This chapter discusses the concept of wage labour and its history and proposes a definition of wage labour that includes the provision of remuneration in exchange for labour power, but also emphasizes the labourers’ continued free status and their concomitant ability to influence the price of their labour power, and thus the level of their wages – thereby allowing the price of labour power to be set on the market. From this follows discussion of the role of wage labour in debates on the ancient economy – in part asking which workers can be seen as wage labourers – and, further, of how paid military service can constitute a form of wage labour. It is argued that for soldiers to constitute wage labourers, their service needs to be voluntary, of temporary nature, and remunerated in coin or in kind.

The history of commercial sealing and sealers’ lives can be understood within the context of capitalism. Sealing was traditionally carried out by different socio-cultural groups over time, mainly as a low-scale activity that attempted to meet the needs of specific communities (some examples including sealing by hunter-gatherers from Alaska and Tierra del Fuego, among others).1 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, sealing acquired new features within the context of modernity, as it was transformed into a large-scale activity with a trading purpose. Commercial sealing responded to a market logic, and it helped to connect different contexts where the exploitation of resources, the manufacture of products, and trade in raw materials and industrial goods took place.

This chapter opens with a brief survey of suffrage literature and the scholarship it has generated before honing in on a particular example: Constance Maud’s No Surrender. This novel conforms to many characteristics of suffrage fiction, playing on romance conventions and integrating fictionalised episodes from the real-world campaign. But even as No Surrender is a campaigning novel, it is also a novel of a campaign that registers and reflects the tensions that characterised the movement. Social class was a deeply contentious issue for the campaign and is one this chapter considers with a focus on Maud’s presentation of Lancashire mill-worker, Jenny Clegg. Maud’s novel raises questions about representation, authenticity, and appropriation, questions that have troubled feminist theory and practice. This chapter suggests that a fuller familiarity with the internal debates of the campaign – particularly those between adult and woman suffragists – results in a more precise sense of how the novel works as propaganda. A corollary of such a contextual approach is that more self-reflexive and self-questioning currents in No Surrender that run parallel to its primary propagandising ones are made visible.

This chapter starts by accounting for the early beginnings of social, economic and labour history in different parts of the world at different times. It then analyses the crisis of social history during the 1970s and 1980s. Challenged both by history from below and by political history as well as poststructuralist theories, social, economic and labour history began to decline. However, over recent decades we have also witnessed a renaissance of a ‘new’ social, economic and labour history. The main bulk of the chapter analyses this renewal, discussing sublaltern studies, the cultural turn, the move to global histories of work, the emphasis on practices as well as discourses and the proliferation of new sub-fields. Overall, many of these recent developments have led to a greater self-reflexivity about the writing of history and its links to collective identity formation.

This chapter looks at the spread of global history globally and the abandonment of historiographical nationalism. It examines the long practice of comparative, transnational and global history writing since the Enlightenments. It also looks at the construction of peculiarities and exceptionalisms through comparison as well as their critique. It distinguishes between comparative and global history and links the rise of both to the renewed crisis of historicism since the 1980s. It also discusses the controvery between comparative historians and historians of cultural transfer, arguing that both approaches need to be united. The chapter highlights the idea of circulations and examines the explosion of global history around particular themes. It also underlines its usefulness in overcoming Western-centric models of development and questioning universalisms. Transnational, comparative and global histories have all contributed to decentring collective identity constructions and making historians more aware of the ways in which historical writing has been connected to the construction of such collective identities. This is shown in relation to spatial boundaries, be they national or supra-national, but also in relation to class, racial and gender identities. Postcolonial perspectives on global history have been particularly adept at questioning the Western-centrism of historical writing and understanding diverse regimes of colonialism. It has also made transnational global history more aware of its own temptation to further global identities.

In the first chapter of Part I the authors discuss the rise and decline of the two Dutch monopoly companies, and how they, formally and informally, operated in the Dutch Republic, Asia and the Atlantic. The histories of these two companies are very different. The Dutch West India Company, operating in the Atlantic, was always threatened by competitors such as private traders, Dutch merchants who used foreign companies to get around the monopoly, and French and English competitors. The Dutch East India Company, the largest enterprise in the world, employing at the height of its existence about 40,000 personnel, went bankrupt not because of the competition from other trading houses in the Netherlands, but because the directors of the Company were aware which products brought in profits and which did not, but had no idea about the total financial results. In order to increase its turnover, the Company switched from the trade in spices to that of Indian textiles and Chinese porcelain, which necessitated larger ships and more personnel, resulting in lower profit rates. This chapter ends with a discussion of the shrinking naval and military capacity of the Dutch Empire in comparison with its main European rivals.