Most scholars hold a skeptical view of the war elephant of ancient India. I show that the skepticism of present-day historians derives from ancient Rome, at the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire, when the Romans, having defeated the elephant-deploying powers of the Hellenistic period, ended the use of war elephants in its growing empire for all time. Late Roman war elephant skepticism was taken up by Quintus Curtius Rufus, who embraced it and strengthened it rhetorically in speeches he devised and put into Alexander’s mouth, in his history of Alexander. In this way Roman skepticism about the value of the Indian war elephant was attributed to Alexander, two centuries previous to its formation among the Romans. In modern times the late Roman view that elephants have a tendency to panic and become a greater danger to their own side was turned into a settled truth about elephant physiology, but it does not accord with the evidence offered.

This article suggests that classification exercises were the quintessential modality for both the narrative and labour–management relations of occupational health and safety in Indian mines for the period 1895–1970. The extant literature has underestimated the cause-and-effect relationship that such classification practices had, including punitive safety regulation clauses, compensation clauses, the public image of firms, forms of knowledge, and stakeholder bargaining. The narrative of work hazards fundamentally forged casualty classification patterns. The ascertainment techniques applied to casualty, perceptions of occupational risk, and the politics of restitution shaped the narratives and defined patterns of casualty classification. Management devised various ways to present a decent picture of mining through casualty statistics. Later, critiques of this business practice exposed statistical discrepancies and flaws in the classification system, challenging the built-in business-blindness. From the late 1920s, the informed, organized mineworkers articulated their experiences of workplace risk; they confronted the managerial discourse of “unavoidable” work hazards and mineworkers’ liability for casualty. The mineworkers’ publicists and the government of the Republic of India took an interest in research on occupational health and safety and its regulation. They aimed at industrial efficiency and national reconstruction by creating a healthy, contented, and experienced workforce. All this steered the classification exercises of industrialists and public authorities towards favourable changes. The twin forces of capital and working people converged on the restitution measures articulated within the utilitarian paradigm. The latter, ironically, contributed to valorizing the narrative of risk and sacrifice in the lives of mineworkers.

Scholars have long recognized the importance of so-called “Ghent” systems of unemployment insurance for working-class strength and therefore national capitalist development. While only three European countries currently maintain “pure” Ghent systems, nearly a dozen did so during the first half of the last century. This article investigates the discontinuation of these systems in two paradigmatic cases, Belgium and the Netherlands. By focusing on the irreconcilable nature of trade union goals regarding the delivery, range, and funding of unemployment insurance, the analysis explains how the discontinuation of Ghent in these two countries could occur under distinctly union-friendly governments and with the explicit consent of their trade union movements. By showing that both the Belgian and Dutch trade union movements displayed great uncertainty regarding the organizational costs and benefits of assuming responsibility for benefit delivery, the article also explains why Belgium subsequently created a semi-Ghent system that continued to significantly boost union membership, while the Netherlands did not.

This article makes use of nearly 25,000 observations representing over 95,000 paid workdays across over 300 years to investigate individual work patterns, work availability, and the changes in work seasonality over time. This sample is comprised of workers in the construction industry, and includes unskilled men and women as well as skilled building craftsmen – the industry that is often used to estimate comparative real wages through early modern Europe. Data come predominantly from Scania, the southernmost region in modern day Sweden, and especially from Malmö, the largest town in the region.

Findings indicate that workers probably do not engage in paid labour on a purely labour-supply-based schedule, but are strongly impacted by the demand for construction labour, which was highly seasonal and impacted by local labour institutions. Seasonality was stronger further back in the past, indicating that finding long-term work may have been more difficult in earlier periods. A typical work year could probably not have been longer than 150 days, and would be made up of shorter work spells at several different sites. This is not enough work to meet standard assumptions of 250 days, or enough work for an unskilled man to support his family at a respectable level. Individual workers rarely worked more than a handful of days in a year on a construction site, even when labour demand was high, indicating that they did not maximize their income from waged labour.

The article explores the evolution of household income in India before the late nineteenth century. At a time when criticism of estimates of global real wages challenges the assumptions arising from the Great Divergence Debate, we aim to provide alternative ways of contributing to the discussion. By looking at individual and household income, as well as consumption levels in different parts of India, we found that members of the household other than the head (namely women) supplied a larger part of its total income than an analysis of wage differentials would suggest. Moreover, we argue that India, in the centuries under review, had a functioning labour market, despite several impediments. This adds to the value of our data as building blocks to reconstruct real wages and, consequently, to better understand welfare levels. Nevertheless, the decline in the Indian skill premium suggests that channels of social mobility decreased over time. The implications of all these findings for the Great Divergence Debate depend on the extent to which our approach also has consequences for our view on household income in other parts of Eurasia. Certainly, they call for a nuanced approach to Indian economic development during the period.

