Introduction: 1. Not 'second-generation rights': rethinking the history of social rights Steven L. B. Jensen and Charles Walton; Part I. Religion, Markets, States: Sources of Social Rights before the Twentieth Century: 2. The rights of the poor: taking the long view Julia McClure; 3. Public welfare and the natural order: on the theological and free-market sources of socioeconomic rights Dan Edelstein; 4. Who pays? Social rights and the French revolution Charles Walton; 5. The Haitian revolution and socioeconomic rights Philip Kaisary; 6. Of rights and regulation: technologies of socioeconomic governance in a revolutionary age Stephen Sawyer and William Novak; 7. Socioeconomic rights before the welfare state: labour movements and economic emancipation in nineteenth-century Europe Nicolas Delalande; Part II. Race, Gender, Class: Social Rights and the Paradoxes of Difference: 8. The soviet social: rights and welfare reimagined Scott Newton; 9. The Japanese 'welfare society': social rights and the seeds of the precariat? Bernard Thomann; 10. Liberation theology, social rights and indigenous rights in Mexico (c1965-2000), Rosie Doyle; 11. The unhappy marriage of gender and socioeconomic rights in France Laura Frader; Part III. Social Rights in the Age of Internationalism: The Politics of State Obligations: 12. The spirit of social rights, Samuel Moyn; 13. From human welfare to human rights: considering socioeconomic rights through the 1947-1948 UNESCO human rights survey Mark Goodale; 14. Claiming land, claiming rights in Africa's internationally supervised territories Meredith Terretta; 15. The road from 1966: social and economic rights after the international covenant Christian O. Christiansen and Steven L. B. Jensen; Epilogue: 16. The present and future of social rights Philip Alston; Index.