Assembled by Angus Maddison, the most widely consulted data set on worktime in the long nineteenth century is seriously flawed, because it assumes all countries had British work hours. This paper constructs new measures of worktime in Europe, North America and Australia between 1870 and 1900....

Globalization was a fact of life in Europe before 1913, but as trade shares increased, so did wage and employment instability. Faced by growing pressure from workers, national authorities established labour compacts - a packet of labour market regulations and social insurance programs - that...