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Books > Humanities > History > World history > 1750 to 1900
The night represents almost universally a special, liminal or "out
of the ordinary" temporal zone with its own meanings, possibilities
and dangers, and political, cultural, religious and social
implications. Only in the modern era was the night systematically
"colonised" and nocturnal activity "normalised," in terms of
(industrial) labour and production processes. Although the
globalised 24/7 economy is usually seen as the outcome of
capitalist modernisation, development and expansion starting in the
late nineteenth century, other consecutive and more recent
political and economic systems adopted perpetual production systems
as well, extending work into the night and forcing workers to work
the "night shift," normalising it as part of an alternative
non-capitalist modernity. This volume draws attention to the
extended work hours and night shift work, which have remained
underexplored in the history of labour and the social science
literature. By describing and comparing various political and
economic "regimes," it argues that, from the viewpoint of global
labour history, night labour and the spread of 24/7 production and
services should not be seen, only and exclusively, as an
epiphenomenon of capitalist production, but rather as one of the
outcomes of industrial modernity.
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