Global Labour History is a latecomer to historical science. It has only developed in the last three decades. This anthology provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art. Prominent representatives of the discipline discuss its fundamental methodological and conceptual aspects. In addition, the volume contains field and case studies from Africa and Latin America, as well as from the Middle East and China. In these studies, the local, regional and continental constitutive processes of the working class are discussed from a global-historical perspective. The anthology has been composed as a Festschrift dedicated to Marcel van der Linden, the leading theoretician of, and networker for, Global Labour History.

The role of gender in the history of the working class world

This book is the first comprehensive account of the International Labour Organization’s 100-year history. At its heart is the concept of global social policy, which encompasses not only social policy in its national and international dimensions, but also development policy, world trade, international migration and human rights. The book focuses on the ILO’s roles as a key player in debates on poverty, social justice, wealth distribution and social mobility subjects and as a global forum for addressing these issues. The study puts in perspective the manifold ways in which the ILO has helped structure these debates and has made – through its standard-setting, technical cooperation and myriad other activities – practical contributions to the world of work and to global social policy.

Coercion and Wage Labour presents novel histories of people who experienced physical, social, political or cultural compulsion in the course of paid work. Broad in scope, the chapters examine diverse areas of work including textile production, war industries, civil service and domestic labour, in contexts from the Middle Ages to the present day. They demonstrate that wages have consistently shaped working people’s experiences, and failed to protect workers from coercion. Instead, wages emerge as versatile tools to bind, control, and exploit workers. Remuneration mirrors the distribution of power in labour relations, often separating employers physically and emotionally from their employees, and disguising coercion. The book makes historical narratives accessible for interdisciplinary audiences. Most chapters are preceded by illustrations by artists invited to visually conceptualise the book’s key messages and to emphasise the presence of the body and landscape in the realm of work. In turn, the chapter texts reflect back on the artworks, creating an intense intermedial dialogue that offers mutually relational ‘translations’ and narrations of labour coercion. Other contributions written by art scholars discuss how coercion in remunerated labour is constructed and reflected in artistic practice. The collection serves as an innovative and creative tool for teaching, and raises awareness that narrating history is always contingent on the medium chosen and its inherent constraints and possibilities. Praise for Coercion and Wage Labour Coercion and Wage Labour is a pioneering volume. It makes a well-founded break with the widespread misconception that wage labour is by definition free from coercion. The fourteen historical case studies ... lead to the conclusion that wage labourers too were subject to many forms of coercion and that usually their “freedom” was and is only relative. But something else makes this book special: throughout the text there are artistic illustrations that enter into a dialogue with the individual chapters, which in turn reflect on the images. This creates an inspiring interaction that complements the volume’s interdisciplinary nature. Marcel van der Linden, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam

Part I: Historiography Writing Global Labour History c. 1800-1940: A Historiography of Concepts, Periods, and Geographical Scope 39 Jan Lucassen African Labor History 91 Frederick Cooper Reflections on Labor and Working-Class History in the Middle East and North Africa 117 Zachary Lockman Paradigms in the Historical Approach to Labour Studies on South Asia 147 Sabyasachi Bhattacharya The History of Labor in Japan in the Twentieth Century: Cycles of Activism and Acceptance 161 Akira Suzuki Fin-de-Si6cle Labour History in Canada and the United States: A Case for Tradition 195 Bryan D. Palmer Labour in Western Europe from c. 1800 227 Dick Geary The Laboring and Middle-Class Peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean: Historical Trajectories and New Research Directions 289 John D. French What's in a Name? Labouring Antipodean History in Oceania 335 Lucy Taksa Workers, Class, and the Socialist Revolution in Modern China 373 Arif Dirlik The Drama of the Russian Working Class and New Perspectives for Labour History in Russia 397 Andrei Sokolov Part 2: Case Studies in Comparative Labour History Worldwide Agricultural Labor and Property: A Global and Comparative Perspective 455 Prasannan Parthasarathi Studying Asian Domestic Labour Within Global Processes: Comparisons and Connections 479 Ratna Saptari Brickmakers in Western Europe (17oo00-19oo) and Northern India (1800-2000): Some Comparisons 513 Jan Lucassen Global Labour History in the Twenty-First Century: Coal Mining and Its Recent Pasts 573 Ian Phimister "Nothing to Lose but a Harsh and Miserable Life Here on Earth": Dock Work as a Global Occupation, 1790-1970 591 Lex Heerma van Voss Railroad Labor and the Global Economy: Historical Patterns 623 Shelton Stromquist.

Social movements have shaped and are shaping modern societies around the globe; this is evident when we look at examples such as the Arab Spring, Spain’s Indignados and the wider Occupy movement. In this volume, experts analyse the ‘classic’ and new social movements from a uniquely global perspective and offer insights in current theoretical discussions on social mobilisation. Chapters are devoted both to the study of continental developments of social movements going back to the nineteenth century and ranging to the present day, and to an emphasis on the transnational dimension of these movements. Interdisciplinary and truly international, this book is an essential text on social movements for historians, political scientists, sociologists, philosophers and social scientists.

This volume suggests a new way of doing global history. Instead of offering a sweeping and generalizing overview of the past, we propose a ‘micro-spatial’ approach, combining micro-history with the concept of space. A focus on primary sources and awareness of the historical discontinuities and unevennesses characterizes the global history that emerges here. We use labour as our lens in this volume. The resulting micro-spatial history of labour addresses the management and recruitment of labour, its voluntary and coerced spatial mobility, its political perception and representation and the workers’ own agency and social networks. The individual chapters are written by contributors whose expertise covers the late medieval Eastern Mediterranean to present-day Sierra Leone, through early modern China and Italy, eighteenth-century Cuba and the Malvinas/Falklands, the journeys of a missionary between India and Brazil and those of Christian captives across the Ottoman empire and Spain. The result is a highly readable volume that addresses key theoretical and methodological questions in historiography. Chapter 7 is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.