Work in Global and Historical Perspective

The phenomenon of labour takes the character of a prism. Labour is thereby always context dependent and constituted through the actions of all protagonists involved in any labour relationship. On the basis of three case studies in colonial German East Africa – the construction of the Central Railway (1905–1916), the Otto Plantation in Kilossa (1907–1916) and the palaeontological Tendaguru Expedition (1909–1911) – labour and labour relations are analysed. The focus lies on hitherto neglected actors and groups of actors of labour in the colonial context of East Africa. These were especially German companies and their staff, white subaltern railway sub-contractors and labour recruiters, Indian skilled workers and (qualified) East African workers. Furthermore, all three sites of labour proved to have their individual logics and characteristics. But all of them were in tension between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’, coercion and voluntariness, machine and manual labour, skilled and unskilled labour, reproductive and wage labour, as well as between black and white.

Michael Rösser’s dissertation has been awarded with ‘honorary distinction’ by the European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH). Shortlisted for the 2025 Hedwig Hintze Prize for excellent dissertations by VHD.

The volume scrutinizes the fundamentally uneven character of industrial production and working class formation by bringing together anthropologists specializing on industrial labour in various locations from South America, Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa, and South Asia. Through their engagement with Leon Trotsky’s concept of ‘uneven and combined development’ the authors unravel the complex relations that connect (and disconnect) labour in their sites of research with workers in other places and other times. As the contributions likewise reveal, the unevenness and combination inherent in industrial developments shape and are at the same time also shaped by the different politics workers in an unequal world pursue, as well as the historical experiences and future expectations of workers that inform these. With the attention the authors pay to the specificities of ethnographic detail as well as to broader regional and global developments the volume demonstrates the value of long-term ethnographic research and is of interest to a wide audience ranging from specialists in the fields of anthropology, history, sociology and development studies to students and activists.

This book explores how workers moved and were moved, why they moved, and how they were kept from moving. Combining global labour history with mobility studies, it investigates moving workers through the lens of coercion.

The contributions in this book are based on extensive archival research and span Europe and North America over the past 500 years. They provide fresh historical perspectives on the various regimes of coercion, mobility, and immobility as constituent parts of the political economy of labour.

Moving Workers shows that all struggles relating to the mobility of workers or its restriction have the potential to reveal complex configurations of hierarchies, dependencies, and diverging conceptions of work and labour relations that continuously make and remake our world.　

This multidisciplinary volume offers unique perspectives, across the globe and throughout the centuries, on the complexity of the nexus between work and the life course. For industrialized regions, from Germany and Western Europe to China and Japan, it questions the widespread notion of an overall growing working life course instability, since the 1970s. For unindustrialized or industrializing regions, from West Africa to state socialist East Central Europe, as well as for transnational and transcontinental labour migrations, it shows the enormous influence of the extended family and wider kin on individual pathways into and out of work. For early modern Europe, India, and China, and up to twentieth-century state socialism and to current welfare states, it stresses and concretizes the crucial impact of age and gender for both societal labour relations and individual work-related decision making. With all chapters based on original research, the volume reflects a close cooperation between historians, anthropologists, and sociologists. Its multidisciplinary approach finds expression in its methodological plurality, reaching from archival research and sophisticated statistical analyses to biographical interviews and participant observation. This mix allows to grasp the interaction between societal change and individual agency.

This book is the first to connect global labor history and the history of human rights: By focusing on democratic labor oppositions in Spain and Poland between 1960 and 1990, it shows how workers in authoritarian regimes addressed repression and whether they developed a language of rights in the light of a globally dynamic human rights discourse.

The study argues that the democratic labor oppositions in Spain and Poland were both variants of emancipatory and democracy-oriented social movements with global interconnections that emerged in the 1960s. It reveals that the demands for free and independent trade unions, which in both countries became a flashpoint in the fight for broader democratic demands, was not always discussed in rights terms, but rather presented as an inevitable necessity. At the same time, these labor movements and their intellectual allies morally delegitimized state repression against workers and thereby employed the concepts of democracy, participation, solidarity, progress and eventually, rights.

