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Summary: This book focuses on some aspects of public health in the first three decades of the twentieth-century in Bombay Presidency.

The article informs that the conditions found in late nineteenth-and early twentieth century Japanese textile mills were highly detrimental to the physical well-being of those who worked in them. Sickness rates, death rates, body weights and heights and other assessments of physical health all indicate that this was the case. Tuberculosis was only the most lethal and most conspicuous of their ailments, and as such caused unusual concern in a society long accustomed to relatively high mortality and morbidity rates. The same conditions, which researchers highlighted, could be found in varying degrees in the life and work of many Japanese. If the conditions female textile workers lived and worked in were conducive to the spread of tubercular infection, then so were the same conditions in both city and countryside, where exhaustion, overcrowding, dirt and poverty were also prevalent. Factory managements, however, also claiming to operate within limits imposed by Japan's position as a late industrializer, were unable or unwilling to eradicate the conditions, which appeared to encourage the spread of tuberculosis and other diseases. They blamed capital shortages and the pressure to "catch-up" for the non-availability of funds to improve working and living conditions.

INTRODUCTION Few industries tug as strongly at the heartstrings as the sexual services industry. Take the tales social historian Mikiso Hane tells. A “growing chasm” separated rich and poor in pre-War Japan (1982, 34), he writes. “[T]he condition of the peasants remained pathetic in contrast with the growing well-being of bourgeois capitalists,” and peasants found themselves waging “a bitter struggle for survival” (id., at 31, 27). Within this impoverished world, some of “the most pitiful victims …were the young farm girls who were sold to brothels” (id., at 207). Unfortunately, the poignancy masks the ingenuity with which prostitutes and brothel owners overcame the chronic informational asymmetries in the contracting process. In most industries, prospective employees know their own productivity better than employers; employers know their own operations better than employees; both have an incentive to lie; and both would do best if both could communicate honestly. Given that most employers and employees care what others say about them, reputational effects mitigate some of these problems. Often, however, employers and employees can – and do – draft labor contracts to reduce any remaining informational problems. In the sexual services industry, they drafted those contracts with a remarkable resourcefulness. In the following two chapters, I consider two issues central to the thesis in this book: narrowly – how did workers and employers respond to such informational asymmetries in the labor market; and more broadly – how independently and selfishly did they behave? To explore these questions, I study two very different industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just once, you should come see a farming or fishing village. You won't find a single girl. All you'll see are shriveled old grannies. The girls are all gone, left the village for work.… We guys are left, but we're lonely. Real lonely. Even suppose I can take the loneliness. How am I going to find a wife? I want a wife so bad I'm going crazy. But no girl'll marry a poor farmer anymore. Even when they come back to the village from the factories, they've turned completely high-class. With their hair done up and perfumed and all, they won't even look at us. It was a letter to the editor of a Tokyo daily newspaper. And it captured at least some of the economic impact of the textile industry. Having made a minor fortune in the textile mills, the women had raised their sights, and raised them high. To explain why the textile workers were able to obtain these high wages, in this chapter I explore the informational logic to the employment arrangements they used. Because each firm was so large and because so many women regularly quit work to return home and marry, potential employees had access to a steady flow of verifiable information about their potential employers. Owners, however, did not have accurate information about their recruits, could not readily monitor each recruit's performance, and could not precisely verify what their plant managers told them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In significant part, the history of law in imperial Japan is a history of the way courts enforced claims to scarce resources. More simply, it is a history of property rights. As one court (somewhat sanctimoniously) put it in 1918, “the inviolability of the right to property is one of the fundamental principles of the Imperial Constitution.” Throughout the period, Japanese courts enforced private claims to property, and labor remained an asset controlled by the laborer himself or herself. Over the past several decades, scholars have detailed the close (though obviously imperfect) relation between institutions that enforce private rights to scarce resources and the dynamics of economic growth. Those institutions, as Douglass North (1994: 359) put it in his Nobel Prize address, “form the incentive structure of a society, and … in consequence, are the underlying determinants of economic performance.” Through its courts, the Japanese government maintained those institutions scrupulously. The relatively efficient Japanese economic growth in the pre-War years was no surprise. It was the predictable result of the legal rules the government enacted and the courts enforced. Land and labor are critical ingredients in almost all industries. By the turn of the century, Japanese courts systematically enforced the rights to use land, to exclude others from it, and to transfer it. Most land has value only when improved, and for most of Japanese history improvement has meant irrigation. Over irrigation rights, too, courts enforced such rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION “I see the world in very fluid, contradictory, emerging, interconnected terms,” Jerry Brown once observed, “and with that kind of circuitry I just don't feel the need to say what is going to happen or will not happen.” Life is subtle. Life is complicated. Life is hard. But Jerry Brown notwithstanding some things are less subtle, less complicated, less hard than they first seem – and the relationship between legal rules and economic performance is one. Legal rules structure institutions, and institutions determine economic growth. Rules that clarify and enforce rights to scarce resources tend to promote efficient growth, and those that muddy those rights tend to retard it. In imperial Japan (1868 to 1945, though I largely end my discussion with 1930), these connections between law and growth raise at least two questions: what role did law play in Japanese economic growth; and what caused the Japanese government to adopt the law that it did? In this chapter I begin with the argument about the first of these questions and follow it with a more tentative hypothesis about the second. In later chapters I focus on the legal rules themselves and on the ways people manipulated those rules by private agreement. Accordingly I begin this chapter by outlining the theoretical relationship between legal regimes and economic performance (Section 1). I describe the Japanese regime in place during the first half of this century, and explain how it tended to promote efficient growth (Section 2). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the programs of the Homeworkers' Association (HWA) for the sewing industry in Toronto, Ontario. It discusses the aims, structure and organization, activities and achievements of HWA. The primary reason that women work as homeworkers in the garment industry is the lack of affordable childcare. Other problems arising from home working such as poor health and safety conditions, and being underpaid are also discussed.

