A Historical Casebook of Wage Formation

This edited collection presents 16 new historical cases of wage formation and wage bargaining across the early modern and preindustrial world. 

Recent literature has revived an established interest in the economic history of wage formation, underlining the gaps still existing in our understanding of wages’ composition, quantification, and process of structuring. This collection sheds light on these points, examining diverse topics including in-kind and monetary payments, bonuses and supplements, work contracts, differentials between skilled and unskilled workers, women’s work, slavery and coerced labour contracts, and wages in both diachronic and comparative perspective: how wages’ structure and composition changes across times and spaces (both in terms of geographical areas and urban-rural environments). The book presents case studies from various geographical areas (from South America to India) from the preindustrial period to the contemporary age and features related contributions on the manufacturing sector, agriculture, mining, and public sectors. The book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of pre-industrial labour markets in economic, social and labour history.

Chapters 6 and 10 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Giulio Ongaro is Associate Professor of Economic History at the Department of Economics, Management and Statistics of the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. His research interests include: the social and economic history of the early modern rural areas, the history of agriculture and agricultural prices, the history of wages and living standards, and environmental history. 

Judy Z. Stephenson is Associate Professor in Economic History of the Built Environment, at UCL, London, UK. She is an economic historian researching labour markets, institutions, firms, finance and industries in London between about 1600 and 1850. Her work has been quoted in the Financial Times and The Economist .

Luca Mocarelli is Full Professor in Economic History at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, where, from 2018, he is also the Dean of the School of Economics and Statistics. He wrote more than 150 publications, including seven books and fifteen edited books,  and he collaborates with many national and international research groups.