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Chapter one draws on histories of suicide and historical studies of industrial labour in order to examine whether work suicide constitutes a new phenomenon reflecting the historically specific conditions of neoliberalism. Despite the poor material conditions of labour under industrial capitalism, there are few recorded cases of work-related suicide. In 19^th century France, suicide was characterised as a marginal phenomenon that affected the most impoverished social groups: the jobless, the destitute or the infirm. The chapter examines the structural transformations that have precipitated a rise of suicides in the workplace and in particular, the shift to a finance-driven economic order. From a source of productivity and therefore profit under industrial capitalism, labour has become, in the contemporary context, an obstacle to rational and extraneous financial goals that needs to be removed. Suicides are the product of differential neoliberal management regimes. On the one hand, suicides affected workers who were pushed to their very limits by management in a bid to increase their individual productivity, economic worth and therefore maximise profits. On the other, suicides affected workers who were pushed out of the workplace as a form of surplus cost.

Summarizing the developments in nineteenth-century academic economics, this chapter draws comparisons and discovers new connections between America’s first full century of economists. German historical economics is discussed in the context of nineteenth-century protectionism and industrial capitalism of the Gilded Age. Parallels are found between antebellum and post–Civil War expressions of opposition toward finance. And special attention is paid to the evolution of conservative economics during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and ultimately the ascendancy of laissez-faire capitalism in the conservative economic mind.

This chapter provides an introduction to the commodification of prostheses in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain and United States. By addressing some of the main processes used to commodify prostheses - invention, design and production; use and consumption; and promotion and patenting – it highlights how the medical profession, surgical instruments makers and individuals with physical impairments not only participated in shaping markets for new and modified assistive devices, but by doing so, redefined what it meant to be ‘abled’ and ‘disabled’ in this period. It argues that the redefinition of disability in this period – as a medical affliction that needed to be ‘corrected’ – led to the rise of disability rights activism in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. The previously little explored history of prostheses commodification, introduced here, formed no small part in the rise of these movements.

This chapter briefly outlines the history of racial discrimination in the rural South and the ways social justice activists continued the struggle for equality in the decades following the civil rights movement. Civil rights legislation failed to adequately address the economic legacies of past discrimintation, which were compounded by the mass displacement of agricultural workers from the land in the mid-twentieth century. Activists’ calls for government intervention to provide employment, income, education, housing, and health care for displaced workers generated strong resistance from regional elites whose preferred solution to the crisis was for displaced workers to leave. The ideological and political struggles that ensued had consequences for all Americans, not just African Americans, and helped shape national responses to labor displacement during the transition from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism in the late twentieth century.