Social Economy and Living Standards: Consumer Cooperatives in Barcelona, 1891–1935

The living standards of the working classes during industrialization continue to be the subject of debate in European historiography. However, other factors closely related to the institutional setting, such as the role played by social economy and the institutions for collective action, are seldom considered. This study focuses on these factors, and attempts to quantify the social impact of consumer cooperatives. We argue that these institutions substantially improved the lot of the working classes from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, helping them to increase their incomes, and access food and services, such as education and social services, which the state did not provide in sufficient measure. To demonstrate this point, we analyse thirty-five consumer cooperatives in Barcelona, an industrial centre in which these organizations were more popular than anywhere else in Spain. Our main conclusion is that consumer cooperatives increased the well-being of their members, helping them to meet their substantial calorific needs, although their diets were unbalanced and low-cost; members improved their income between five and ten per cent, by simply shopping at the institution, and gained access to basic welfare services.

Genealogies of “Verification”: Policing the Master–Servant Relationship in Colonial and Postcolonial India

Police verification of domestic servants has become standard practice in many cities in contemporary India. However, the regularization of work, which brings domestic servants under protective labour laws, is still a work in progress. Examining a long timespan, this article shows how policing of the servant, through practices of identification and verification, came to be institutionalized. It looks at the history of registration within the larger mechanism of regulation that emerged for domestic servants in the late eighteenth century. However, the establishment of control over servants was not linear in its subsequent development; registration as a tool of control took on different meanings within the changing ecosystem of legal provisions. In the late eighteenth century, it was discussed as being directly embedded in the logic of master–servant regulation, a template that was borrowed from English law. In the late nineteenth century, it was increasingly seen as a proxy for formal means of regulation, although this viewpoint was not universally accepted. Charting this history of changing structures of inclusion and exclusion within the law, the article argues that overt policing of servants is a manifestation of the colonial legacy, in which the identity of the servant is fused with potential criminality.

When Ants Beset the Elephant: Rent Extraction and Resistance on China's E-commerce Platform

E-commerce in China has developed and expanded rapidly in recent years. Conflicts and confrontations have accumulated in parallel. Using Taobao e-marketplace – one pillar platform of the Alibaba group – as its case, this article aims to analyse the developmental logic and profit-seeking strategies of e-commerce capitalism in China and beyond. It also investigates how small online merchants responded to and resisted the particular rent-extractive and exclusive mechanisms designed by the platform. I attempt to identify the emerging responses from below to both the creative and destructive sides of this newest capitalist development in China. I argue that, despite the militancy and innovation involved in these movements, and despite the use of Maoist rhetoric borrowed from the past, the contentious collective actions (online or offline) organized by these small online merchants lack the solidarity, the shared identity and consciousness, and the powerful ideological language observed among the “traditional” working class in industrial capitalism, and hence they are more improvised, transient, and easily defeated.

“We Go on Our Own Boats!”: Korean Migrants and the Politics of Transportation Infrastructure in the Japanese Empire

This paper examines transportation infrastructure in the Japanese empire and its role in positioning Korean migrants in the labor markets of the metropole. To do so, it focuses on the Pusan–Shimonoseki ferry which, between 1905 and 1945, transferred over 30 million people between Japan and Korea. During this time, the ships that comprised this ferry line helped articulate new borders between the metropole and its annexed colony. In this capacity, the vessels helped constitute and control the flow of a new class of colonial migrants as they entered the labor markets of Japan. Historically, transportation networks have been looked on as modes of conveyance or as symbols of political amalgamation. Colonial era descriptions of the Pusan-Shimonoseki ferry commonly maintained this view. However, rather than stress the spatial integration brought by the line, this paper highlights its function as a source of delineation. The ferries connecting Japan to its closest colony not only served as a conduit for Korean workers, but also introduced forms of constraint and contingency that shaped their ability to sell their labor in Japan. Transportation thus became an issue of political contestation and resistance. Korean workers and union activists employed an array of tactics to undermine the borders imposed through the regulation of transportation. Doing so was part of an attempt to assert greater control over the migrant's position in regional markets and mitigate the unevenness of the colonial system.

The “Perfect Map” of Widow Hiamtse: A Micro-Spatial History of Sugar Plantations in Early Modern Southeast Asia, 1685–1710

Not all early modern sugar plantations were in the Atlantic World. Indeed, far away from it, in the rural space surrounding the Dutch headquarters in Asia (the Ommelanden of Batavia (Jakarta)), over a hundred of them were thriving by the end of the seventeenth century. Together, they constituted a unique plantation society that followed Dutch land law, was operated by Javanese rural labour, and was managed by Chinese sugar entrepreneurs. Through archival work on a certain “perfect map” that belonged to a Chinese widow, this article explores how that plantation society took shape on the ground.