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When discussing wages, historians have traditionally concentrated on the level of wages, much less on how people were paid for their work. Important aspects were thus ignored such as how frequently were wages actually paid, how much of the wage was paid in non-monetary form - whether as traditional perquisites or community relief - especially when there was often insufficient coinage available to pay wages. Covering a wide geographical area, ranging from Spain to Finland, and time span, ranging from the sixteenth century to the 1930s, this volume offers fresh perspectives on key areas in social and economic history such as the relationship between customs, moral economy, wages and the market, changing pay and wage forms and the relationship between age, gender and wages.
List of contents
List of Figures and Tables
Introduction
Chapter 1. The wage in Europe since the sixteenth century
Peter Scholliers and Leonard Schwarz
Custom, Wages and the Market
Chapter 2. Institutional and cultural change in wage formation: port labour in Antwerp (sixteenth – eighteenth centuries)
Harald Deceulaer
Chapter 3. When labour hires capital: evidence from Lancashire, 1870–1914
Michael Huberman
Chapter 4. Giving notice: the legitimate way of quitting and firing (Ghent, 1877–1896)
Patricia Van den Eeckhout
Changing Pay Systems and Wage Forms
Chapter 5. Wage forms, wage systems and wage conflicts in German crafts during the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries
Reinhold Reith
Chapter 6. Wage forms, pay systems and labour control in nineteenth-century agriculture. Evidence from the Dutch province of Groningen
Henny Gooren and Hans Heger
Chapter 7. Cash, wages and the economy of makeshifts in England, 1650–1800
Craig Muldrew and Steven King
Age, Gender and Wages
Chapter 8. Gendered wage systems and industrialisation in Finland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Sakari Heikkinen
Chapter 9. Engendering the experience of wages: the evolution of the piecework system at the Spanish Tobacco Monopoly, 1800–1930s
Lina Gálvez-Muñoz
Chapter 10. Age, gender and the wage in Britain, 1830–1930
Paul Johnson
Chapter 11. At what cost was pre-eminence purchased? Child labour and the first industrial revolution
Jane Humphries
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the author
Leonard Schwarz works at the Department of Modern History, University of Birmingham.
Summary
When discussing wages, historians have traditionally concentrated on the level of wages, much less on how people were paid for their work. Important aspects were thus ignored such as how frequently were wages actually paid, how much of the wage was paid in non-monetary form - whether as traditional perquisites or community relief - especially when there was often insufficient coinage available to pay wages. Covering a wide geographical area, ranging from Spain to Finland, and time span, ranging from the sixteenth century to the 1930s, this volume offers fresh perspectives on key areas in social and economic history such as the relationship between customs, moral economy, wages and the market, changing pay and wage forms and the relationship between age, gender and wages.
Additional text
"This is a volume that is to be welcomed both for providing new and intersint findings, that suggest new answers to old questions, and for opening new and exciting avenues for future research." · Economic History Review
