Potamianos Papastefanaki Introduction Labour History in The Semiperiphery

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Book title: Labour History in the Semi-periphery
Chapter DOI: 10.1515/9783110620528-003
Chapter title: Labour History in the Semi-periphery. Southern Europe, 19th – 20th centuries
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Walter de Gruyter GmbH  Genthiner Str. 13 10785 Berlin  Deutschland
Leda Papastefanaki and Nikos Potamianos
Labour History in the Semi-periphery.
Southern Europe, 19th – 20th centuries
Introduction
This book contains 14 studies on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century labour
history of Southern Europe (expanded to include Austria, the subject of one of
the chapters where we also find migrants from Southern Europe). The volume
is divided into four parts. Part one contains chapters that examine small enter-
prises and small ownership in relation to labour. The chapters in part two dis-
cuss aspects of formal and informal labour, as well as family patterns. The
third part focuses on industrial labour relations in Southern Europe, while in
the fourth and final part labour on the sea and in the shipyards of the Mediter-
ranean is investigated.
In this introduction we first explain how we understand the concepts of
Southern Europe and the semi-periphery that appear in the title of the book.
We then discuss the existing literature and studies of labour history that tran-
scend national borders.We end with a brief presentation of the studies in the vol-
ume and their main arguments, which cover four pillars: the tendency towards
independent work and the role of culture; forms of labour management (from pa-
ternalistic policies to the provision of welfare capitalism); the importance of the
institutional framework and the wider political context; and women’s labour and
gender relations.
Southern Europe
The chapters of this book focus on regions of the broader geographical area of
Southern Europe. It has been noted that, as happens with all regions, “Southern
Europe” is a geographical category whose conception and use do not depend
solely on geographical, economic and social structures but on the contexts
and junctures of political and intellectual history as well as, of course, on histor-
ical experience. Even so, the realisation that the concept of Southern Europe is
also produced by “polarizing discourses reflecting internal European power hi-
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110620528-003
2 Leda Papastefanaki and Nikos Potamianos
erarchies” does not mean that this concept should not be used.¹ Southern Eu-
rope, then, has historically been defined with reference to its ancient cultural tra-
dition (as the cradle of the classical civilisations), to its cultural refinement in
contrast to the “barbarian” North, but also in reference to its economic and so-
cial “backwardness” in contrast to the advanced and pioneering North in more
recent eras. It has been defined with the Mediterranean Sea as a reference point,
as well as by Catholicism and the Romance languages and literatures – in this
way including also France, which is a Mediterranean power but at the same
time is also one of the powerful countries of the Western European core. The Bal-
kan peninsula is sometimes included and other times not, in an entanglement
with the (stronger) distinction between Western and Eastern Europe – as well
as with the even stronger distinction between Christendom and Islam.²
Recent historical developments have especially helped to intensify the use of
the concept of Southern Europe: understanding its conceptualisation as an area
that includes Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, Guido Franzinetti observes that
Southern Europe emerged, quite literally, with the Cold War, when Greece was
detached from the Balkans. This was followed by the so-called Southern Europe-
an Transitions to Democracy in Spain, Portugal and Greece in 1974– 75 – which
are reminiscent of the common experience of long-lived dictatorships during the
twentieth century, to which we should add Italian fascism as well as the Balkan
dictatorial regimes. After the accession of Greece, Spain and Portugal to the Eu-
ropean Economic Community in the 1980s, a distinction emerged between
southern and northern countries and political coalitions were formed on this
basis. More recently, the “PIGS” have been characterized by some common pat-
terns of vulnerability during the financial and economic crisis that started in
2008.
Yet Southern Europe has also been defined by other experience and struc-
tures, which in several instances expand its geographical breadth to include
 Martin Baumeister and Roberto Sala, “Introduction”, in Southern Europe? Italy, Spain, Portugal
and Greece from the 1950s until the present day, ed. Martin Baumeister and Roberto Sala (Frank-
furt: Campus, 2015), 7– 18.
 Guido Franzinetti, “Southern Europe”, in European regions and boundaries. A conceptual his-
tory, ed. Diana Mishkova and Balázs Trencsényi (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2017), 100 –
121. On the problematization of the spatial categories of the European South (Monde meditérra-
neen, Südosteuropa, Balkans), see also Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997); Vaso Seirinidou, “The Mediterranean” and Diana Mishkova, “Balkans/
Southeastern Europe”, ed. Mishkova and Trencsényi, European regions and boundaries, 79– 99
and 143 – 165; Sabine Rutar, “Introduction: Beyond the Balkans”, in idem (ed.), Beyond the Bal-
kans: Towards an Inclusive History of Southeastern Europe (Münster: LIT – Studies in South East
Europe, 2013), esp. 12 – 15.
Labour History in the Semi-periphery. Southern Europe, 19th – 20th centuries 3
the Balkans or to highlight common characteristics and similarities with the non-
European Mediterranean. The studies by social anthropologists in the 1960s and
1970s shaped an image of the Mediterranean (and its sub-region of Southern Eu-
rope) as a distinct cultural area, in which the values and practices of honour and
shame, amoral familism, patronage and clientelism were particularly strong.³
Historical demographers identified a “Mediterranean model” in the demographic
behaviours of the Europeans, particularly as regards marriage practices before
the “demographic transition”, as can be seen in the ages of marriage.⁴ The cor-
relation of marriage practices with the paid or unpaid work of women and their
contribution to economic growth have been used to interpret the “little diver-
gence” within Europe and in particular between its North and South in the
early modern period.⁵ Low numeracy and literacy rates in the early modern
and modern period in comparison to Western Europe have been taken as indica-
tors of lower levels of investment in human capital in Southern Europe.⁶ Around
the Mediterranean and its ecosystem, an economic system was created that was
based on intensive labour and the early commercialisation of agriculture (the
 These studies were strongly criticized for exoticizing. For two recent literature reviews that in-
sist on a sense of Mediterranean cultural distinctiveness, see Dionigi Albera, “Anthropology of
the Mediterranean: between crisis and renewal”, History and Anthropology 17, no. 2 (2006): 109 –
133; Christian Giordano, “The anthropology of Mediterranean societies”, in A companion to the
anthropology of Europe, ed. Ullrich Kockel, Mairead Nic Graith and Jonas Frykman (Malden and
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 13– 31.
 Family forms in historic Europe, ed. Richard Wall, Jean Rodin and Peter Laslett (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983); Marzio Barbagli, “Three household formation systems in
18th- and 19th-century Italy”, in The family in Italy from antiquity to the present, ed. David Kertzer
and Richard Saller (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 250 – 270; Violetta Hio-
nidou, “Nuptiality patterns and household structure on the Greek island of Mykonos, 1849 –
1959”, Journal of family history 20, no. 1 (1995): 67– 102.
 Jan Luiten van Zanden, The long road to the industrial revolution. The European economy in a
global perspective, 1000 – 1800 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), 95– 141. However, the “exces-
sively rigid opposition between the legal systems of Northern and Southern Europe” as regards
the economic rights of married women has been challenged by Anna Bellavitis and Beatrice
Zucca Micheletto in their “Introduction” to Gender, law and economic well-being in Europe
from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. North versus South?, ed. Anna Bellavitis and Beatrice
Zucca Micheletto (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 1– 27. See also Filipa Ribeiro da Silva
and Helder Carvalhal, “Reconsidering the Southern European model: marital status, women’s
work and labour relations in mid-eighteenth century Portugal”, Revista de Historia Econớmica
38, no. 1 (2020): 45 – 77.
 Gabriel Tortella, “Patterns of economic retardation and recovery in south-western Europe in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”, Economic History Review XLVII, no. 1 (1994): 1– 21;
Joerg Baten, “Southern, eastern and central Europe”, in A history of the global economy from
1500 to the present, ed. Joerg Baten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 42– 73.
cultivation of vineyards, mulberries and olives as a complement to wheat). It has

