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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. The 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 first chapter.
Selin Çağatay,
Mátyás Erdélyi,
Alexandra Ghiț,
Olga Gnydiuk,
Veronika Helfert,
Ivelina Masheva,
Zhanna Popova,
Jelena Tešija,
Eszter Varsa,
Susan Zimmermann,
26 August 2025
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Rent Strikes
A history of collective tenant actions across the world
Series: Work Around the World
Publication date: November 6, 2025
Open Access PDF ISBN: 9781800089822
Paperback ISBN: 9781800089815
Hardback ISBN: 9781800089808
Trim size (hardback): 23.4cm x 15.6cm
Trim size (paperback): 23.4cm x 15.6cm
Download free PDF online
https://uclpress.co.uk/book/rent-strikes/
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. The 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 first chapter.
‘Poy and Rolf’s book is a significant addition to the academic literature on rent strikes. Few works have analysed this activism, let alone on such a large scale, yet by studying all types of rent struggles, the volume attempts to show common factors and to make protagonists visible.’ History
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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