Historical and present-day child labour: is there a gap or a bridge between them?

This article suggests that analyses of child labour today should take as th eir point of comparison poorer nineteenth-century continental European coun tries, rather than the more commonly cited analogy of industrializing Brita in. Two aspects of comparison between the nineteenth-century Finnish experi ence and today's developing economies are especially relevant. The first is the role of foreign investors in introducing industrial child labour in th e early stages of industrialization. The second is labour migration, and pa rticularly that of children. Industrial child labour in nineteenth-century Finland, and labour migration from Finland to St Petersburg, serve as empir ical case studies. Finally, the author suggests that new apologies for indu strial child labour in the past can be linked with the late-twentieth-centu ry expansion of child labour.