been argued that this model contributed to keeping the workforce in rural areas,
to the relative weakness of the proto-industrial complexes in the region and also
to the late industrialization.⁷ Furthermore, rural communities responded in the
same way to the pressures from integration into the world economy in the mod-
ern period and the crises in the global markets: there was a common experience
of mass migration of Southern European peasants to the Americas in the last de-
cades of the nineteenth century and to North-western Europe in the 1950s and
1960s.⁸ To return to a more classic subject of labour history, the structures of
the labour movement differed markedly from those in North-western Europe dur-
ing the period 1880 – 1914: national trade union federations (as well as social
democratic parties) were weak in Southern Europe, where, by contrast, an impor-
tant organizational and political role was played by the local chambers of la-
bour, following the model of the French bourses de travail. ⁹
Of course, alongside the common features and historical paths, there are
equally significant differences and divergences in Southern Europe, both within
 Christine Agriantoni, “Μεσογειακά αγροτικά προϊόντα: η ελιά, η μουριά και το αμπέλι την ώρα
της βιομηχανίας”, Τα Ιστορικά 8 (1988): 69 – 84. See also, idem, “L’industrie grecque au XIXe siè-
cle. Problèmes d’intégration”, Actes du IIe Colloque Internationale d’Histoire: Économies Méditer-
ranéennes, Équilibres et Intercommunications, v. II (Athens: Centre de Recherches Néohelléni-
ques-FNRS, 1986), 333 – 342. On the other hand, it has been argued that a main feature of
labour in Southeast (as in Eastern) Europe was instability and geographical mobility, both in
the form of itinerant labour and of migration. Ulf Brunnbauer, Globalizing Southeastern Europe.
Emigrants, America and the state since the late nineteenth century (Lanham: Lexington books,
2016); Susan Zimmermann, “Eastern Europe”, in Handbook Global History of Work, ed. Karin
Hofmeester and Marcel van der Linden (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 131– 155.
 Alexander Kitroeff, “Emigration transatlantique et stratégie familiale: La Grèce”, in Espaces et
familles dans l’Europe du Sud à l’âge moderne, ed. Stuart Woolf (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des
sciences de l’homme, 1993), 241– 270; Socrates D. Petmezas, “Responses to Agricultural Income
Crisis in a Southeastern European Economy: Transatlantic Emigration from Greece (1894–
1924)”, in Fra Spazio e Tempo. Studi in Onore di Luigi de Rosa III, ed. Ilaria Zilli (Napoli: Società
degli Storici Italiani-Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici-Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1995),
427– 487; Edmund Burke III, “Toward a comparative history of the modern Mediterranean, 1750 –
1919”, Journal of world history 23, no. 4 (2012): 907– 939; Paul Caruana Galizia, Mediterranean
labor markets in the first age of globalization (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Brunnba-
uer, Globalizing Southeastern Europe; Michele Colucci and Stefano Gallo, “Migration in Southern
Europe since 1945: the entanglement of many mobilities”, Revue Européenne des migrations in-
ternationales 34, no. 1 (2018): 53 – 77.
 Antonis Liakos, Εργασία και πολιτική στην Ελλάδα του μεσοπολέμου (Athens: Ίδρυμα Έρευνας
και Παιδείας της Εμπορικής Τράπεζας της Ελλάδος, 1993); Stefano Musso, Storia del lavoro in Ita-
lia dall’ Unità a oggi (Venezia: Marsilio, 2002), 112– 128; Geoff Eley, Forging democracy. The his-
tory of the left in Europe, 1850 – 2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 62– 74.
larger areas as well as within each country. The most profound difference is be-
tween the Balkans and “South-western Europe”, as history divided them from
early on, through the survival of the Roman empire in the Eastern Mediterra-
nean, the dogmatic split into Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, the establish-
ment of the Ottoman Empire and the more recent experience of state socialism.¹⁰
As such the Balkans, aside from Greece, are not included in the Southern Euro-
pean welfare regime, which is characterized by “the central role of the family as
a source of protection against risks and vulnerability”,¹¹ while the same is per-
haps true of the discussion about varieties of capitalism in contemporary Europe
and the existence of a (particularly Southern European) “mixed market political
economy”.¹² There is, however, another element that gives a unified appearance
to Southern Europe from the perspective of this book: its quality as a semi-pe-
riphery.
Semi-periphery
In the modern era, major phenomena that shaped labour globally, such as the
industrial revolution, the widespread subsumption of labour under capital and
the rise of the labour movement in its “classic” forms, as well as of social dem-
ocratic parties, were centred in North-western Europe. Against this “core”, one
can instinctively understand the other regions of Europe in terms of “periphery”.
In comparative economic history, the concepts of core and periphery are used to
research the huge regional differences in economic development, with the pe-
riphery signifying the “less developed” regions, with different levels of “relative
backwardness” in comparison with the “core” of North-western Europe and
which in any case “fell behind the industrial core in North-western Europe
and North America during the Great Divergence” in living standards.¹³
 Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe. Idea, identity, reality (Houndmills and London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 1995), 49 – 52.
 Claude Martin, “Southern welfare states: configuration of the welfare balance between state
and the family”, in Southern Europe? Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece from the 1950s until the
present day, ed. Martin Baumeister and Roberto Sala (Frankfurt: Campus, 2015), 77– 100.
 Oscar Molina and Martin Rhodes, “The political economy of adjustment in mixed market
economies: a study of Spain and Italy”, in Beyond varieties of capitalism, ed. Bob Hancké, Martin
Rhodes and Mark Thatcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 223 – 252.
 Ivan T. Berend, An economic history of nineteenth century Europe. Diversity and Industrial-
ization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 6 – 9; Kevin Hjortshøj O’Rourke and Jeffrey
Gale Williamson, “Introduction”, in The Spread of Modern Industry to the Periphery since 1871,
ed. Kevin Hjortshøj O’Rourke and Jeffrey Gale Williamson (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
Of course, theories of core and periphery and the unequal exchange between
them developed primarily in relation to the so-called “Third World”. Αlthough
their origins can be found in the Marxist thought of the early twentieth century,
the first systematic elaboration of unequal exchange theory and dependency
theory was done immediately after the Second World War by the Argentine econ-
omist Rául Prebisch. It was developed into a coherent argument in the mid-1960s
by Latin American economists and other social scientists (Celso Furtado, André
Gunder Frank, etc.) to become an expression of the economics of growth in the
Third World.¹⁴ The region of Southern Europe was incorporated into the analyses
of the most historicized and even today influential versions of the centre-periph-
ery theory: the analyses of the capitalist world-economy by the school of Imma-
nuel Wallerstein.
According to Wallerstein, the core and periphery of capitalist world systems
are formed on the basis of the position of each region in the commodity chains
that developed historically and the specific mix of economic activities that typify
the core and periphery. The transfer of surplus from periphery to core takes place
particularly through the concentration in the centre of the branches and phases
of the production process with high productivity and the use of wage labour,
while in the periphery the forms of production are more extensive and labour
is unfree as well as independent – and primarily cheaper: one special character-
istic of the periphery is the mass existence of semi-proletarian households that
collect an income from many sources, something that makes it possible to keep
wages very low. The powerful states of the core ensure the concentration of cap-
ital, unequal exchange and the reproduction of the system at the expense of the
weak states of the periphery. This theory also introduces the idea of the semi-pe-
riphery, which is characterized by both the relative power of its states as well as
the balance of the flow of the surplus and the coexistence of core-like and pe-
2017), 1 – 12, esp. 1– 3. These interpretive approaches of the new economic history, despite the fact
that they have supplanted the old dominant historiographical model that was based on the sole
and absolute comparison of continental Europe with the “successful” model of the industrial rev-
olution in Britain, were clearly Western Eurocentric and teleological.
 For a detailed analysis of the various currents of thought and policy measures in the forma-
tion of dependency theory, see Joseph L. Love, Crafting the Third World. Theorizing Underdevel-
opment in Rumania and Brazil (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), esp. 119 – 139, 189 –
201; Wil Hout, Capital and the Third World. Development, Dependence and the World System (Al-
dershot: Edward Elgar, 1993); see also Daniel Chirot and Thomas D. Hall, “World-System Theo-
ry”, Annual Review of Sociology 8 (1982): 81– 106, esp. 87– 93.
riphery-like economic activities. Sharecropping is cited as a form of labour that

