, it holds the potential to retrace shifts in the functional distribution of income and the wage systems for different groups in the premodern economy.