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Chapter Seven begins with Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939. The First Mountain Division’s Signal Corps occupied new barracks in Oberammergau and recruited locals who served in France, on the eastern front, and in the Balkans, where divisional units were implicated in massacres, including one featured in the book and movie Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. World War II brought a leadership shift to a ruling Nazi who was a democratically elected holdover from the Weimar Republic. He served an overcrowded and socially tense village population as evacuees arrived from bombed cities all over Germany. Intrusive Nazi officials relocated a Messerschmitt plant staffed by thousands of zealous Nazi workers and forced foreign laborers housed in a special camp. As bombing fleets roared overhead in 1944, the mayor drew strength from his identity as a Passion player to protect downed Americans from active Nazis seeking retribution.

The rise of market exchange, and the related competition, was the main dynamic force of the later Middle Ages and the motor behind social changes. This chapter shows how its force was refracted by the regional prism of power and property, resulting in a sharpening of the distinctions between regions. Some rural areas saw the rise of large tenant farmers and a multitude of pauperized wage labourers, while others saw the fragmentation of peasant holdings combined with proto‐industrialization. In the towns, which rapidly grew—in what was becoming the most urbanized part of Europe—similar differences can be observed, although less pronounced than in the countryside. Craftsmen and peasants sometimes succeeded in protecting small‐scale production and their ways of self‐determination, occasionally by extreme measures such as revolts, but gradually lost out to the growing financial power of merchant‐entrepreneurs and their Burgundian and Habsburg rulers. Moreover, growing population pressure undermined real wages, and poor relief and the actions undertaken by public authorities were hardly able to curb the negative effects on welfare.

This chapter presents the editorial “Who Will Own the Soil of the South in the Future,” published in both the Christian Recorder and the Globe. Here, Fortune set forth a position on landownership that he would further develop in Black and White. Heavily influenced by the ideas of Henry George and other agrarian radicals, Fortune believed that there needed to be a fundamental change in the ownership of land. In this editorial, he demonstrated his frustration with the monopoly of landownership and his belief that land was the common property of the people and should be available to those who cultivate the soil. Although he did not call for the complete abolition of private property in land, as he would in Black and White, one can see the germination of Fortune's idea more than a year before the publication of his larger study.

This chapter presents “A New Party” and “But It Will Be!”—editorials written while finishing Black and White—where Fortune demonstrates his growing belief that the conditions of workers, black and white, were the same and, consequently, so was their cause. He called for workers “of the South, the North and the West” to create “a solid front to the masterful forces which press them down.” “Opposition to this unification,” he argued, “is suicidal.” Equally important, Fortune attempted to demonstrate that the same economic forces that were shaping the lives of white workers, here and abroad, were also affecting the lives of the African Americans. Because of this, according to Fortune, blacks should have an equal place in the struggle for economic justice. These are themes that he would further develop in the latter half of Black and White.

The spike in immigration during the 1880s swelled the ranks of America's workers. America became one of the world's greatest industrial powers, in no small part due to the accomplishments of foreigners laboring in coal mines and quarries and on railroads. Many of them, especially Jews and Roman Catholics, suffered from religious discrimination. Protectionist opponents of immigration condemned the moralizing of anyone who “may try to smother us with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” On the West Coast, the Chinese were the most common objects of bigotry. Denied citizenship, and consequently the right to vote, it was impossible for Chinese immigrants to establish an effective political lobby. The xenophobia did not go unchallenged. Although the immigration issue was quite different from those traditionally related to the Declaration of Independence, there were prominent voices who connected the topic to the nation's foundational principles.

This chapter looks at the Jamaican guestworkers' transfer to Clewiston, Florida, where their status sank from exotic British war workers to “alien negro laborers,” and neither their British citizenship nor U.S. officials could protect them from the perils of farm labor relations in the southern countryside. In Florida, guestworkers' foreignness provided employers with a new and effective weapon in the arsenal of labor discipline: workers who protested their treatment now faced detention, repatriation, and blacklisting. In this new era of transnational labor, the threat of deportation became the new whip. No longer were Jamaicans told to expect “a friendly English-speaking people,” with habits and customs “somewhat different” from their own. In Florida, they were warned to adapt to the dictates of “the Jim Crow Creed.”