typifies the semi-periphery.¹⁵
Southern Europe has been placed by scholars of the school of world-systems
theory into the zones of the semi-periphery. Spain, Portugal and Northern Italy
are former core countries that passed into the semi-periphery from the seven-
teenth century onwards; in the nineteenth century they are left behind and ex-
perience a new process of peripheralization, to withstand, with some success,
their peripheralization in the twentieth century.¹⁶ The semi-periphery is also
formed of areas that had previously been world-empires and were integrated
into the world system as a semi-periphery thanks in particular to their powerful
state mechanisms. This, according to Kasaba, was the case with the Ottoman Em-
pire (and Southeast Europe, from the perspective of this volume) in the initial
phase of its integration into the world-economy, with the tendency for peripher-
alization rapidly dominating until the end of the nineteenth century.¹⁷
 The theory is elucidated primarily in the first two volumes of Immanuel Wallerstein, The
modern world-system (I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy
in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974), and II: Mercantilism and the Consol-
idation of the European World-Economy, 1600 – 1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980), in which
Wallerstein presents an analysis of the semi-periphery. The thread is taken up especially by Ar-
righi, who sees the semi-periphery as a “zone of political turbulence”: Giovanni Arrighi and Jes-
sica Drangel, “The Stratification of the World-Economy: an Exploration of the Semiperipheral
Zone”, Review 10, no. 1 (1986): 9 – 74; Giovanni Arrighi, “The Developmentalist Illusion: a Rec-
onceptualization of the Semiperiphery”, in Semiperipheral states in the world-economy, ed. Wil-
liam G. Martin (New York, Westport and London: Greenwood press, 1990), 11– 42.
 Wallerstein, The modern world-system II, 178 ff; Immanuel Wallerstein, “The relevance of the
concept of semiperiphery to South Europe”, in Giovani Arrighi (ed.), Semiperipheral develop-
ment. The politics of Southern Europe in the Twentieth Century (Beverly Hills, London and New
Delhi: Sage, 1985), 31– 39. According to Arrighi and Drangel, “The Stratification of the World-
Economy”, Italy moved to the core in the period between 1938 and 1985; see also Gary Gereffi
and Miguel Korzeniewicz, “Commodity chains and footwear exports in the semiperiphery”, in
Semiperipheral states in the world-economy, ed. William G. Martin (New York, Westport and Lon-
don: Greenwood press, 1990), 45 – 68.
 Resat Kasaba, The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy. The nineteenth century (New
York: State University of New York, 1988). Other studies influenced by the Wallerstein school,
such as Caglar Keyder, State and class in Turkey: a study in capitalist development (London
and New York: Verso, 1987) simply discuss the process of the peripheralization of the Ottoman
Empire – as Wallerstein himself did in Immanuel Wallerstein, Hale Decdeli and Resat Kasaba,
“The incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the world-economy”, in The Ottoman Empire and
the World-Economy, ed. Huri Islamoglu-Inan (Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press
and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1987), 88 – 97.
This discussion did not progress after the 1980s.¹⁸ It is perhaps indicative
that Nicos Mouzelis did not attempt to clarify how he understood the concept
of semi-periphery, beyond delinking it from Wallerstein’s theory, of which he
was critical.¹⁹ This was perhaps because the term “semi-periphery” was still
identified with a theory that was rather worked (or elaborated) in its details
and “closed”, with the historian forced either to adopt it entirely or to reject it.
Moreover, the theories of centre-periphery and world-systems approach were
criticised for Eurocentrism,²⁰ the overcoming of which has been a major concern
of global labour history in the past 20 years.²¹ Marcel van der Linden, a leading
 For instance, there are no references to the semi-periphery in the special issue of Review 16,
no. 4 (1993) on “Port-cities of the Eastern Mediterranean 1800 – 1914”. In this journal, published
by the Fernand Braudel Center, few articles worked with the concept of the semiperiphery in the
following years. See Kosmas Tsokhas, “War, industrialization and state intervention in the semi-
periphery: the Australian case”, Review 19, no. 2 (1996): 197– 223, and for a late example see Kle-
mens Kaps, “Internal differentiation in a rising European semi-periphery: cameralist division of
labor and mercantile polycentrism”, Review 36, no. 3 – 4 (2013): 315 – 360.
 Nicos Mouzelis, Politics in the semi-periphery: Early parliamentarism and late industrialisa-
tion in the Balkans and South America (London: Macmillan, 1986). In the same way, Seferiadis
did not develop the line of thought hinted at in his earlier work, the study of a potential “dis-
tinctive semi-peripheral formation of the classes”, shaped by, among other things, the expansion
of the informal sector and the widespread existence of small owners in the city and the country-
side: Serapheim Seferiadis, “Η κρυφή γοητεία της ιδεολογίας: αντιθεωρητισμός και εκλεκτισμός
στη μελέτη του εργατικού κινήματος”, Ελληνική Επιθεώρηση Πολιτικής Επιστήμης 8 (1996): 191–
217.
 Sebastian Conrad, What is global history? (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2016), 50. Chirot and Hall (“World-System Theory”, 90) believe that the world-system theory “is
in most ways merely a North American adaptation of dependency theory”. Certainly the adop-
tion of a “profoundly Eurocentric epistemelogical and conceptual framework” of centre-periph-
ery theories is often done without it being acknowledged that its pioneers coined the term Euro-
centrism and participated in the anti-colonial struggle and more generally in the cause for
changing the balance between Greater Europe and the rest of the world, part of which was
also the development of dependency theories: Alessandro Stanziani, Eurocentrism and the pol-
itics of global history (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 133– 134 and 147 does justice to this.
Wallerstein himself offered a complex critique of Eurocentrism: Immanuel Wallerstein, “Euro-
centrism and its avatars: the dilemmas of social science”, Sociological Bulletin 46, no. 1
(1997): 21– 39. Of interest is the attempt by Klemens Kaps and Andrea Komlosy in “Centers
and peripheries revisited. Polycentric connections or entangled hierarchies?”, Review 36,
no. 3– 4 (2013): 237– 264 to reconcile the postcolonial critique of Eurocentrism with world-sys-
tems theory.
 Sabyasachi Bhattacharya and Jan Lucassen, “Introduction: informalization in history”, in
Workers in the informal sector: studies in labour history, 1800 – 2000, ed. Sabyasachi Bhattachar-
ya and Jan Lucassen (Delhi: Macmillan India, 2005), 1– 19; Marcel van der Linden, “Labour his-
tory: the old, the new and the global”, African studies 66, no. 2– 3 (2007): 169 – 178; Andreas Eck-
figure of global labour history, acknowledges the great contribution of the world-
systems approach but at the same time describes it as “implicitly Eurocentric,
because it suggests that the requirements of the core capitalist regions will com-
pletely determine what happens in the periphery”.²² Van der Linden’s in any case
few references to the “semi-periphery” have gradually been reduced in his
work,²³ since in the global labour history approach the problematization of the
dichotomies of free and unfree, paid and unpaid, and formal and informal
work and the arguments for the reconceptualization of the core concepts of la-
bour history so as to incorporate the experiences of the non-Western world are
based on highlighting the contrast between the North Atlantic region and the
Global South. In this case, the identification of an intermediary semi-periphery
does not appear to have anything to offer.
The studies in this volume do not belong to either the world-systems theory
school or the current of global labour history. They may communicate with the
latter over certain common concerns (such as informality, workers who combine
wage work and small ownership, resistance to proletarianization and so on), yet
they do not focus on connections between Southern Europe and places located
in other continents, they are not engaged in a systematic dialogue with the em-
blematic themes of the global labour history approach, such as free and unfree
labour, nor do they foreground the need to transform the categories of labour
history in order to fit non-Western labour regimes within them.
For our part as editors, we have chosen to use the term semi-periphery with-
out necessarily giving it the characteristics that it has in world-systems theory
and without attempting to define it with a corresponding theoretical precision.
We do, however, need a term that eloquently conveys the sense of an intermedi-
ate category (from an economic, social and cultural perspective), different from
both the core of the capitalist world-economy as well as from a periphery that is
not only characterized by high levels of differentiation from the core but has also
been dominated by it and has been directly exploited by the core. The term
ert, “Why all the fuss about global labour history?”, in Global histories of work, ed. Andreas Eck-
ert (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter Oldenburg, 2016), 3 – 22.
 Marcel van der Linden, “Global labor history and the “modern world-system”: thoughts at
the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Fernand Braudel Center”, International Review of Social His-
tory 46 (2001): 423 – 459.
 Compare Marcel van der Linden, “The “globalization” of labour and working-class history
and its consequences”, in Global labor history. A state of the art, ed. Jan Lucassen (Bern:
Peter Lang, 2006), 13 – 36; idem, Workers of the World. Essays toward a Global Labour History
(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008); idem, “The promise and challenges of global labor history”,
International Labor and Working-Class History 82 (2012): 57– 76.
“semi-periphery” for Southern Europe can offer the prospect for better integrat-
ing the area into the historical analysis and the global division of labour, without
having to resort to current terms such as “Global South”, which is rather vague
and without historical depth and only with difficulty could be applied to parts of
Europe in any case.²⁴
We conclude this section with a further comment on this difference between
Southern and North-western Europe, the semi-periphery and the core, and on
how it is thematized in research. In their daily lives, human beings constantly
make comparisons through which they understand the world, while in the scien-
ces comparisons are one of the main methods used to produce knowledge.²⁵
Even so, comparisons take place within a framework of inequality, hierarchy
and power relations, which they tend to reproduce. The histories of those coun-
tries that do not belong to the centre and are compared with it are histories of ab-
sences and, even more, as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, of “not yet”.²⁶
In the case of Southern Europe, the acceptance of the European Canon and
the internalization of the hierarchical view of the world that it imposes has often
led to complexes towards the stigma of underdevelopment and backwardness
that divergence from the Canon entails. The anxiety of comparison with the
“West”, with the capitalist core, is particularly apparent in discussions of back-
wardness and modernization, the failure of the bourgeois revolutions to guide
their countries to “normal” and full modernity, the weakness of industrialization,
and so on. Each national case and specific area, such as the Balkans or Southern
Europe, has been perceived as a special case, as an exception and deviation from
a dominant model, which is homogenized and idealized in the framework of
what Kocka and Haupt have described as an “asymmetrical comparison”.²⁷ In
the case of labour history, it is primarily the limited proletarianization that is un-
derstood as “backwardness” for the formation of a “normal” working class and a
 Samantha Christiansen and Zachary A. Scarlett, “Introduction”, in The Third World in the
Global 1960s, ed. Samantha Christiansen and Zachary A. Scarlett (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 3.
 Jürgen Kocka and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (eds.), Comparative and transnational history (New
York: Berghahn, 2009).
 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
 For the Greek debate from this perspective, see Antonis Liakos, “Modern Greek historiogra-
phy (1974 – 2000). The era of transition from dictatorship to democracy”, in (Re)Writing history.
Historiography in Southeast Europe after socialism, ed. Ulf Brunnbauer (Münster: LIT Verlag,
2004), 351– 378; idem, “Canonical and anticanonical histories”, in Ethnographica moralia. Ex-
periments in interpretative anthropology, ed. Neni Panourgia and George Marcus (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2008), 138 – 156; Dimitris Kousouris, “Εισαγωγή. Νέες προσεγγίσεις
στην ελληνική κοινωνία του μεσοπολέμου (1922– 1940)”, in Η Ελλάδα στο μεσοπόλεμο, ed. E. Av-
dela, R. Alvanos, D. Kousouris and M. Charalabidis (Athens: Αλεξάνδρεια, 2017), 9 – 32.
capitalist labour market. We have seen, however, that the small degree of prole-
tarianization is interpreted by the world-system school not as a stage in econom-
ic development but as a result of the position of a region in the global division of
labour, while global labour history underscores that there is no linear model of
proletarianization. ²⁸
The issue of a comparison with countries in North-western Europe arises
often in the chapters of this volume, in relation, for example, to the different def-
initions of “independent artisan” and “small industry” (Anna Pina Paladini), al-
though without such a comparison being attempted systematically by the au-
thors (with the exception of Vincent Gouzi). Our comment here is that the
achievements of global labour history, as well, of course, of the broader post-col-
onial theory, enable us to escape the anxiety of divergence from the Western
Canon, as this could be found in previous studies. This creates a far healthier
basis for (entirely legitimate) questions to be answered in the future, such as
whether we can talk about forms of labour that are peculiar to this specific
area and which give it a particular character. An attempt can also be made to
interpret these forms, to periodize them and to highlight the variations within
Southern Europe itself.
The discussion of the European Canon also enables us to problematize the
terms of the production of scholarly knowledge and of how the different histor-
iographical trends are influenced or characterized by “asymmetric circuits of
knowledge”, as Susan Zimmermann has put it.²⁹ Despite the intentions of
their pioneers, both world-systems theory and the field of global labour history
could be seen as North Atlantic projects, given the institutions that support them
and the funding they receive. Academic communities often take paths that had
earlier been opened by commercial exchanges, investment, or conquest. As An-
drea Komlosy argues, the historiographical trends associated with global history
follow “the tracks beaten by colonialism, area studies often concentrating on the
‘golden eras’ of the respective states and empires”, while the research interest in
certain geographical areas is also linked to cultural and linguistic skills.³⁰
In the international division of labour within academia, the research that is
being done in countries of the periphery and semi-periphery lacks easy access to
 Andreas Eckert and Marcel van der Linden, “New perspectives on workers and the history of
work: global labor history”, in Global history, globally, ed. Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsen-
maier (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 145 – 161; Andrea Komlosy, Work. The last
1.000 years (London and New York: Verso, 2018).
 Susan Zimmermann, “Eastern Europe”, 131.
 Andrea Komlosy, “Western Europe”, in Hofmeester and van der Linden (eds.), Handbook,
160 – 166, quotation p. 163.
the institutions and publishers of the European centre, if it does not adopt he-
gemonic narratives. In the countries of the European periphery, which since
1989 – 1991 have included the former socialist countries, inadequate research
funding, unemployment, precarious labour conditions and the brain drain,
among other factors, exacerbate these social and regional inequalities and polar-
ization.
Labour History in Southern Europe

