Rent Strikes
A history of collective tenant actions across the world
Lucas Poy (Editor), Hannes Rolf (Editor)
Series: Work Around the World
Since the nineteenth century, working-class families have predominantly relied on tenements for housing, with rents often consuming a large portion of their household budgets. There is a long and contested history of tenants taking collective action across time and in many contexts, including their involvement in rent strikes, but international comparisons have been scarce. Rent Strikes: A history of collective tenant actions across the world is a collaborative effort by 16 contributors from diverse countries to identify common patterns and global trajectories in the rich history of tenants’ strikes, spanning a period of almost 120 years from the early twentieth century to the COVID-19 pandemic. It brings together local, national and comparative case studies to illustrate the history of tenant mobilisation for the general public, connecting with existing scholarship and laying the groundwork for future research. Adopting a transnational perspective, it examines episodes of tenant struggles in North and Latin America, Northern and Southern Europe, and Oceania. In doing so, the book explores a range of actions, including petitions, demonstrations, boycotts and legal actions, and has a special focus on the part played by women in these movements. All contributors examine the role of ethnic, national and gender differences between tenants and landlords, while situating their studies within a broader historical context and addressing the larger questions posed in the introduction.
List of contributors
1 Rent contention throughout history and across borders
Lucas Poy and Hannes Rolf
2 Rent strikes, tenant organising and the cultural politics of inflation in the post-World War I United States
Mark W. Robbins
3 Shop strike! Rent control, moral economy and tenants’ mobilisation in Athens, 1914-1936
Nikos Potamianos
4 Women’s activism, trade union hesitancy and state repression in the 1907 tenant strike in Buenos Aires
Lucas Poy and Alejandro Belkin
5 The left, the labour movement and Afro-Caribbean migrants in the Panama tenant strikes of 1925 and 1932 Jacob A. Zumoff
6 The Swedish rent model: collective bargaining and the institutionalisation of rent struggle in post-war Sweden
Hannes Rolf
7 ‘Autogestion des luttes’: immigrant rent strikes in France, 1975–1980
Nathan Crompton
8 The Leiden rent strikes of the 1970s: national politics, Middletown Maoism and the rise of the Socialist Party in the Netherlands
Bart van der Steen
9 West Berlin’s tenant movement and the crisis of the Fordist city in the 1970s
Lisa Vollmer
10 Women’s experiences of fight for housing in Harlem and Magliana through autobiographical narratives
Giulia Novaro and Eugenia Crosetti
11 ‘Watch out sharks!’ Mobilisations against the rental market in the favelas of Belo Horizonte (Brazil) in the early 1960s
Samuel Oliveira and Philippe Urvoy
12 A century of renter activism in Aotearoa New Zealand
Elinor Chisholm
13 Lockdown tenants: household resistance against rentier capital during the 2020 rent strike in Spain
Marta Ill-Raga and Jordi Bonshoms-Guzman
14 Conclusion
Lucas Poy and Hannes Rolf
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800089822
Publication date: 01 November 2025
PDF ISBN: 9781800089822
EPUB ISBN: 9781800089839
Hardback ISBN: 9781800089808
Paperback ISBN: 9781800089815
Lucas Poy (Editor) 
Lucas Poy is a social and labour historian specializing in the history of social democracy and the labour movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is an Assistant Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and a fellow at the International Institute of Social History.
Hannes Rolf (Editor)
Hannes Rolf is an urban, social and labour historian specializing in the history of the labour and cooperative movements and the history of housing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is an assistant professor at the Institute of Urban History, Department of History, Stockholm University.
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