Considers endogamy, the custom forbidding marriage outside one's social class, which is central to social history.

New approaches in economic, social, labour and institutional history have re-examined guilds - not least within the framework of a re-appraisal of the classic distinction between the 'capitalist' and 'pre-capitalist' modes of production. These fresh approaches are unravelling the reasons why guilds were established, and why they could maintain themselves so long. International comparisons have fostered this rejuvenation of guild studies; awareness is growing that guilds are not just a European phenomenon, but have been prominent all over Northern Africa and the Middle East, as well as in many...

Starting from a broad definition of labour relations as the full range of vertical and horizontal social relations under which work is performed, both within and outside the household, this volume examines the way states have shaped and interacted with labour relations in a wide range of periods and places, from the sixteenth-century silver mines of Potosi in the Andes to late twentieth-century Sweden, and from seventeenth-century Dzungharia to early twentieth-century colonial Mozambique. The articles presented look at very different types of states, from local and regional power holders to...

Colonial and post-colonial port cities in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions brought together laboring populations of many different backgrounds and statuses - legally free or semi-free wage-laborers, soldiers, sailors, and the self-employed, indentured servants, convicts, and slaves. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century the labor of these "motley crews" made port cities crucial hubs of the emerging capitalist world market and centers of imperial infrastructure. The nine chapters in this volume investigate the interaction between different groups of laborers around the docks and...

This volume examines Brazilian labour history, offering articles that enter into conscious dialogue with the debates and findings of scholarship in other world regions. Contributions engage with issues such as free and unfree labour in the nineteenth-century Amazon, the transnational contexts of urban sex work, and revolutionary syndicalism in Rio.

When the full abolition of slavery appeared on the political agenda in the Atlantic world the institutional arrangements that underpinned the peculiar institution changed dramatically. Although many have studied these transformations, their urban dimension has remained underappreciated. The contributions to this volume offer an in-depth look at cities in the British and French Caribbean, the United States, West-Central Africa, Brazil, and South Africa. Rather than treating urban slavery as a more benign counterpoint to the brutal plantation complex, the articles explore how cities were part...

Women's emancipation was a central but contested pillar of socialist and communist internationalism during the twentieth century. The collapse of state socialism has led to renewed interest in the history and legacies of women's movements across the former socialist world during the era of decolonisation, and their significance for global feminisms in the present day. Responding to these debates, this collection of essays explores the history of transnational socialist feminisms during the global Cold War from the perspective of mid-ranking activists, officials and functionaries in...