Each national historiography has its own separate route, according to the cultur-
al, social and academic idiosyncrasies of each country. We do not aim here to
give a presentation of the different historical approaches to labour nor to discuss
extensively the achievements of labour history in Southern Europe. It will suffice
for us to state that important historiographical discussions of economic and so-
cial history have taken place in the countries of Southern Europe, particularly
since the 1970s,³¹ and that Southern European historians are in a dialogue
with their colleagues in other countries.
The collaboration between historians of Southern Europe, particularly Med-
iterranean Europe (France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey) has intensified in recent
years. Today a much closer communication between economic, social and cultur-
al historians from different parts of Southern Europe can be observed. Conferen-
ces, research programmes and publications demonstrate the multifaceted
growth of academic interest. With France especially as the starting point,
which has the privilege of being simultaneously part of the North-western Euro-
pean centre and the European South, the research interest grew in the 1980s and
sought to highlight the historical specificities of Mediterranean Europe in rela-
tion to rural structures and land relations, family structure and survival strat-
egies.³² In the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean, the economic structures, so-
cial and political reactions, transition to modernity, state formation, institutional
changes, the rise of nationalisms and politicization and the formation of trans-
 Until the 1970s, the dictatorships of Spain, Portugal and Greece prevented the development
of independent social and economic histories.
 Indicatively: Stuart Woolf (ed.), Domestic strategies: work and family in France and Italy,
1600 – 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences
de l’homme, 1991); Stuart Woolf (ed.), Espaces et familles dans l’Europe du Sud à l’âge moderne
(Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1993); Roland Caty (ed.), Enfants au trav-
ail. Attitudes des élites en Europe occidentale et méditerranéenne aux XIX e et XXe siècles (Aix-en-
Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2002).
national networks of entrepreneurs, experts and activists are the themes around
which systematic historical research that goes beyond national boundaries has
been oriented since the 2000s, to produce transnational/entangled approaches.³³
The comparisons that have been used as a result of this interest in global
and transnational comparative approaches have incorporated the critique of Eu-
rocentrism. At the same time, the comparative approach, which has emerged as a
historiographical trend in Southern Europe too, has as one of its central issues
the highlighting of the specific features of Southern European cases in relation to
the hegemonic North-western European historiographical narrative.
Labour history in Southern Europe has been shaped into a distinct historio-
graphical field, especially in the 2000s. Nevertheless, from as early as the period
1970 – 2000, an increasing number of scholars was contributing with studies on
the economic and social history of these countries, while research into the his-
tory of the labour movement, its associations, various branches or individual en-
terprises had already, from even earlier, been providing rich empirical material.³⁴
 Indicatively for the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean: Augusta Dimou, Entangled paths to-
wards modernity. Contextualizing socialism and nationalism in the Balkans (Budapest and New
York: CEU Press, 2009); Lorans Tanatar Baruh and Vangelis Kechriotis (eds.), Economy and So-
ciety on Both Shores of the Aegean (Athens: Alpha Bank Historical Archives, 2010); Edhem Eldem
and Socrates Petmezas (eds.), The Economic Development of Southeast Europe in the 19th century
(Athens: Historical Archive of Alpha Bank, 2011); Tassos Anastassiadis and Nathalie Clayer
(eds.), Society, Politics and State Formation in Southeastern Europe during the 19th Century (Ath-
ens: Alpha Bank Historical Archives, 2011); Anastassios Anastassiadis (ed.), Voisinages fragiles.
Les relations interconfessionnelles dans le Sud-Est européen et la Méditerranée orientale 1854 –
1923: contraintes locales et enjeux internationaux (Athens: École française d’Athènes, 2013); An-
dreas Lyberatos (ed.), Social Transformation and Mass Mobilization in the Balkan and Eastern
Mediterranean Cities, 1900 – 1923 (Heraklion: Crete University Press and Institute for Mediterra-
nean Studies, 2013); Evguenia Davidova (ed.), Wealth in the Ottoman and Post Ottoman Balkans.
A Socio-Economic History (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016); Roumen Daskalov et al.
(eds.), Entangled histories of the Balkans, 4 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2013– 2017); Dimitris Stamato-
poulos (ed.), European Revolutions and the Ottoman Balkans: nationalism, violence and empire
in the Long Nineteenth Century (London: I.B. Tauris 2019). See also Maurizio Isabella and Kon-
stantina Zanou (eds.), Mediterranean diasporas. Politics and ideas in the long 19th century (Lon-
don: Bloomsbery, 2016). The ongoing research project “History of the Black Sea, 18th-20th century”
which is run, under the guidance of Gelina Harlaftis, by the Centre of Maritime History of the
Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH (Rethymno, Crete) offers a good example of the glob-
al and transnational approach to the economic and social history of port cities in a region linked
to Southeast Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean: https://blacksea.gr/ (accessed May 15,
2020).
 For historiographical accounts of social and labour history in Southern Europe, see José A.
Piqueras and Vicent Sanz Rozalén, “Traditional history and the new social history of labour in
Spain”, in A social history of Spanish labour. New perspectives on class, politics and gender, ed.
Some of the themes of the history of labour that inspired research and gave
birth to discussions in Southern European historiography concern migration and
migratory movements,³⁵ the (engendered) experiences of labour on the shop
floor (organization of labour, remuneration, hierarchies, technological innova-
tions),³⁶ agricultural labour relations and conflicts in the rural world,³⁷ labour re-
José A. Piqueras and Vicent Sanz Rozalén (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 1– 18; Yannis Yannitsio-
tis, “Social history in Greece: new perspectives”, East Central Europe 34– 35 (2007– 2008): 101–
130; Touraj Atabaki and Gavin Brockett (eds.), “Ottoman and Republican Turkish Labour Histo-
ry,” supplement, International Review of Social History 54 (S17) (2009); Leda Papastefanaki and
M. Erdem Kabadayı, “Introduction and Historiographical Essay on Greek and Turkish Economic
and Social History and the Emergence and Current State of Labour History”, in Working in Greece
and Turkey: A Comparative Labour History from Empires to Nation States, 1840 – 1940, ed. Leda
Papastefanaki and M. Erdem Kabadayı (New York: Berghahn, forthcoming 2020), 1– 57. On the
“syndicalist debate” in Portuguese historiography, see Paulo E. Guimarães, “A Questão Operária
na Primeira Republican: historiogarfia e memória”, A Ideia, Revista Libertária, II Série 13, no. 68
(2010): 3– 15; For Italian historiography see “The foundation of the SISLav: an interview with
Luca Baldissara (November 2012)” at https://www.storialavoro.it/eng/the-foundation-of-the-si
slav-an-interview-with-luca-baldissara-nov-2012/ (accessed May 15, 2020).
 Indicatively: Angiolina Arru, Daniela Luigia Caglioti, Franco Ramella (eds.), Donne e uomini
migranti. Storie e geografie tra breve e lunga distanza (Roma: Donzelli 2008); Michele Colucci and
Michele Nani (eds.), Lavoro mobile. Migranti, organizzazioni, conflitti (XVIII – XX secolo) (Paler-
mo: Società italiana di storia del lavoro – NDF, 2015).
 Examples include: Lina Gálvez Muñoz, “Engendering the experience of wages: the evolution
of the piecework system at the Spanish Tobacco Monopoly, 1800 – 1930s”, in Peter Scholliers and
Leonard Schwarz (eds.), Experiencing Wages. Social and Cultural Aspects of Wage Forms in Eu-
rope since 1500 (New York: Berghahn, 2003), 201– 227; Carmen Sarasúa, “Technical innovations
at the service of cheaper labour in pre-industrial Europe. The Enlightened agenda to transform
the gender division of labour in silk manufacturing”, History and Technology 24, no. 1 (2008):
23 – 39; Leda Papastefanaki, Εργασία, τεχνολογία και φύλο στην ελληνική βιομηχανία. Η κλωστο-
ϋφαντουργία του Πειραιά, 1870 – 1940 (Heraklion: Πανεπιστημιακές Εκδόσεις Κρήτης, 2009);
idem, Η φλέβα της γης. Τα μεταλλεία της Ελλάδας, 19ος-20ος αιώνας (Athens: Βιβλιόραμα, 2017);
idem, “Family, Gender, and Labour in the Greek Mines, 1860 – 1940”, International Review of
Social History (2019): 1– 22, doi:10.1017/S0020859019000580; Miguel Pérez de Perceval Verde,
Ángel Pascual Martínez-Soto, and Jose Joaquin García-Gómez, “Female workers in the Spanish
mines, 1860 – 1936”, International Review of Social History (2019): 1– 33. doi: 10.1017/
S0020859019000567.
 Examples include, for the Balkan regions of the Ottoman Empire, Alp Yücel Kaya, “On the
Çiftlik Regulation in Tırhala in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Economists, Pashas, Governors, Çift-
lik-Holders, Subaşıs, and Sharecroppers,” in Ottoman Rural Societies and Economies: Halcyon
Days in Crete VIII; A Symposium held in Rethymno, 13 – 15 January 2012, ed. Elias Kolovos (Re-
thymno: Crete University Press, 2015), 333 – 380; idem, “Were Peasants Bound to the Soil in
the Nineteenth-Century Balkans? A Reappraisal of the Question of the New/Second Serfdom
in Ottoman Historiography”, in Papastefanaki and Kabadayı (eds.), Working in Greece and Tur-
key, 61– 112. For Greece, see Christos Hadziiossif, “The ‘Invisible’ Army of Greek Labourers”, in
gimes and forms of unfree labour,³⁸ child work,³⁹ underemployment, unemploy-

