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This doctoral thesis examines the impact of innovation on jobs using the first historical index of job quality and international comparative case studies of sectors in Great Britain and the United States. It makes four principal contributions. First, it constructs a new indicator of living standards that measures work-related wellbeing in the past. Second, it shows that macroinventions increased the division of labor and thereby raised the inequality of work-related wellbeing. Third, it demonstrates that firms' push to reduce unit labor costs produced a race between job quality and productivity. Managers adopted microinventions that could have reduced work intensity or improved safety, but to raise productivity they demanded higher effort levels and increased throughput, which mitigated improvements to safety and conditions. Fourth, it shows that some instances of technological change produced widespread unemployment and provided opportunities to reorganize the workforce. Higher-status workers used the dislocation of innovation to claim or retain the best jobs. These findings contribute to historical scholarship on the development of living standards and provide perspective for debates about job polarization and the future of work.

A comparative study of nineteen Oxford colleges, this thesis offers a novel contribution to the historiography of the University of Oxford: a history of the university 'from below'. From the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, colleges experimented with a variety of solutions to problems common to many employers. Labour contracts are compared across colleges to consider the role of wage forms and methods of pay in the management of college servants. Colleges and servants relied on family labour networks to mitigate the risks of uncertainty. These networks became particularly important after 1868, when the university began licensing lodging houses for undergraduates, and college servants and their families provided a trustworthy source of labour. Colleges were early adopters of contributory pension schemes. By the late nineteenth century, the employment contract reflected a fundamental shift in the apportionment of responsibility for managing the financial risk associated with death, illness, and most importantly, old age. Beginning with contributory savings schemes for the purchase of life insurance in the mid-nineteenth century, colleges experimented with a variety of strategies for managing the cost of servants' retirement and by the 1920s, all colleges but two had contributory pension schemes. Contradicting longstanding characterizations of these workers, I find evidence of trade union activity among college servants in the early twentieth century that resulted in wage increases for many of these workers.

This thesis centres on international women migrants in London: how they crossed borders, navigated foreign spaces and experienced social and behavioural boundaries. Their stories are told through the lens of their economic status as domestic servants, by far the largest occupation absorbing women of all nationalities in London at this time. Accessing accounts of servant experiences has traditionally been perceived as challenging, yet as ‘aliens’ the women become more visible, both in society and in the records. What were the implications and consequences (positive or otherwise) of being foreign, female and employed in service during the period 1881–1939? And to what extent were they able to advantage of their otherness? The thesis draws on an historical migration approach proposed by Pooley and Whyte in which both structural and individual evidence is bound together to offer new insights into both the system and the individuals it shaped. Using unique quantitative and qualitative sources permits an entirely new understanding of the female migrant experience, challenging our view of the male-only pioneering migrant, of foreign servants as luxury accessories and servants as young people engaged for short periods in a lifecycle occupation. In a bid to reverse the tendency in scholarship to represent female migrant labour as ‘victim’, the thesis incorporates servants’ experiences before, during and after domestic employment, that links London sculleries and suburban parlours with transnational migration.