A Historical Casebook of Wage Formation: Wage Determination and Wage Bargains, 1500-1950

This edited collection presents 16 new historical cases of wage formation and wage bargaining across the early modern and preindustrial world. 

Recent literature has revived an established interest in the economic history of wage formation, underlining the gaps still existing in our understanding of wages’ composition, quantification, and process of structuring. This collection will shed light on these points, examining diverse topics including in-kind and monetary payments, bonuses and supplements, work contracts, differentials between skilled and unskilled workers, women’s work, slavery and coerced labour contracts, and wages in both diachronic and comparative perspective: how wages’ structure and composition changes across times and spaces (both in terms of geographical areas and urban-rural environments). The book presents case studies from various geographical areas (from South America to India) from the preindustrial period to the contemporary age and features related contributions on the manufacturing sector, agriculture, mining, and public sectors. The book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of pre-industrial labour markets in economic, social and labour history.

Chapters 6 and 10 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Giulio Ongaro is Associate Professor of economic history at the Department of Economics, Management and Statistics of the University of Milano-Bicocca, where he teaches contemporary economic history. He is also the Vice-President of the Italian Society for Labour History, and among his publications it is worth remembering Work in Early Modern Italy, published together with Luca Mocarelli in 2019 (Palgrave Studies in Economic History). His research interests include: the social and economic history of the early modern rural areas, the history of agriculture and agricultural prices, the history of wages and living standards, and environmental history. 

Judy Z. Stephenson (Associate Professor in Economic History of the Built Environment, The Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction Faculty of the Built Environment – UCL, London) is an economic historian researching labour markets, institutions, firms, finance and industries in London between about 1600 and 1850. She is known for her work on London and English wages between 1650 and 1800, and she published on contracts and wages, and the boundaries of the firm before 1800. Her work has been quoted in the Financial Times and The Economist.

Luca Mocarelli is Full Professor in Economic History at the University of Milano-Bicocca, where, from 2018, he is also the Dean of the School of Economics and Statistics. He is the President of the International Association for Alpine History, Vice-President of the Italian Urban History Society, member of the management committee of the Italian Society of Historical Demography, and among the founders of RESPro – Network of historian for the production landscape. He wrote more than 150 publications, including seven books and fifteen edited books with relevant Italian and international publishers. He collaborates with many national and international research groups, he is a reviewer of research projects for the Italian University Minister, the Swiss National Research Fund, the Dutch Research Foundation, and he is member of the editorial boards of many reviews of economic and social history, besides reviewing research articles for the most important journals in the area.