ment and attitudes towards state intervention and labour legislation,⁴⁰ and, of
Papastefanaki and Kabadayı (eds.), Working in Greece and Turkey, 133 – 147; see also, idem,
“Class structure and class antagonism in late 19th century Greece”, in Philip Carabott (ed.),
Greek society in the making, 1863 – 1913. Realities, symbols and visions (Aldershot: Ashgate-Vario-
rum, 1997), 3– 17. See also the special issue “Conflict in the contemporary rural world. New in-
terpretations of an old problem”, edited by the Research Group on the Agrarian and Political
History of the Rural World at University of Santiago de Compostela, of the review Workers of
the World – International Journal on Strikes and Social Conflicts 1, no. 5 (2014).
 Indicatively: Christos Hadziiossif, “Από τη δουλεία στη μισθωτή εργασία”, in Τα Βαλκάνια:
Εκσυγχρονισμός, ταυτότητες, ιδέες. Συλλογή κειμένων προς τιμήν της καθηγήτριας Nadia Danova,
ed. Andreas Lyberatos (Heraklion: Βουλγαρική Ακαδημία Επιστημών – Πανεπιστημιακές Εκδό-
σεις Κρήτης-Ινστιτούτο Μεσογειακών Σπουδών, 2014), 63 – 75; Ali Sipahi, “Convict Labor in Tur-
key, 1936 – 1953: A Capitalist Corporation in the State?,” International Labor and Working-Class
History 90 (2016): 244– 265; Fernando Mendiola, “The Role of Unfree Labour in Capitalist Devel-
opment: Spain and Its Empire, Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries”, International Review of
Social History 61 (S24) (2016): 187– 211; Giulia Bonazza and Giulio Ongaro (eds.), Libertà e coer-
cizione: il lavoro in una prospettiva di lungo periodo (Palermo: Società italiana di storia del lavoro
– NDF, 2018).
 Indicatively: Michalis Riginos, Μορφές παιδικής εργασίας στη βιομηχανία και τη βιοτεχνία,
1870 – 1940 (Athens: ΙΑΕΝ – Κέντρο Νεοελληνικών Ερευνών ΕΙΕ, 1995); idem, “Formes du travail
des enfants dans l’industrie et l’artisanat en Grèce (XIXe – XXe siècles)”, in R. Caty (ed.), Enfants
au travail, 59 – 70; Antonia Pasi, “Les enfants dans l’industrialisation lombarde (1876 – 1911)”, in
R. Caty (ed.), Enfants au travail, 71– 105; Pedro Goulart and Arjun S. Bedi, “The Evolution of
Child Labor in Portugal, 1850 – 2001”, Social Science History, 41, no. 2 (2017): 227– 254. For a com-
parison, see Maria Papathanassiou, “Child Work and its Meanings in Rural Europe: Compari-
sons between Central Europe and the Balkans during the late Nineteenth and the First Decades
of the Twentieth Century”, in Kristoffel Lieten and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk (eds.), Child
Labour’s Global Past, 1650 – 2000 (Bern: Peter Lang Academic Publishers, 2011), 363– 390.
 Examples include historical research for legal measures and regulation of the labour market
as regards child work, work hours, workplace safety, occupational health, insurance systems for
health and pensions, professionalization of specific forms of work. See indicatively: Arón Cohen,
“Le travail des enfants entre droit et pratiques sociales. Un observatoire médico-patronal en An-
dalousie minière (1902 – 1920)”, in R. Caty (ed.), Enfants au travail, 253 – 265; Stefano Musso, Le
regole e l’elusione: il governo del mercato del lavoro nell’industrializzazione italiana (1888 – 2003)
(Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 2004); Raquel Varela, “State Policies Towards Precarious Work: Em-
ployment and Unemployment in Contemporary Portugal”, International Review of Social Histo-
ry 61 (S24) (2016): 263 – 284; Nikos Potamianos, “Regulation and the retailing community: the
struggle over the establishment of the holiday of Sunday in Greece, 1872– 1925”, History of Re-
tailing and Consumption 3, no. 3 (2017): 168 – 183. Many of the chapters of a collective volume
on labour in theatre and cinema in Greece refer to issues of professionalisation, licensing, con-
trol and regulation of the labour market: Eliza Anna Delveroudi and Nikos Potamianos (eds.),
Δουλεύοντας στον χώρο του θεάματος (Rethymno: Εκδόσεις Φιλοσοφικής Σχολής Πανεπιστημίου
Κρήτης, forthcoming).
course, an examination of forms of organization of the production process in

conjunction with labour mobilization and the issues at stake with these mobili-
zations.⁴¹ The organization of production in small enterprises, collective action
and the culture of master artisans and small shopkeepers had also come to be
understood through a prism that was compatible with that of labour history:
since for a large number of independent artisans and small traders, work pre-
vails (over property and entrepreneurship) as a point of reference for their iden-
tity and the material conditions of their existence, we should perhaps under-
stand them as belonging to the group of subaltern workers, the category
introduced by van der Linden, rather than the petite-bourgeoisie – at least if
we were to give some weight to the second part of this term (“bourgeoisie”).⁴²
The history of women and gender has given a significant renewal to the his-
tory of labour in all countries.⁴³ The perspective of gender has enabled us to deal
with the under-registration of women’s labour in the sources, and to explore con-
 Rolandos Katsiaounis, Labour, society and politics in Cyprus during the second half of the
nineteenth century (Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre, 1996); Kostas Fountanopoulos, Εργασία
και εργατικό κίνημα στη Θεσσαλονίκη. Ηθική οικονομία και συλλογική δράση στο μεσοπόλεμο (Ath-
ens: Νεφέλη, 2005).
 Andrea Colli, I volti di Proteo. Storia della piccola impresa in Italia nel Novecento (Torino: Bol-
lati Boringhieri, 2002); Bruno Maida, Artigiani nella città dell’industria. La Can a Torino (1946 –
2006) (Torino: Edizioni SEB, 2007); idem, Proletari della borghesia. I piccoli commercianti dall’
Unità a oggi (Roma: Carocci, 2009); Anna Pellegrino, La città piu artigiana d’ Italia. Firenze
1861– 1929 (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2012); idem, “Il lavoro artigiano”, in Storia del lavoro in Ita-
lia. Il Novecento, 1896 – 1945, ed. Stefano Musso (Roma: Lit, 2015), 84– 125; Nikos Potamianos, Οι
νοικοκυραίοι. Μαγαζάτορες και βιοτέχνες στην Αθήνα, 1880 – 1925 (Heraklion: Πανεπιστημιακές
Εκδόσεις Κρήτης, 2015); idem, “From the People to a Class: The Petite Bourgeoisie of Athens,
1901– 1923”, in Social Transformation and Mass Mobilization, 133 – 145; Anna Pina Paladini, Con-
fartigianato. Dalle origini al consolidamento democrativo (1946 – 1958) (Milano: Guerini e associ-
ate, 2016); idem, Confartigianato. Dal miracolo economico alla nascita delle regioni (1959 – 1970)
(Milano: Guerini e associate, 2018). In a reversal, studies on labourers in sectors such as con-
struction have shown that many of them shifted regularly between wage labour and self-employ-
ment: Dimitra Lambropoulou, Οι οικοδόμοι. Οι άνθρωποι που έχτισαν την Αθήνα 1950– 1967 (Ath-
ens: Βιβλιόραμα, 2009).
 Efi Avdela, Le genre entre classe et nation. Essai d’historiographie grecque (Paris: Syllepse,
2006), 17– 19, 27– 35; Dimitra Lambropoulou, A. Liakos and Y. Yiannitsiotis, “Work and Gender
in Greek Historiography during the Last Three Decades”, in Berteke Waaldijk (ed.), Professions
and social Identity. New European Historical Research on Work, Gender and Society (Pisa: Plus –
Pisa University Press, 2006), 1– 14; Cristina Borderías and Manuela Martini, “Introduzione. Per
una nuova storia del lavoro: genere, economie, soggetti”, Genesis XV, no. 2 (2016): 5 – 13; Leda
Papastefanaki, “Labour in economic and social history: The viewpoint of Gender in Greek His-
toriography”, Genesis XV, no. 2 (2016): 59 – 83.
cepts and categories concerning female labour in the censuses.⁴⁴ It has also per-
mitted the systematic exploration of the dichotomy between productive and un-
productive work,⁴⁵ the study of variety of forms of paid and unpaid female work
in the home ⁴⁶ and in family businesses,⁴⁷ as well as the historicization of con-
cepts such as “labour precariousness” and “labour flexibility”.⁴⁸
The history of labour in the former state socialist countries has followed a
different path, given that the history of the working class and the labour move-
ment were at the centre of the research agenda promoted by the socialist states.
In this sense, the history of labour, as the history of the labour movement, was a
noteworthy branch of research in Eastern European historiography from the
1960s until the end of state socialism in 1989 – 1991. The crisis that befell this
 Cristina Borderías, “Revisiting Women’s Labor Force Participation in Catalonia (1920 –