For two decades, real wage comparisons have been centre stage in global socio-economic history studies of comparative development, offering a tractable – if oversimplified – gauge of living standards. But critics argue that these studies have leaned too heavily on the earnings of male, urban, unskilled, daily wage labourers, overlooking wage disparities between social groups and the mechanics of how wages were paid. This Special Issue attempts to shift the focus to overlooked groups and “wage systems” – the methods behind pay determination – and their role in deepening or mitigating inequality. This introduction attempts a global overview of the long-term developments in real wage studies, highlighting methodological innovations and challenges over recent decades. It also explains how the various articles in this Special Issue, spanning topics from medieval Europe to colonial India, contribute to this field. We argue that wage systems – and the inequalities they breed – played out in ways as varied as history itself, so comparing material living standards across time and space remains a complex calculation. We plead for a two-pronged approach: the continued study of all types of income of all working people, alongside a new focus on the social norms, institutions, and systems that determine the opportunities for individuals to acquire an income. A consolidated bibliography of all references in this Special Issue may help future research.

The concept of ritual has been all too loosely applied to violence and atrocity with assumptions of repetitiveness, mythic symbolism, and religious overtones. This paper examines a selection of modern cases of atrocity for specific ritual elements: attention to body and spaces as frames for meaning; a prescripted mode of action; and performative enaction of a new millennial or transgressive order. Focal cases include American lynching (nineteenth–twentieth centuries) and militia atrocities in Sierra Leone and Liberia (1990s), while examples of gendered atrocity in ritualized forms (perpetrated by Bosnian Serbs and the Islamic State) are broached in the conclusion. Ritualization is not typical to modern atrocities but allows perpetrating groups to experience meaningfulness in the violent acts they assemble, often in situations of crisis.

Forty years into Botswana’s AIDS epidemic, amidst persistently low rates of marriage across southern Africa, an unexpected uptick in weddings appears to be afoot. Young people orphaned in the worst years of the epidemic are crafting creative paths to marriage where—and perhaps because—their parents could not. Taking the lead of a pastor’s assertion that the wife is mother of her husband, I suggest these conjugal creativities turn on an understanding of marriage as an intergenerational relationship. Casting marriage in intergenerational terms is an act of ethical (re)imagination that creates experimental possibilities for reworking personhood, pasts, and futures in ways that respond closely to the specific crises and loss the AIDS epidemic brought to Botswana. This experimentation is highly unpredictable and may reproduce the crisis and loss to which it responds; the multivalences of marriage-as-motherhood can be sources of failure and violence, as well as innovation and life. But it also recuperates and reorients intergenerational relationships, retrospectively and prospectively, regenerating persons and relations, in time. While different crises might invite different sorts of ethical re-imagination, marriage gives us a novel perspective on how people live with, and through, times of crisis. And marriage emerges as a crucial if often overlooked practice by which social change is not only managed but sought and produced.

This article investigates geosocial patterns of marriage strategies among the leadership of Hasidism, arguably the most prominent socio-religious movement of modern Jewry, known for its unique network of charismatic leaders organized in hereditary dynasties. The article’s core premise is that grasping the network structure of the Hasidic movement’s dynasties, which has been under-researched, is crucial to understanding the movement’s social and cultural dynamics. The study employs social network analysis (SNA) and spatial analysis to examine marital unions among these leaders (2,375 cases), from the early stages of the movement in the eighteenth century until the early twenty-first century. The article explains, for the first time, how Hasidic dynasties expanded, eroded, and negotiated their status within the network of other dynasties. More specifically, we analyze the position of the dynasties within a wider context of social and spatial interconnection patterns, the significance of endogamy, the impact of territorial factors on marriage preferences, and the creation of dynastic clusters. A significant conclusion of this article is that, rather than a set of unrelated dynasties, Hasidic leadership gradually became a web of interconnected families with explicable patterns of organization. These findings can help explain historical processes in Hasidism, such as its persistence through historical crises. It can also illuminate leadership processes in other religions in which, as in Hasidism, the social structure of charismatic leadership is based on clans.