Integrating the history of two European semi-peripheric societies into a broader narrative, this book is relevant for readers interested in global labor history, human rights history and the history of democratization in Europe in the late twentieth century.

Between working men and women (which may include “free” wage earners, chattel slaves, indentured labourers, sharecroppers, domestic servants, and many others) and those employing them, there has always been a constant – mostly silent but sometimes overt – struggle concerning employers’ discretionary power and over the interpretation of formal and informal rules. There is a constantly shifting frontier of control, that is, an ongoing struggle for control in the workplace, with managers and supervisors trying to increase their power over their subordinates, and their subordinates, in reaction, trying to maintain and increase their relative autonomy. The detailed case studies in this volume span three centuries and cover different parts of the world. Still, they speak to each other in many ways, highlighting the fact that power at work, whether on the shopfloor or beyond, results from a wide range of complex interrelations. Between technological innovations and the ways in which they are actually implemented. Between the division of labour at the site of production or service provision and changing standards of social segmentation beyond the premises of the company, which can be reinforced – or weakened – by management strategies of utilizing labour power as well as workers’ reaction to these strategies. And finally, between politics in production, which shape the relations between capital and labour on the shopfloor, and state politics of production, which cannot be understood without reference to broader developments in economy and society.

This study analyzes the establishment of an iron foundry in the interior 18^th-century of Angola. It was a fruit of the Portuguese Enlightenment, which encouraged investment in manufacturing, particularly of iron, a metal indispensable for military and technological purposes. However, the plans faced the resistance of African blacksmiths and founders who refused to learn foreign techniques and work processes. By emphasizing Central African agency, the book highlights the successful strategies of historical actors who scholars have largely ignored.

Based upon a wide variety of sources from Brazilian, Portuguese, and Angolan archives, the book reconstructs how Africans were taken to work at the foundry and the important role they played in developing the form of production employed there. By emphasizing continuities with African technology and the quality of the iron produced, it counters interpretations of the project as an example of the failure of the Portuguese Enlightenment.

The analysis demonstrates the circulation of knowledge about iron production, thus revitalizing debates that have posited knowledge transmission as unidirectional. It also highlights the relationship between local political leaders and the colonial government, in addition to elucidating the processes by which workers were organized.

Touts is a historical account of the troubled formation of a colonial labor market in the Gulf of Guinea and a major contribution to the historiography of indentured labor, which has relatively few reference points in Africa. The setting is West Africa’s largest island, Fernando Po or Bioko in today’s Equatorial Guinea, 100 kilometers off the coast of Nigeria. The Spanish ruled this often-ignored island from the mid-nineteenth century until 1968. A booming plantation economy led to the arrival of several hundred thousand West African, principally Nigerian, contract workers on steamships and canoes. In Touts, Enrique Martino traces the confusing transition from slavery to other labor regimes, paying particular attention to the labor brokers and their financial, logistical, and clandestine techniques for bringing workers to the island.

Martino combines multi-sited archival research with the concept of touts as "lumpen-brokers" to offer a detailed study of how commercial labor relations could develop, shift and collapse through the recruiters’ own techniques, such as large wage advances and elaborate deceptions. The result is a pathbreaking reconnection of labor mobility, contract law, informal credit structures and exchange practices in African history.

This book reflects the development of Latin American labour history across broad geographical, chronological and thematic perspectives, which seek to review and revisit key concepts at different levels. The contributions are closely linked to the most recent trends in Global Labour History and in turn, they enrich those trends.　

Here, authors from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Spain take a historical and sociological perspective and analyse a series of problems relating to labour relations. The chapters weave together different periods of Latin American colonial and republican history　from the vice-royalties of New Spain (now Mexico) and Peru, the　Royal　Audiencia de Charcas　(now Bolivia), Argentina and Uruguay (former vice-royalty of Río de La Plata) and Chile (former　Capitanía General).