The relationship between Russian labor and Bolshevik power in the months immediately following October remains a central and contentious issue of early Soviet history. Bolshevik political legitimacy turns in large measure on the degree to which the party was able in this period to retain the support of workers whose activism in 1917 had brought the Bolsheviks to power; and the nature and extent of workers' opposition to the new regime in these early months is fundamental to our understanding of its dictatorial structure. These issues, central to the work of E. H. Carr, Leonard Schapiro, and others, have recently reemerged in the literature, both implicitly and explicitly. Whereas new books by S. A. Smith, David Mandel, and Diane Koenker on 1917 have examined carefully the social circumstances of Petrograd and Moscow workers, Schapiro's own last volume, The Russian Revolutions of 1917, takes sharp issue with historians whose work centers on “social trends, economic theories, or sociological analysis.” Roy Medvedev and Vladimir Brovkin have demonstrated how elections to local Soviets in the spring of 1918 brought extensive gains for Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, including popular majorities in all provincial capitals where elections took place; and an important new collection of materials edited by M. S. Bernshtam for Alexander Solzhenitsyn's series on modern Russian history reasserts an old Right Menshevik view, put most forcefully perhaps by Grigorii Aronson, who maintained that the Bolsheviks had been in power scarcely two months before all sympathy for them had disappeared, and the benevolent neutrality of the weeks preceding [October] gave way to a committed opposition. […] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A powerful aspect of the prevailing view of the revolution – of the white and red contrast between good democratic liberals and evil Bolsheviks – is that it makes the past very simple. This simplicity, in turn, makes the past easier to understand and to express as moral lessons for our own time. The reality of 1917 is much more complex. The revolution of 1917 – any revolution for that matter – should be thought of as a kaleidoscope Patterns fall into place and then fall apart, and then become reassembled in different patterns. In order to stress this kaleidoscopic aspect of the revolution and to emphasize the many-layered reality of 1917, I shall draw upon my own work on Moscow's working class during the revolution. When I set out to do a study of Moscow workers in 1917, I had three goals in mind. The first was to study the revolution as it happened away from Petrograd. Petrograd was a unique place: It was the center of political power, the home of the aristocratic elite, the most advanced industrial center in the country, and it was relatively near the eastern front of the world war. All these factors would surely affect the process of revolution in ways that might not be repeated elsewhere. So I turned to Moscow, not just for the sake of learning what happened in a different place, but also to understand why Moscow's experience was different, if indeed it was. In so doing, I hoped to add a new dimension to the history of 1917. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

St. Petersburg, or Petrograd as it was named in deference to anti-German sentiment after the outbreak of world war in August 1914, was the main theater of revolutionary activity. But it was by no means the only one. Moscow and numerous other Russian cities figured prominently in the events that brought down the old order. In the final decades of late imperial Russia the changes associated with modernization profoundly altered the Russian city and transformed the conditions of daily life and labor for most of its inhabitants. Urban industrialization obviously played an important role in this general process of social, economic, and, ultimately, political change. In few places were the consequences more plainly to be seen than in the Empire's principal cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, which are the focus of attention in this chapter. My purpose is to describe some features of the urban environment that might serve as a backdrop to the revolution of 1917. Before embarking on this task, however, it is necessary to sketch in broad outline the pattern of population growth and industrial development in the Empire as a whole. Citizens and cities in late imperial Russia During the nineteenth century Russia grew significantly both in areal extent and in number of subjects. In the first quarter of the century the Caucasus region with its predominantly Christian, but ethnically diverse and non-Slavic peoples, was brought into the ambit of Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]