When discussing wages, historians have traditionally concentrated on the level of wages, much less on how people were paid for their work. Important aspects were thus ignored such as how frequently were wages actually paid, how much of the wage was paid in non-monetary form - whether as traditional perquisites or community relief - especially when there was often insufficient coinage available to pay wages. Covering a wide geographical area, ranging from Spain to Finland, and time span, ranging from the sixteenth century to the 1930s, this volume offers fresh perspectives on key areas in social and economic history such as the relationship between customs, moral economy, wages and the market, changing pay and wage forms and the relationship between age, gender and wages.

Leonard Schwarz works at the Department of Modern History, University of Birmingham.

List of Figures and Tables

Introduction

Chapter 1. The wage in Europe since the sixteenth century
Peter Scholliers and Leonard Schwarz

Custom, Wages and the Market

Chapter 2. Institutional and cultural change in wage formation: port labour in Antwerp (sixteenth - eighteenth centuries)
Harald Deceulaer

Chapter 3. When labour hires capital: evidence from Lancashire, 1870-1914
Michael Huberman

Chapter 4. Giving notice: the legitimate way of quitting and firing (Ghent, 1877-1896)
Patricia Van den Eeckhout

Changing Pay Systems and Wage Forms

Chapter 5. Wage forms, wage systems and wage conflicts in German crafts during the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries
Reinhold Reith

Chapter 6. Wage forms, pay systems and labour control in nineteenth-century agriculture. Evidence from the Dutch province of Groningen
Henny Gooren and Hans Heger

Chapter 7. Cash, wages and the economy of makeshifts in England, 1650-1800
Craig Muldrew and Steven King

Age, Gender and Wages

Chapter 8. Gendered wage systems and industrialisation in Finland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Sakari Heikkinen

Chapter 9. Engendering the experience of wages: the evolution of the piecework system at the Spanish Tobacco Monopoly, 1800-1930s
Lina Gálvez-Muñoz

Chapter 10. Age, gender and the wage in Britain, 1830-1930
Paul Johnson

Chapter 11. At what cost was pre-eminence purchased? Child labour and the first industrial revolution
Jane Humphries

Notes on Contributors
Index