The most thorough recreation of the South Indian tradition of worship anywhere in the diaspora took place in Guyana when large numbers of indentured laborers were taken there in the middle of the nineteenth century. The temple compounds they established in each village are called the ”Madrasi temples” in local parlance, and they are all the same with Mariyamman in the center surrounded by five to ten subsidiary deities. The pujaris (priests) regularly go into trance and perform exorcisms, and in preparing for their trance, they carry on the ancient practice of animal sacrifice and also follow a unique local practice of being whipped with a 12‐foot rope. The festival in this case is limited to three days, with the Goddess arriving and possessing the pujaris and their assistants the first night, the whole troop visiting every house in the village the second night, and the whole village returning to the temple for exorcisms on the last night.

The diaspora experience of the indentured laborers in South Africa was different from those who went to Guyana, primarily because in South Africa they were able to leave plantation work within the first generation and try to find themselves in a complex society where Gandhi was already leading a movement to insist that they had civil rights. In moving to the outskirts of Durban, the former indentured workers tried to raise their social status by adopting high‐caste names and by building Brahmanical temples rather than Mariyamman temples. The most distinguished of these Brahmanical temples is the Umgemi Road Temple of Sivan, and the celebrated kavati festival of that temple is in honor of Sivan's son Murukan. This festival includes many dancers having hooks put through their flesh to hold the kavati in place, but the most prominent people in the procession are the business and political leaders of this very modern Indian community.

Consumption involved not only the acquisition and use of goods but also the use of labour. Live‐in servants were employed to cook and clean the house, care for horses and hawks, and work on the Le Stranges’ home farm. Day labourers were less intimately connected to the household, but wages provided the main income for a number of local families. In addition, the Le Stranges employed a myriad of craftsmen and other workers to undertake particular tasks, boosting the local economy but also calling on specialists in Norwich and London. The final section of the chapter assesses the impact of the Le Strange household on the local economy, and explores their links with particular local families.

This chapter focuses upon the corporeality and materiality of representations of parental care. Mothers were associated with physically caring for their infants and sick children, though fathers’ bodies were also the medium of their love through tears, hugs and embraces during the age of sensibility. This was celebrated in the popular cultural motif of the labourer's return home to his family. The parental bosom was frequently evoked through maternal breastfeeding and the nursing father. Society also praised labouring fathers and mothers who worked hard for their children, seeing their children's love as suitable reward. Men's provision for their families was demanded, but this chapter shows that provision was difficult to fulfil for many fathers. Also it was considered to be a maternal obligation in several social ranks.

This chapter explores the changes in job-search-advice literature over the course of the last three decades of the twentieth century—particularly the emergence of the artist as the ideal laborer in the post-industrial labor force. Richard Nelson Bolles' What Color Is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job Hunters and Career Changers assists the unemployed in finding a match between themselves and the labor market. Marsha Sinetar's Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow offers new advice to job seekers. Thomas Peters advises individuals to market themselves using a variety of techniques for fostering word of mouth, each of which involves additional work for the new CEO of Me, Inc. The CEO of Me, the lone artist and the singular entrepreneur, signalled a new model for the ideal worker free of the baggage of dependents.

This chapter examines inequality in rural Germany: the allocation of property rights, the distribution of land holding and land ownership, the position of rural labourers. Topics discussed include agrarian reform movement in 19th-century Germany, a comparison of agrarian reforms in Germany and Denmark, German agriculture in comparison with other European countries, and the Kuznets Curve and German agriculture.

In 1845 potatoes dominated the diets of the poorest one-third of the population. This chapter examines the spread of potato cultivation and consumption from the later 17th century. Potatoes moved from being a garden crop to a field crop as an adjunct to the extension of tillage. Their cultivation was labour-intensive and relied on — and supported — a growing population. Potatoes were nutritious, easy to cook, and normally plentiful except during the summer months. Labourers grew them on their small plots of land to feed themselves and their families. They supplemented potatoes with buttermilk and oatmeal, especially during the summer months. Meat and fish, apart from herrings, were rarities. Whiskey was widely drunk although it had little nutritional value.

This chapter examines the extent of cyclical, seasonal, and casual unemployment from 1870 to 1914, and shows that reported unemployment rates greatly understate the probability of job loss faced by manual workers. It also reveals the public and private battles over relief for the unemployed. In the 1870s, cities abruptly curtailed granting outdoor relief to able-bodied males, and beginning in 1886 the Local Government Board encouraged municipalities to establish work relief projects during downturns. However, neither municipal relief projects nor the work relief established as a result of the 1905 Unemployed Workmen Act succeeded in assisting the temporarily unemployed—most of those employed on relief works were chronically underemployed laborers.