"Global Networks and New Histories Rice today is food to half the world's population. Its history is inextricably entangled with the emergence of colonialism, the global networks of industrial capitalism, and the modern world economy. The history of rice is currently a vital and innovative field...

This thesis is an attempt to evaluate and correct the sanguine view of the U.S. labor market prior to the twentieth century as a 'spot' market. The spot-market characterization permits economists to produce clean predictions of market behavior, based on one dimension of market adjustments, i.e....