This paper uses recently digitised samples of apprentices and masters in London and Bristol to quantify the practice of apprenticeship in the late 17th century. Apprenticeship appears much more fluid than is traditionally understood. Many apprentices did not complete their terms of indenture;...

This paper studies the way workers and firms behaved in a highly cyclical sector such as the cotton textile industry, which encompassed 1/5 of the Catalan industrial workforce in the early 20th century. Using firm level evidence from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the paper shows that,...

[...]In part, this collection of papers derives from the impact of Subaltern Studies on approaches to the history of labour. While the contributions may not be located within ‘subalternism’, to differing degrees they reflect responses in the literature to that paradigm. At the very least,...

One of the most significant changes in the labour market in the twentieth century was the rise of the internal labour market. Its origins can be found in the nineteenth century, particularly in the large service companies such as banks and the railway companies. By studying the internal labour...

[...]This research takes Iliffe’s suggestion seriously. For the student of Sub-Saharan Africa who has decided to explore a plausible route of causationbetween nutrition and poverty, the most urgent task is to disregard the initialdiscouragement triggered by the scarcity of references. The lack...

In 1866, the Midland Railway Company demolished Agar Town,an area Victorian writers called the foulest slum in London, tomake way for the development of St Pancras railway station.Most Londoners lauded the action. But what kind of tenantsactually inhabited the area before it was destroyed, and...

In this paper we examine the concept of "vulnerability" (Townsend 1994) within thecontext of income mobility of the poor. We test for the dynamics of vulnerablehouseholds in the UK using Waves 1 - 12 of the British Household Panel Survey andfind that, of three different types of risks that we...

We examine associations of mass media and information and communicationstechnologies (ICT) as knowledge-based infrastructures on some economicdevelopment outcomes. We .nd that several mass media and ICT penetration variablesare negatively associated with three development outcomes: corruption,...

The concept of social exclusion has been widely debated in Europe butits application to children has seen relatively little discussion. What couldbe meant by exclusion of children is the first main theme of the paper.Among other things, I consider the choice of reference group, thegeographical...

This paper reviews the achievements of the Labour Government’seducation policy between 1997 and 2001. Tony Blair claimed that hisGovernment would make education a priority. The first part of thepaper reviews the scale of education spending in relation to theeconomy at large and within the...