1936)”, Feminist Economics 19, no. 4 (2013): 224– 242; idem, “The Statistical Construction of
Women’s Work and the Male Breadwinner Economy in Spain (1856 – 1930)”, in Raffaella Sarti,
Anna Bellavitis, and Manuela Martini (eds.), What is Work? Gender at the Crossroads of Home,
Family, and Business from the Early Modern Era to the Present (New York: Berghahn, 2018),
165– 187; Carmen Sarasúa, “Women’s work and structural change: occupational structure in
eighteenth-century Spain”, The Economic History Review 72, no. 2 (2019): 481– 509; Raffaella
Sarti, “Toiling Women, Non-working Housewives, and Lesser Citizens: Statistical and Legal Con-
structions of Female Work and Citizenship in Italy”, in Sarti, Bellavitis, and Martini (eds.), What
is Work?, 188 – 225; Papastefanaki, “Labour in economic and social history”, 62– 68.
 Alessandra Pescarolo, “Productive and Reproductive Work: Uses and Abuses of an Old Di-
chotomy”, in Sarti, Bellavitis, and Martini (eds.), What is Work?, 114– 138.
 Tania Toffanin, Fabbriche Invisibili. Storie di donne, lavoranti a domicilio (Verona: Ombre
corte, 2016); Alessandra Gissi, “The Home as a Factory: Rethinking the Debate on Housewives’
Wages in Italy, 1929 – 1980”, in Sarti, Bellavitis, and Martini (eds.), What is Work?, 139 – 160. On
domestic labour, see the collective volumes with chapters referring to case studies from South
Europe: Suzy Pasleau and Isabelle Schopp (eds.), with Raffaella Sarti, Proceedings of the Servant
Project, vol. I-V (Liège: Éditions de l’Université de Liège, 2006) and Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux
(ed.), Domestic Service and the Formation of European Identity (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005). See also
Raffaella Sarti, “Historians, social scientists, servants, and domestic workers: Fifty years of re-
search on domestic and care work”, International Review of Social History 59, no. 2 (2014):
279 – 314; Pothiti Hantzaroula, Σμιλεύοντας την υποταγή: οι έμμισθες οικιακές εργάτριες στην Ελ-
λάδα το πρώτο μισό του 20ού αιώνα (Athens: Παπαζήσης, 2012).
 Daniela Cagliotti, “Petites bourgeoisies napolitaines du XIXe siècle. Mobilités géographiques
et sociales”, Bulletin du Centre Pierre Léon d’ histoire économique et sociale 4 (1993): 5– 14; Bea-
trice Zucca Micheletto, “Épouses, mères et propriétaires: artisanes à Turin à l’époque mod-
erne”, Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire 38 (2013): 241– 252; idem, “Only unpaid labour force? Wom-
en’s and girls’ work and property in family business in early modern Italy”, The History of the
Family 19, no.3 (2014): 323 – 340.
 Eloisa Betti, “Gender and Precarious Labor in a Historical Perspective: Italian Women and
Precarious Work between Fordism and Post-Fordism”, International Labor and Working-Class
History 89 (2016): 64 – 83.
field after 1989 – 1991 is a result of the political changes and was expressed as
both a disdain for the previous historical output and in a shift to other subjects.
The research interest was revived in the 2000s by a few historians from the coun-
tries of Southeast Europe and by foreign scholars.⁴⁹ In the new labour history of
Yugoslavia, Croatia, Serbia and Romania in the era of state socialism and in the
post-socialist period, attention turned to women’s wage labour in factories,⁵⁰
workers’ everyday lives,⁵¹ the peculiarities of self-managed Yugoslavian factory
and the diversity of its workforce,⁵² forced labour during the Nazi occupation,⁵³
and the ways in which the centrally-planned economy was transformed into eco-
nomic, political and daily practices in the spaces of production.⁵⁴ Relatively ne-
glected in the new period is the subject of labour mobilizations and organized
labour, although there is an interest for Yugoslavia and its successor states.⁵⁵
 On the broad differences among historiographies of the ex-socialist countries, see Peter Heu-
mos, “Workers under Communist Rule: Research in the Former Socialist Countries of Eastern-
Central and South-Eastern Europe and in the Federal Republic of Germany”, International Re-
view of Social History 55, no. 1 (2010): 83 – 115; Zimmermann, “Eastern Europe”; Adrian Grama
and Susan Zimmermann, “The art of link-making in global labour history: subaltern, feminist
and Eastern European contributions”, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire
25, no. 1 (2018): 1– 20, mainly 8– 14. On the historiographical trends for Yugoslavia, see also Sa-
bine Rutar, “Towards a Southeast European History of Labour: Examples from Yugoslavia”, in
idem (ed.), Beyond the Balkans: Towards an Inclusive History of Southeastern Europe (Münster:
LIT – Studies in South East Europe, 2013), 323 – 354.
 Indicatively: Jill Massino, “Constructing the Socialist Worker: Gender, Identity and Work under
State Socialism in Braşov, Romania”, Aspasia. The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern,
and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 3, no. 1 (2009): 131 – 160; Chiara Bon-
figliloi, “Gender, Labour and Precarity in the South East European Periphery: the Case of Textile
Workers in Štip”, Contemporary Southeastern Europe 1, no. 2 (2014): 7 – 23; idem, “Post-socialist
deindustrialisation and its gendered structure of feeling: the devaluation of women’s work in the
Croatian garment industry”, Labor History 61, no. 1 (2020): 36– 47.
 Indicatively: Rory Archer and Goran Musić, “‘Not all canteens are created equal’: Food pro-
vision for Yugoslav blue-collar workers in late socialism”, in Ruža Fotiadis, Vladimir Ivanović,
Radina Vučetić (eds.), Brotherhood and Unity at the Kitchen Table. Food in Socialist Yugoslavia
(Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2019), 73 – 93.
 Rory Archer and Goran Musić, “Approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: consid-
erations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia”, Labor History 58, no. 1 (2017): 44– 66.
 Sanela Schmid and Milovan Pisarri (eds.), Forced Labour in Serbia. Producers, Consumers
and Consequences of Forced Labour, 1941 – 1944 (Belgrade: Center for Holocaust Research and
Education, 2018).
 Alina-Sandra Cucu, Planning Labour. Time and the Foundations of Industrial Socialism in Ro-
mania (New York: Berghahn, 2019); idem, “For a New Global Labour History: A View from East-
ern Europe”, Historein 19, no. 1 (2020).
 Goran Musić, Serbia’s working class in transition, 1988 – 2013 (Belgrade: Rosa Luxemburg Stif-
tung Southeast Europe, 2013); idem, “‘They Came as Workers and Left as Serbs’: The Role of Ra-
On the whole, the new studies in the labour history of Southern and South-
eastern Europe, which are very different from each other in terms of theory and
methodology, are engaged in a dialogue with other social sciences (sociology,
anthropology, political economy, economic theory), while most problematize cat-
egories and established concepts (such as proletarianization, class, gender, eth-
nicity, race and nation). These studies often focus on the interactions of culture
with relations of production and labour relations or labour regimes.
The history of labour has been strengthened by research networks and aca-
demic societies. In the 2010s, an internationalization of labour history in South-
ern Europe is being achieved through the establishment of academic societies
and informal networks. In Spain, the research group for Work, Institutions
and Gender (Trabajo, Instituciones y Género, TIG) was formed in Barcelona in
1999, and since then has been at the heart of research activities, with the partic-
ipation of scholars from other Spanish universities. In 2010/2011, Portuguese his-
torians formed the research group for Global Labour History and Social Conflicts
(Grupo de Estudo História Global do Trabalho e dos Conflitos Sociais) at the Insti-
tuto de História Contemporânea of the NOVA University Lisbon. The Internation-
al Association of Strikes and Social Conflicts, formed in Lisbon in March 2011,
and its academic journal Workers of the world have contributed to the dialogue
between Southern European historians and historians from the rest of the
world.⁵⁶ The Italian Association of Labour History (Società italiana di storia del
lavoro-Sislav) was formed in May 2012,⁵⁷ while the French Association for the
History of the Worlds of Work (Association Française pour l’Histoire des Mondes
du Travail, AFHMT) was established in June 2013.⁵⁸ The creation of the European
kovica’s Blue-Collar Workers in Serbian Social Mobilizations of the Late 1980s”, in Rory Archer,
Igor Duda and Paul Stubbs (eds.), Social Inequalities and Discontent in Yugoslav Socialism
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 132– 154.
 https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/grupos-de-investigacao/historia-global-do-trabalho/ (accessed May
15, 2020).
 “The foundation of the SISLav: an interview with Luca Baldissara (November 2012)” at https://
www.storialavoro.it/eng/the-foundation-of-the-sislav-an-interview-with-luca-baldissara-nov-2012/
(accessed May 15, 2020).
 David Hamelin, “Pour une histoire du travail !”, Cahiers d’histoire. Revue d’histoire critique
124 (2014): 147– 158 (an interview with the historians Nicolas Hatzfeld, Michel Pigenet and Xavier
Vigna, founding members of the French Association). On the rich and long French historio-
graphical tradition in histoire ouvrière/histoire du travail, see Anne Jollet (ed.), “Comment les his-
toriens parlent-ils du travail?”, special issue Cahiers d’histoire, revue d’histoire critique 83 (2001)
and Christian Chevandier, Michel Pigenet, “L’histoire du travail à l’époque contemporaine, cli-
chés tenaces et nouveaux regards”, Le Mouvement social 200, no. 3 (2002) : 163 – 169. The revue
Le Mouvement social has contributed since its first issue (1960 – 1961) to the development of his-
toire ouvrière in France.
Labour History Network (ELHN) in Amsterdam in 2013 enabled researchers and