Since the 1960s, many influential Latin Americans, such as the leaders of student movements and unions, and political authorities, participated in exchange programs with the United States to learn about the American way of life. In Brazil, during the international context of the Cold War, when Brazil was governed by a military dictatorship ruled by generals who alternated in power, hundreds of union members were sent to the United States to take union education courses. Did they come back “Americanized” and able to introduce American trade unionism in Brazil? That is the question this book seeks to answer. It is a subject that is as yet little explored in the history of Latin American labor and international relations: the influence of foreign union organizations on national union politics and movements. Despite the US’s investment in advertising, courses, films and trips offered to Brazilian union members, most of them were not convinced by the American ideas on how to organize an “authentic” union movement – or, at least, not committed to applying what they learned in the States.

This book provides a global perspective on the transformations in the world of work caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The collection of essays will break down the general statistics and trends into glimpses of concrete experiences of workers during pandemic, of workplaces transformed or destroyed, of workers protesting against political measures, of professions particularly exposed to the coronavirus, and also of the changing nature of some professions.

Asian industrial competition, from Japan, China but also India, attracted greater public attention in Europe during the inter-war period than ever before. Indian industrial employment became the subject not only of extensive official enquiries, intensified legislation, a growing number of academic studies and of more popular writings, but also of debates within and between European trade unions.

This book investigates the phenomenon of slavery and other forms of servitude experienced by people of African or indigenous origin who were taken captive and then subjected to forced labor in Charcas (Bolivia) in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Founded in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles as part of the League of Nations’ system, the ILO is still today the main organization responsible for the international organization of work and the improvement of working conditions in the world. Widely recognized for its efforts in building international labour standards, the ILO remains little studied by development specialists and historians. This book intends to fill this gap and traces the history of international development and its early pioneers, through an analysis of the activities of the International Labour Office, the Secretariat of the International Labour Organization, between 1930 and 1946. In this book, development is used as a key to questioning the ILO's place and function in the expanding inter-war world. The development practices and discourses that emerged in the 1930s were mainly intended to support the ILO's universalization strategy, which was made necessary by the events that shook Europe at the time. Development discourses and practices were also part of the "esprit du temps", as they were closely linked to the affirmation of the planist and rationalist ideas of the 1930s. However, development for the ILO was not reduced to a project of economic modernization, but was seen as a tool for social engineering, as evidenced by the ILO's missions of technical assistance, organized since 1930. The analysis of the expertise work makes it possible to highlight the logics that prevailed in technical assistance, which was more in line with institutional objectives, than with the dissemination of a genuine expertise. This book therefore hopes to bring new insight on the history of internationalism, and international organizations during the inter-war period and the Second World War, as well as on the role of the ILO in the history of international development thinking and practices.

In Enduring Change, Ju Li explores the concrete labor and social history of one particular Third-Front industrial complex in China from the 1960s to the globalized present. By connecting the micro-historical-ethnographic research with larger structural dynamics, Li provides a vivid, in-depth, and multi-layered account of how the transformative history of the past half-century has manifested itself in this small industrial site and how several generations of workers there have lived through these turbulences.

Law and justice are studied in this book from the perspective of social and
global history. The main focus of Workers Before the Tribunal is to
overcome traditional binary oppositions between corporativist and
contratualist models of labor relations, the former representing a view in
which the working class would have more autonomy in struggling for better
labor conditions, the latter meaning the protagonism of the State in
promoting labor rights.

Teixeira da Silva presents three main arguments.

First, he shows that the Brazilian labor justice system created during the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship (1930-1945), although inspired by Mussolini's legal
order in Italy, is very different from the Fascist Magistratura del Lavoro.

Second, in his comparative analysis with other national cases, such as the
United States, France, Germany and Australia, the author argues that there
was a large circulation of ideas and practices, resulting in a more complex
dynamic of appropriation of international ideas on labor rights and
institutions in Brazil.

Third, Teixeira da Silva demonstrates that litigation in labor courts was one strategy of the working-class movement in Brazil, together with strikes and other means of confrontation. Therefore, he questions historiographical and political
approaches that see labor justice as a weak substitute for class
action. The "jurisdictionalization" of labor relations became a
constitutive element in the making of the Brazilian working class.

