Who Defines Work? Labour, Power, and Inequality in Historical Perspective
The history of labour is not simply the history of production, employment, and wages. It is also the history of the social and institutional processes through which certain activities have been recognized as productive, while others have been marginalized, devalued, or excluded from conventional definitions of work. Two recent articles published in Past & Present offer different but complementary perspectives on this problem. Siân Davies examines the transition to wage labour in nineteenth-century Wales and Jamaica, while Jane Humphries reconstructs women’s working time in eighteenth-century England. Together, their studies illuminate how the classification and recognition of labour have contributed to the historical construction of social inequalities.
In The Transition to Wage Labour, in Stone, in North Wales, in Jamaica, Siân Davies challenges the conventional separation between British industrial development and colonial labour relations. Focusing on the properties of the Pennant family, whose economic interests connected slate production in North Wales with sugar plantations in Jamaica, Davies reconstructs the efforts of landowners and managers to establish greater control over workers’ time and activities. The administrative correspondence reveals that labourers in both contexts sought to preserve a degree of independence through subsistence production, alternative economic activities, and control over their working schedules.
These similarities, however, did not produce equivalent responses from employers. In Wales, resistance to wage dependency was understood as an obstacle to industrial discipline. In Jamaica, particularly after emancipation, comparable behaviour was increasingly interpreted through racial categories that portrayed formerly enslaved people as naturally unwilling to work. Such representations helped justify coercive labour arrangements and restrictions on workers’ autonomy. The distinction between supposedly industrious British workers and allegedly indolent colonial labourers therefore concealed shared conflicts over the organization of labour while legitimizing different forms of control.
Davies’s contribution extends beyond demonstrating the economic connections between industrial Britain and plantation slavery. Her analysis shows how ideas about labour discipline and economic freedom circulated across imperial spaces, acquiring different meanings according to existing relations of power. The emergence of wage labour was neither a uniform nor an exclusively voluntary process. Access to land and subsistence resources could strengthen workers’ negotiating positions, while restrictions on these alternatives increased their dependence on employers. From this perspective, the distinction between free and coerced labour becomes historically more complex, without erasing the profound differences between metropolitan and colonial conditions.
A related question of recognition lies at the centre of Jane Humphries’s Microhistory and Women’s Time Use. Drawing on the diaries of Peter Walkden, a farmer and Nonconformist minister in eighteenth-century Lancashire, Humphries reconstructs the activities of his wife, Catherine. By combining references to everyday tasks with estimates of their frequency and duration, she moves beyond identifying women’s participation in economic life towards examining the actual organization of their working time.
The methodological significance of this approach is considerable. Historians have increasingly demonstrated that women participated in a wider range of productive activities than traditional economic histories acknowledged. Yet concentrating primarily on their contributions to markets risks reproducing another form of invisibility: the exclusion of unpaid domestic work and care from the historical understanding of production and economic activity.
Humphries demonstrates that household maintenance, childcare, and other forms of care were indispensable to the functioning of the domestic economy, even when contemporary sources did not explicitly identify them as work. Their economic significance became particularly visible when Catherine was unavailable and her husband had to perform these activities himself or arrange for someone else to undertake them. The need for substitution revealed a value that ordinary descriptions of household life frequently obscured.
The two studies differ substantially in their geographical scope, chronology, and methodological approaches. Davies adopts a relational perspective connecting metropolitan and colonial labour regimes, while Humphries uses microhistorical evidence to reconstruct activities generally overlooked by conventional economic records. Their findings should not be treated as interchangeable. Racialized coercion in the colonial economy and the limited recognition of women’s unpaid labour operated through distinct institutions and social relations.
Nevertheless, both articles demonstrate that the historical boundaries of work were neither neutral nor self-evident. Employers, landowners, household members, and public authorities participated in defining which activities counted as economically valuable, which forms of independence appeared legitimate, and which contributions remained insufficiently recognized. These distinctions influenced the distribution of resources, bargaining power, and social authority.
Read together, Davies and Humphries suggest a broader interpretation of inequality. Economic hierarchies were shaped not only by differences in wealth, wages, or ownership, but also by the power to classify activities and assign them unequal value. In the Welsh and Jamaican cases, subsistence production could be represented as idleness because it reduced workers’ dependence on employers. In eighteenth-century Lancashire, unpaid care remained essential to economic life even when its contribution was largely absent from explicit accounts of productive activity.
The importance of these studies lies in their capacity to question categories that historical research has sometimes taken for granted. Rather than treating wage labour as the natural outcome of modernization or market participation as the principal measure of economic contribution, they direct attention towards the social relations that established these distinctions. Their different approaches also demonstrate how global and microhistorical perspectives can contribute to a more comprehensive history of inequality, connecting institutional structures and systems of power with the everyday practices through which economic life was organized and sustained.
References
Siân Davies, “The Transition to Wage Labour, in Stone, in North Wales, in Jamaica,” Past & Present, advance online publication, 14 October 2026. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtag031
Jane Humphries, “Microhistory and Women’s Time Use,” Past & Present, advance online publication, 3 September 2026. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtag025
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