research groups working on the history of labour to meet and strengthen the
bonds among scholars from Southern Europe. At the first conference of the
ELHN in Turin in December 2015, research groups from Spain formed the Span-
ish Labour History Network (Red Española de Historia del Trabajo, REHT). Infor-
mal networks of scholars have also been established in Greece (in 2014) and Tur-
key (in 2011).⁵⁹ The sizeable participation of scholars from Southern Europe at
the second (Paris, 2017) and third (Amsterdam, 2019) ELHN conferences, as
well as at other academic meetings and conferences that now take place regular-
ly in Italy, Spain, France and Greece, confirm the dynamism of the renewed field
of labour history in Europe, as well as the interest of Southern European histor-
ians in dialogue and collaboration.
Studies on the history of labour in Southern and Southeast Europe have
been published in the past decade in collected volumes that attempt large-
scale international comparisons, such as in the case of textile workers,⁶⁰ or ship-
building and ship repair workers,⁶¹ or in special issues that take a fresh look at
classic subjects.⁶²
A group of comparative studies provide a link between research from France,
Italy, Spain and Greece using the tools of economic and social history, family his-
tory and labour history, with a focus on female paid and unpaid work in the fam-
 Marcel van der Linden, “The Growth of a European Network of Labor Historians”, Interna-
tional Labor and Working-Class History 90 (2016): 266 – 273; Christian G. de Vito, “New perspec-
tives on global labour history. Introduction”, Workers of the world I, no. 3 (2013): 7– 29; Leda Pa-
pastefanaki, Kostas Paloukis and Nikos Potamianos, “Το ελληνικό Δίκτυο για την Ιστορία της
Εργασίας και του Εργατικού Κινήματος. Ελληνικές και ευρωπαϊκές αλληλεπιδράσεις”,
Αρχειοτάξιο 18 (2016): 218 – 222. In 2011 an international conference on Ottoman and Turkish la-
bour history in an international perspective was held in Istanbul, giving historians from Turkey,
Greece, Iran, Egypt and the Netherlands the opportunity to exchange ideas. On this conference,
see M. Erdem Kabadayι and Kate Elizabeth Creasey, “Working in the Ottoman Empire and in Tur-
key: Ottoman and Turkish Labor History within a Global Perspective”, International Labor and
Working-Class History 82 (2012): 187– 200.
 Lex Heerma van Voss, Els Hiemstra-Kuperus, and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk (eds.), The
Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 1650 – 2000 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010),
which includes case studies from Italy, Spain, the Ottoman Empire and Turkey.
 Raquel Varela, Hugh Murphy and Marcel van der Linden (eds.), Shipbuilding and Ship Repair
Workers around the World Case Studies 1950 – 2010 (Amsterdam University Press, 2016), with
case studies from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Romania.
 Indicatively: “Back to the factory: the continuing salience of industrial workplace history”,
Görkem Akgöz, Richard Croucher and Nicola Pizzolato (eds.), Labor History 61, no. 1 (2020),
with case studies from Italy, Croatia and Turkey.
ily, family businesses and family economies.⁶³ At the core of these studies is the
need to give a historical dimension to research on care and unpaid work through
different case studies and theoretical approaches. The importance of women’s
work for family economies, especially in times of crisis, is another issue that
is of interest for research. Crises are seen as those particular periods of economic
recession or social and political upheaval during which it is possible to study dy-
namic gender relations in adaptive family economies within different historical
contexts, including that of Southern Europe.⁶⁴
A group of research projects is advancing the study of the history of labour
within multinational states, such as the Ottoman Empire and its successor na-
tion-states, focusing on mutual relations, interconnections, and movements of
population, ideas, products and practices. The comparative perspective on the
labour history of Greece and Turkey offers an alternative approach to the histor-
iographical dialogue across the coasts of the Aegean Sea, as studies on rural la-
bour relations, the impact of ethno-religious divides and emerging nationalisms
on labour markets and gender relations in the various workplaces inside and
outside the home intersect with each other.⁶⁵
An ongoing research project on maritime labour history explores in a com-
parative approach the transition from sail to steam navigation and its effects
on seafaring populations in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea between the
1850s and the 1920s, while investigating the maritime labour market, the evolv-
ing relations among ship-owner, captain, crew and local maritime societies, life
on board and ashore.⁶⁶
 Manuela Martini and Anna Bellavitis (eds.), Family Workshops and Unpaid Market Work in
Europe from the 16th Century to the Present, special issue of The History of the Family 19,
no. 3 (2014); Anna Bellavitis, Manuela Martini and Raffaella Sarti (eds.), Familles laborieuses.
Rémunération, transmission et apprentissage dans les ateliers familiaux de la fin du Moyen Âge
à l’époque contemporaine, special issue of Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Italie et Méd-
iterranée modernes et contemporaines (MEFRIM) 128, no. 1 (2016).
 Manuela Martini and Leda Papastefanaki (eds.), Crises, genre et économies familiales adap-
tatives dans l’Europe méditerranéenne (fin XIXe-milieu du XXe siècle), special section in The His-
torical Review/La Revue Historique 15, no. 1 (2018); Manuela Martini and Cristina Borderías
(eds.), “Coping with crisis: labour markets, institutional changes and household economies
from the mid-18th century to the early 20th century”, special issue of Continuity and change. A
journal of social structure, law and demography in past societies 35, no. 1 (2020).
 Papastefanaki and Kabadayi (eds.), Working in Greece and Turkey.
 Research project “Seafaring Lives in Transition, Mediterranean Maritime Labour and Ship-
ping, 1850s-1920s” run, under the guidance of Apostolos Delis, in the Centre of Maritime History
of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH http://www.sealitproject.eu/the-project (ac-
cessed May 15, 2020).
Overall, however, in the labour history of Southern Europe, such initiatives

for systematic comparative, transnational or entangled approaches are still
rather rare. We hope that this volume will help to create the conditions for
such initiatives in the future.
The Chapters of the Volume

We will conclude this introduction with an attempt to bring together some of the
central issues of the labour history of Southern Europe that are raised in the
14 chapters of this book.
First, one of the issues that emerges from the chapters is that of self-employ-
ment in Southern Europe. As Vincent Gouzi notes – and not only for Greece but
also other countries of Southern Europe – the rates of self-employment and
small businesses are high in comparison with countries in other parts of Europe.
This structure may be interpreted as the result of a strong cultural resistance to
proletarianization, a resistance that was of course not enough to prevent the
manifestation in the region of the broader trends of capitalist development,
but did limit their impact.
Thus, the Italian master artisans appear in Anna Pina Paladini’s chapter as
part of the broader world of labour, who, among other things, fought for the cre-
ation of a social security system for themselves too. The Spanish ship engineers,
as Enric Garcia Domingo demonstrates, sought stable employment as freelancers
on dry land after their service in the merchant navy was over. In the case of the
street vendors of Athens, explored by Nikos Potamianos through the “minor
news” items in the newspapers, independent employment was accompanied
by great poverty and very bad living and working conditions. So much so that,
according to the analysis by Kostas Paloukis on the neighbourhood of Peristeri,
proletarianization resulted in a rise in the living conditions and social status of
its inhabitants. Stavroula Verrarou, in examining land ownership and labour in
rural Greece, pits herself against the tendency to idealize independent work and
small ownership. In her own research, Verrarou combines a diverse range of
nineteenth-century sources, such as the Proceedings of Parliamentary Debates,
contracts, business archives, electoral lists and autobiographical narratives. As
she observes, this special mixture of small ownership and the expansion of
wage labour without proletarianization in Greek agriculture was less about the
desire of the farmers for independence and more about their insecurity and vul-
nerability, which led them to seeking multiple sources of income.
The goal of independent work has been associated, previously by Efi Avde-
la,⁶⁷ and now by Vincent Gouzi in this volume, with certain cultural structures in
the wider area of the Mediterranean, which drive a preference for labour inde-
pendence and favour the creation and reproduction of small economic units.
Gouzi sees the Mediterranean culture of honour as the root of this trend towards
self-employment, to the extent that entrepreneurship acts as an expression of
masculinity and the desire to reproduce the family unit and maintain its inde-
pendence against forms of subjugation such as paid work. Furthermore, the fam-
ily maintains a strong organizational role in the economic activities and pro-
vides, to the extent that it is needed, flexible unpaid work of its members in
the small enterprise run by the head of the family. Maria Papathanassiou dis-
cusses the economic role of the family in her chapter on Austria, pointing to
its function as an economic/labour unit that pushes its members into a range
of forms of employment and the collection of income from different sources,
as well as the relationship of the family to the contract-work systems of labour
recruitment.
Secondly, different forms of managing labour relations, from paternalism to
the systematic benefits of corporate welfare, can be observed in different histor-
ical contexts in Southern Europe. Paternalism as a set of attitudes and practices
towards labour relations has a special position in the history of labour in this
area. Although “paternalism” is a difficult concept to pin down, as it sometimes
lacks historical specificity as E.P. Thompson argues,⁶⁸ we can still distinguish in
the workplace practices, rituals and discourses that are based on a metaphor of
the family, where the employer was the head and father, and the employees—
both men and women—the children who are dependent upon him. The largest
and most modern enterprises throughout the twentieth century promoted a dif-
ferent model of managing labour, through systematic benefits and services
(housing, dining halls, kindergartens, community centres, health care services,
etc.) for their workers (corporate welfare or welfare capitalism).
Daniel Alves explains how the controversy surrounding the closing of shops
on Sundays in Lisbon was connected to the paternalistic view of shopkeepers as
to how to manage their shops and their staff. This paternalistic view denied total
independence and the transition to adult life to the shop assistants. Alves sug-
gests that paternalism was not a unique characteristic of the shopkeepers of Lis-
bon alone, and their arguments were similar to those used by shopkeepers in the
 Efi Avdela, “Genre, famille et stratégies de travail”, in Avdela, Le genre, 37– 60.
 Edward P. Thompson, “The Patricians and the Plebs,” in Customs in Common (London and
New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 24.
rest of Portugal and even in Europe, both northern and southern. We also en-
counter the idea of the employer as the father/protector who cares for his under-
age children, his workers or his employees in Anna Pellegrino’s chapter, which
uses the court records for the arbitrations of Italian workers. The divisions and
hierarchies in the workplace according to gender and age may perhaps be
more closely linked to the paternalistic discourse in which employers expressed
themselves.
Milan Balaban in his chapter explores a different kind of entrepreneurial pa-
ternalism, that of the creation of a modern company town. The Bata company
town of Borovo, in today’s Croatia, was unique as it was the only company
town in the territory of interwar Yugoslavia with a clear division of production,
residential and recreational zones. Balaban describes, through the use of Mora-
vian and Yugoslavian archival sources, the high standards of living in the com-
pany town of Borovo and the diverse facilities and social events (such as sports
games, concerts, movies) that it provided, highlighting how the Bata Company
aimed to create a loyal and stable skilled workforce through the control of the
workers’ everyday lives.
In his chapter, Paolo Raspadori examines the corporate welfare policies and
provisions in Italy in the first half of the twentieth century through the use of
surveys conducted by the State Inspectorate of Industry and Labour, the Fascist
Association of Italian industrialists and the Italian Parliament. Raspadori adopts
a broad definition of welfare capitalism (housing, healthcare, sport facilities,
loan funds, etc.) and analyses the evolution of these managerial policies within
their political and institutional context to show how they were used as tools for
the control and stabilization of labour, to create consensus and to manage the
workforce through the institutionalization of industrial relations. Welfare provi-
sions spread and strengthened in Italian companies from 1923 to 1955, mainly
in the North of Italy, and Raspadori discusses their uneven, irregular develop-
ment in terms of geography, sector and size. The focus on corporate welfare of-
fers us a way to understand, through a mirror effect, the transformations of wel-
fare at the national level too.
Andrea Umberto Gritti in his chapter examines the managerial strategies of
control during an important and critical period for Italy, that of the post-war Re-
construction. Gritti elucidates the role of ideology and sociological research as
instruments of control over the labour process. During the interwar period, the
implementation of corporate welfare policies was perceived as a means of rais-
ing work outputs and achieving productivity, while in the 1950s, corporate wel-
fare policies were mainly aimed at restraining labour conflicts after the great po-
litical mobilizations of the post-war period, so as to the assimilate the workforce
into the factory organisation. Cultural constructions and managerial practices
were interrelated in the entrepreneurial milieus of Lombardy, where the ideology

