Labouring Lives
Subtitle: Work and Workers in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Ontario Historical Studies Series)
Contributors: Ontario (Corporate Author); Paul Craven (Editor)
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: August 1995
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 622
ISBN-13: 9780802006417
Subjects: Economic history; Labour economics; Social history; Minority Studies - General; History Of Labor; Sociology; Working class; History: World; Ontario; History; 19th century; Labor; Social life and customs
Description: For twenty years, labour and working-class history has emphasized the struggle for workplace control between skilled craftsmen and factory owners in Ontario's major industrial cities. This preoccupation not only has left the great majority of the province's working people in the shadows of history, but has isolated labour history from such other 'new histories' as women's history, ethnic history, and the history of mobility.

This collaborative volume argues for a more nuanced account of the diversity of working people's experience in the nineteenth century. It presents detailed studies of a broad range of occupations and institutions that figured prominently in workers' lives. These include the more common jobs - farm labour, housework, lumbering - and the more pervasive institutions - the church, the law, the family - as well as new accounts of industrial labour in small-town factories and on the railways.

The themes explored include class formation, the nature and meaning of work, labour relations, and the character of economic and social change in nineteenth-century Ontario.