We are delighted to welcome presenters and attendees to Oxford for the Labour in History & Economics Conference. We have organized the conference to bring together labour historians, economic historians, and labour economists, to share research, and to encourage connections that will produce valuable collaborations in the future. We hope that you will help us in ensuring that the conference is an inclusive and constructive forum for all scholars presenting and attending.

Presentations will be twenty minutes followed by ten minutes of questions, and we ask that all attendees hold questions for the designated Q&A period as indicated by the panel chair. In order to ensure feedback from many perspectives, we ask that you keep questions during the Q&A period brief, but please feel free to follow up with further comments to presenters during our lunch and coffee breaks. Presenters and attendees who have booked dinner as part of their registration are also welcome to join for the drinks reception and dinner in hall following the first day of the conference. All attendees are welcome to continue conversations in the King’s Arms pub in the afternoon on the second day of the conference.

Our two keynote speakers are Professor Fabrice Bensimon and Professor Jill Rubery, whose work encompasses the breadth of qualitative and quantitative labour research that we are delighted to showcase at this conference. We are very grateful to Professor Bensimon and Professor Rubery for what promise to be two very interesting keynote lectures. We would also like to thank Professor Jane Humphries and Dr Eric Schneider for leading our concluding roundtable on the relationship between history and economics.

We are very pleased that All Souls College, Oxford is the venue for the conference, and we are grateful to Professor Jane Humphries and the Academic Purposes Committee of All Souls for their generous support. All Souls is a historic, medieval site and we encourage you to enjoy these magnificent surroundings and take care on the steep staircases and uneven pavements of the college.