The book is anchored in the research of hundreds of labor litigation cases during the dramatic months preceding the 1964 civil-military coup d’état that inaugurated a quarter century of dictatorial rule in Brazil.

Houses and homes are dynamic spaces within which people work to organize and secure their lives, livelihoods and relationships. Written by a team of renowned historians and anthropologists, and and accompanied by original photography by Maurice Weiss, To Be at Home: House,Work, and Self in the Modern World compares the ways people in different societies and historical periods strive to make and keep houses and homes under conditions of change, upheaval, displacement, impoverishment and violence. These conditions speak to the challenges of life in our modern world. The contributors of this volume position the home as a new nodal point between work, the self and the world to explore people’s creativity, agency and labour. Houses and homes prove complex and powerful concepts – if also often elusive – invoking places, persons, objects, emotions, values, attachments and fantasies. This book demonstrates how the relations between houses, work and the self have transformed dramatically and unpredictably under conditions of capitalism and modernity – and continue to change today.

Products of war rather than revolution, the socialist regimes of Eastern Europe emerged in a global conjuncture defined by the aftermath of the Second World War. How did these regimes manage to overcome the domestic impact of the war and build socialism at the same time? This book shows how a commitment to productivity structured the transition from the period of postwar reconstruction to the take-off of industrial development during the late 1950s. Conceived as (1) pacification of labor relations, (2) the recovery of managerial authority, (3) monetarization of everyday life, (4) rationalization and (5) austerity, the politics of productivity provides a comprehensive conceptual framework for grasping together the end of the postwar period and the building of state socialism in Eastern Europe. By revealing how the social consequences of the Second World War were absorbed in the transition to authoritarian state socialism in the age of the rolling steel mill, this book carries implications for the way in which we may think about the aftermath of wars, reconstruction and development during the second half of the twentieth century.

All work is free work – or is it?

Rooted in the historical and theoretical debates over the status of labor, this volume analyzes the relationship between free and forced work, migration, and the role that states play in producing un-freedom. With contributions among others from Stephen Castles, Cindy Hahamovitch, Vincent Houben and William G. Martin, the book explores constrained labor forms across the world from the mid-19^th century to today.

“Coolie” is a generic category for the “unskilled” manual labour. The offering of services for hire had various pre-colonial lineages. In the nineteenth century there was an attempt to recast the term in discursive constructions and material practices for “mobilized-immobilized” labour. Coolie labour was often proclaimed as a deliberate compromise straddling the regimes of the past (slave labour) and the future (free labour). It was portrayed as a stage in a promised transition. The tea plantations of Assam, like many other tropical plantations in South Asia, were inaugurated and formalized during this period. They were initially worked by the locals. In the late 1850s, the locals were replaced by labourers imported from outside the province who were unquestioningly designated “coolies” in the historical literature. Qualifying this framework of transition (local to coolie labour) and introduction (of coolie labour), this study makes a case for the “production” of coolie labour in the history of the colonial-capitalist plantations in Assam. The intention of the research is not to suggest an unfettered agency of colonial-capitalism in defining and “producing” coolies, with an emphasis on the attendant contingencies, negotiations, contestations and crises. The study intervenes in the narratives of an abrupt appearance of the archetypical coolie of the tea gardens (i.e., imported and indentured) and situates this archetype’s emergence, sustenance and shifts in the context of material and discursive processes.

Global Histories of Work is the first title in the new series "Work in Global and Historical Perspective". This collection of selected articles written by leading scholars in different disciplines provides both an introduction and numerous insights into themes, debates and methods of Global Labour History as they have been developed over the last years. The contributions to the volume discuss crucial historiographical developments; present different professions that have gained new attention in the context of an emerging Global Labour History; critically engage the boundaries of "free" labour and the ambiguities contained in this concept; and take up and historicize current debates about "informal labour". Global Histories of Work will familiarize readers with a burgeoning fi eld of high academic, social, and political relevance.