26 books like Annals of the Labouring Poor

Dickens was a great intuitive psychologist, and The Tale of Two Cities shows some brilliant insights into human behavior during and after revolutions. The wonderful dreams of French society being built on justice and fairness came crashing down after the revolution. This is because people driven by opportunism and pathological hatred took over society. These ‘revolutionaries’ had an intense desire for vengeance and violent retribution–as well as gaining power for themselves. 

This is a feature of revolutions that we see again and again after the collapse of the old regime: unprincipled opportunists jumping to power. The direction of change becomes more radical. Inevitably, a lot of innocent people became victims during this post-revolution period, as did many innocent French people during what became known as the period of ‘Terror,’ when the guillotine rapidly killed thousands and thousands.

Dickens shows that in this terrifying post-revolution period, some individuals make great sacrifices… show more.

I adore this book. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class might be better known, but his book that I return to time and time again, his most brilliant, most detailed, most political, is Whigs and Hunters. More than any other book, this gets absolutely to the heart of how power was practiced in early eighteenth century. Against the protests of poor forest dwellers, the British state in one swoop made more acts punishable by death than the rest of the statute combined. If you want to understand how and why inequality persists, and how foodstuffs became a battleground between the rich and poor, this is essential.

The hard fact of the matter is that in the modern world no one needs be hungry, let alone die from starvation. But the idea that famine is not a result of ‘total food-availability decline’ but instead was a function of ‘entitlements’ is Sen’s – and is one of the most profound and important theories of the past hundred years. The theory is a complex one but can be boiled down to the idea that hunger – and then famine – are the product of political choices in the distribution of goods. It is impossible, meaningless even, to write of hunger without first thinking of Sen’s extraordinary book.  

Throughout history – and into the present – hunger is always profoundly gendered, women being disproportionately impacted upon than men. The point has been remarkably little studied so it’s a good thing that the most prolific writer on the Great Famine of Ireland, Christine Kinealy alongside two other fine famine scholars, have finally addressed this. The book is a series of essays exploring the roles that women (and children) played during the famine. Timely and powerful and a useful reminder that when it comes to writing the history of hunger we’ve only just started.

A well-written study of Philadelphia’s single women in the eighteenth century, this book offers an unusual view of women’s lives by focusing on the unmarried female residents of an urban middle-colony environment. (Most works on colonial women have studied married women in rural New England.) Each chapter highlights an individual woman and the diverse experiences of others like her, including poor women, dependents in siblings’ households, female shopkeepers and other tradeswomen, and women who form organizations with other women. Remarkably comprehensive, it presents a counterpoint to more familiar narratives.

I really learnt a lot from this book! It is an important contribution to the debates about women’s labour, accumulation of capital, and extraction of resources from the global south.

It traces the social origins of the sexual division of labour, which Mies called 'housewifization' (not my favourite word, but it captures something about the way in which the term housewife hides women’s labour!). Layering this with the history of colonialism and the new international division of labour, Mies is able to locate the history of capitalism not only in the roots of colonialism but also in the gendered division of labour–capitalist patriarchy.

This is now a classic in feminist political economy literature.

Power in Organizations changed my life. This book was required reading for me in grad school. What I learned from this book is that there is office politics in every organization and that the company I was working for had way more politics than any one person should have to handle. Upon completion of this book (and grad school), I quit my job and traveled around the world, where it took me a year to recover from the politics that was going on all around me. I wish I read this book before I entered management. I’m sure I would have been better prepared to manage the people above me, as well as my peers.

This is a good early analysis of globalization and the enormous transformations it is reputed to have brought about. Its contributions are many, including a conceptualization of globalization that goes beyond economic exchange to include cultural, social, and political dimensions of global interactions.

Overall, Mittelman sees the immense, unsettling tensions in globalization that are likely to give rise to contestation and conflict.

The Field Study Handbook is both a guide to international field research and a beautiful work of art. Jan Chipchase comprehensively covers every possible consideration for the planning and execution of global field research, including such topics as travel logistics, lodging guidance, division of labor, and working with local guides. Jan’s deep experience from the front lines of field research comes across on every beautifully illustrated page.

In the original version of this book, Wade refutes the two extreme versions of the reasons for the dramatic successes of the East Asian Tigers, particularly Taiwan, in going from undeveloped to advanced economies, fully integrated into the global economy, within one generation.

One version is that the success was mainly due to the free market and the other that it is attributed mainly to government intervention. Instead, Wade shows that key decisions were divided between the private and public sectors in a way that produced a synergy between them.

The revised version extends the coverage to explain the booms and busts in the early 21st century and outlines his new agenda for national and international development policy.