of corporate order developed together with the adoption of American organisa-
tional techniques that aimed to eliminate the propensity of workers to oppose
the factory hierarchy. One of the biggest Italian iron and steel companies, the
Falck Steelworks in Sesto San Giovanni, promoted the ideal of belonging to
the corporation through the publication of an employee magazine and the devel-
opment of corporate rituals, in order to contain the waves of labour unrest of the
post-war period.
Thirdly, most of the chapters in this volume underline the importance of the
institutional framework and the struggle for regulation of the labour market. In
her chapter, Svetla Ianeva studies an archetypal institution that was primarily
aimed at controlling the labour market, the guilds, and discusses the flexible tac-
tics with which they largely retained this ability in the central Balkans in the
mid-nineteenth century, despite the expansion of manufacturing beyond the
guilds in rural areas. The method that was deemed acceptable in the twentieth
century by which a professional group could achieve this control was for
trade licenses to be issued for a particular sector. As Paladini and Potamianos
show, this was the strategy that certain artisans in post-war Italy and street ven-
dors of interwar Athens respectively pursued. Enric Garcia Domingo’s chapter on
the Spanish engineers of the merchant navy offers a precise description of the
process of their professionalization through a discussion of their training, the
creation of a distinct skill and the recognition of its associated labour rights
on ships and elsewhere. Control of the labour market, then, may be won through
the struggle to define the limits of professions and skills: these limits are respect-
ed even when they are informal, as can be seen in the decisions of the arbitration
tribunals in early-twentieth-century Italy, analysed by Pellegrino.
The development of institutions for the “protection” of the working class and
the provision of an indirect social wage is a theme that is touched upon by many
of the contributors to this volume. Raspadori and Balaban examine the “private
welfare state” in Italy and Yugoslavia. Comprised of the benefits paid by the em-
ployer, it was penurious on a national level but in certain cases could be signif-
icant. However, it was mostly state intervention that significantly transformed la-
bour relations and the living standards of the working class in the twentieth
century – limiting phenomena such as the employment of old people as street
vendors so they could secure a living (Potamianos): labour legislation on work
hours, workplace safety, and the suchlike and, of course, insurance systems
for health and pensions. Their adoption was the result of both state paternalism
from the top down and the radical demands made from the bottom up. In his
chapter, Alves examines the conflicts over the introduction of a Sunday holiday
in Portuguese shops in the early twentieth century, while in her chapter Paladini
shows the significance that the demand for the extension of social security to
them too had on the trade union activity of craftsmen in post-war Italy.
The increase in labour costs brought about by the labour legislation led to
attempts to avoid its implementation. As Papathanassiou illustrates, the entre-
preneurs, so as to avoid prohibitions on employing minors, moved production
whenever possible to other areas – to domestic production, in the case of Austria
at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the shipyards of Palermo, as Aurora
Ianello demonstrates in her chapter, the labour laws, regulations on worker safe-
ty and legislation on subcontracting were violated systematically – with the
presence of the mafia adding a particular Sicilian colour to illegal practices
that appear to have been rather widespread in other countries too and which
led to a “safety net” for workers that was of lower standards than those in
North-west Europe. One possible fertile area for research and future studies is
how the character of the Southern European semi-periphery was shaped in
the twentieth century, not so much from the delay in introducing new institu-
tions, such as labour laws,⁶⁹ but in their incomplete application, which led to rel-
atively low levels of real regulation and contributed to the mushrooming of the
informal sector.
One parameter that could explain this development is the smaller strength
of organised labour in Southern Europe. The aspect of the unions as institutions
created by the workers with the aim to “embed labor markets in social institu-
tions”⁷⁰ appears in the studies by Ianello, Alves and Paladini, but its presence
in this volume is otherwise minor. Of interest, however, are a few references to
demands that were not manifested through the unions and which are usually ab-
sent in studies of industrial relations: the appeals lodged by individual workers
in the arbitration courts, as discussed by Pellegrino, as well as the representa-
tion of ship engineers in public space described by Garcia Domingo and the
struggle for the recognition of their profession. This, as Garcia Domingo eluci-
dates, was the work primarily of two leading figures of “intellectuals of the pro-
fession” and the circles that formed around them.
In some cases, the collective representation of the interests and demands of
labour was done not by large unions but by political parties such as the Commu-
 To remain with the chapters in this book, even though the introduction of labour arbitration
in Italy – and in the rest of Southern Europe – was delayed, as Pellegrino shows, the Sunday
holiday was introduced in the same period in countries of Northern and Southern Europe, as
Alves demonstrates.
 Wolfgang Streeck, “The Sociology of Labor Markets and Trade Unions”, in The Handbook of
Economic Sociology, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2005), 254– 283.
nist parties (which were particularly powerful in Southern Europe), which in a

certain way continued the tradition of the politicized chambers of labour. The
role of the wider political context thus takes on further significance, as it is pre-
sented in some of the chapters in this volume. Paolo Raspadori shows how forms
of corporate welfare were influenced by fascism and its policies. Kostas Paloukis
discusses the contribution of the Greek Communist Party, as well as the effects of
the changing context brought about by the Οccupation of the country during the
Second World War, on the transformation of the popular culture of the sub-pro-
letariat neighbourhood that he studied. Paladini demonstrates how the political
conflicts in post-war Italy related to both state policies towards artisans and their
union activities.
Fourthly, the paid and unpaid work of women in the workplace and in the
family, the economic importance of women’s work in the family and the gender
division of labour are discussed by some of the chapters in this book, even
though there are no chapters especially dedicated to women’s labour and gender
relations in Southern Europe.
Svetla Ianeva has found that women were the main workforce in many
branches of proto-industrial manufacturing in the Ottoman Central Balkans,
as they were involved in carpet making, rose-oil distillation and silk-reeling.⁷¹
Women, however, remained excluded from the unions and the regulations
they imposed. The hierarchically inferior character of women’s work emerges
in several other chapters in this volume. Pellegrino uses a valuable source, the
probiviri arbitrations, to study the regulatory mechanisms of labour relations
in Italian towns, but also to explore workers’ identities, their conceptions and
models of behaviour. Pellegrino’s findings on women’s work conclude not only
that female employment in manufacturing was frequently not permanent, but
especially that the authority of the employer seems to be equivalent to patriar-
chal authority even before the labour arbitration tribunals. The unequal treat-
ment of women as regards pay and the professional hierarchy is detailed impres-
sively in the study of the of the Bata shoemaking industry in Borovo. As Balaban
explains in his chapter, women were expected to leave their job after marriage
and to devote themselves to their family. Politics for a happy family life in the
company town was connected to the maintenance of a clean and tidy house
by housewives and the encouragement of male workers to be breadwinners. Sta-
ble and healthy family lives (away from alcohol and sexually transmitted diseas-
 The whole household was involved in most proto-industries, often with occasional and sea-
sonal work, a distinguishing feature of proto-industrialisation in rural areas. See also Socrates D.
Petmezas, “Patterns of Protoindustrialization in the Ottoman Empire: The Case of Eastern The-
ssaly”, Journal of European Economic History 19, no. 3 (1990): 575 – 603.
es) provided the guarantees for a stable and skilled workforce, productivity and
clockwork reliability in interwar Yugoslavia. It also seems that women hardly
would become head of a family business: one of the “specificities” of the
Greek industrial sector identified by Gouzi is the high rates of small enterprises
in which members of the family of the (usually male) owner worked en masse.
However, Potamianos argues that women in Athens gradually achieved more
freedom of movement in the public space, and some of them began to work as
itinerant traders at the beginning of the twentieth century. Most, however, had
their mobility restricted through their duties as mothers and housekeepers.
Finally, in his contribution, Paloukis underlines how the urban space of ev-
eryday life in a working-class neighbourhood of Athens in the interwar period
was a space in which the working class was made. Through an analysis of pop-
ular culture, as expressed in the social spaces of the neighbourhood and in
urban folk songs, gender relations are indirectly explored. Masculinity in the
neighbourhood is associated with violence and the defence of honour, a crucial
element of social relations for working-class culture. The transformations in the
expression of masculinity can be related to the changes in the composition of the
working class and the expansion of paid labour for young women, with the
strengthening of communist radicalism and the linking of the armed defence
of individual honour to collective demands during the period of the Occupation.
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cultivation of vineyards, mulberries and olives as a complement to wheat). It has

riphery-like economic activities. Sharecropping is cited as a form of labour that

Labour History in Southern Europe

gimes and forms of unfree labour,³⁸ child work,³⁹ underemployment, unemploy-

course, an examination of forms of organization of the production process in

 Cristina Borderías, “Revisiting Women’s Labor Force Participation in Catalonia (1920 –

Labour History Network (ELHN) in Amsterdam in 2013 enabled researchers and

Overall, however, in the labour history of Southern Europe, such initiatives

The Chapters of the Volume

were interrelated in the entrepreneurial milieus of Lombardy, where the ideology

nist parties (which were particularly powerful in Southern Europe), which in a

Sarasúa, Carmen. “Women’s work and structural change: occupational structure in

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