Marcel van der Linden

Tom Brass

The text comprises 24 essays which examine various forms of unfree labour and its absence or presence in various parts of the world.

The Debate Continues

Free and Unfree Labour

This volume describes the various movements and thinkers who wanted social change without state intervention. It covers cases in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. The first part discusses early egalitarian experiments and ideologies in Asia, Europe and the Islamic world, and then moves to early socialist thinkers in Britain, France, and Germany. The second part deals with the rise of the two main currents in socialist movements after 1848: anarchism in its multiple varieties, and Marxism. It also pays attention to organisational forms, including the International Working Men's Association (later called the First International); and it then follows the further development of anarchism and its 'proletarian' sibling, revolutionary syndicalism – its rise and decline from the 1870s until the 1940s on different continents. The volume concludes with critical essays on anarchist transnationalism and the recent revival of anarchism and syndicalism in several parts of the world.

The Cambridge History of Socialism

Jürgen Kocka

"Leading scholars explore the resurgence of interest in the term capitalism and debates the term's usefulness and its limits in social and economic history"--

The Reemergence of a Historical Concept

Capitalism

Global Labour History has rapidly gained ground as a field of study in the 21st century, attracting interest in the Global South and North alike. Scholars derive inspiration from the broad perspective and the effort to perceive connections between global trends over time in work and labour relations, incorporating slaves, indentured labourers and sharecroppers, housewives and domestic servants. Casting this sweeping analytical gaze, The World Wide Web of Work discusses the core concepts ‘capitalism’ and ‘workers’, and refines notions such as ‘coerced labour’, ‘household strategies’ and ‘labour markets’. It explores in new ways the connections between labourers in different parts of the world, arguing that both ‘globalisation’ and modern labour management originated in agriculture in the Global South and were only later introduced in Northern industrial settings. It reveals that 19th-century chattel slavery was frequently replaced by other forms of coerced labour, and it reconstructs the laborious 20th-century attempts of the International Labour Organisation to regulate labour standards supra-nationally. The book also pays attention to the relational inequality through which workers in wealthy countries benefit from the exploitation of those in poor countries. The final part addresses workers’ resistance and acquiescence: why collective actions often have unanticipated consequences; why and how workers sometimes organise massive flights from exploitation and oppression; and why ‘proletarian revolutions’ took place in pre-industrial or industrialising countries and never in fully developed capitalist societies.

A history in the making--

The World Wide Web of Work

The Global History of Work: Critical Readings provides an extensive reference collection which is essential for all students and scholars needing to gain a critical understanding of work and the history of work. Collating scholarly historical texts on the subject from the last 50 years and beyond from a wide range of sources, this four-volume set offers a key knowledge resource for the field. The set brings together around 60 essays and papers - from the field-shaping pieces published in the 1970s through to the landmark texts of the recent past and present - and thematically arranges in a way that highlights the crucial topics of discussion and debate in this area of study. The set obviously has a global scope and provides valuable insights into how the field was formed, how it has developed and how it will be studied in the years to come. Volume 1 explores core concepts to do with work and work history and examines definitions, perceptions and the `making of workers'. Volume 2 focuses on work sites, with an emphasis on locations, migrations and households. Volume 3 considers labour markets and includes material on unemployment, gender and ethnicity, sociability/social networks and recent trends. Volume 4 covers collective action and the importance of the politics of labour, unions and forms of resistance. Each volume includes a substantial contextualizing introduction surveying the development of the field.

Critical Readings

The Global History of Work

Jürgen Rojahn

An International Perspective

The Formation of Labour Movements, 1870-1914

Jan Breman

Ching Kwan Lee

Kevan Harris

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness: first recognized together in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, these are the focus of the Social Question. In 1942 William Beveridge called them the “giant evils” while diagnosing the crises produced by the emergence of industrial society. More recently, during the final quarter of the twentieth century, the global spread of neoliberal policies enlarged these crises so much that the Social Question has made a comeback. The Social Question in the Twenty-First Century maps out the linked crises across regions and countries and identifies the renewed and intensified Social Question as a labor issue above all. The volume includes discussions from every corner of the globe, focusing on American exceptionalism, Chinese repression, Indian exclusion, South African colonialism, democratic transitions in Eastern Europe, and other phenomena. The effects of capitalism dominating the world, the impact of the scarcity of waged work, and the degree to which the dispossessed poor bear the brunt of the crisis are all evaluated in this carefully curated volume. Both thorough and thoughtful, the book serves as collective effort to revive and reposition the Social Question, reconstructing its meaning and its politics in the world today.

A Global View

The Social Question in the Twenty-First Century

If the Soviet Union did not have a socialist society, then how should its nature be understood? The present book presents the first comprehensive appraisal of the debates on this problem, which was so central to twentieth-century Marxism.

A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates Since 1917

Western Marxism and the Soviet Union

Abram de Swaan

They still abound in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Informal Savings Funds from the Global Periphery to the Core?

Mutualist Microfinance

Work and Workers in Context

Karin Hofmeester

Coffee from East Africa, wine from California, chocolate from the Ivory Coast - all those every day products are based on labour, often produced under appalling conditions, but always involving the combination of various work processes we are often not aware of. What is the day-to-day reality for workers in various parts of the world, and how was it in the past? How do they work today, and how did they work in the past? These and many other questions comprise the field of the global history of work – a young discipline that is introduced with this handbook. In 8 thematic chapters, this book discusses these aspects of work in a global and long term perspective, paying attention to several kinds of work. Convict labour, slave and wage labour, labour migration, and workers of the textile industry, but also workers' organisation, strikes, and motivations for work are part of this first handbook of global labour history, written by the most renowned scholars of the profession.

Handbook Global History of Work

Frits L. van Holthoon

1830-1940

Internationalism in the Labour Movement

Ravi Ahuja

Anna Sailer

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.

British and German Trade-Union Reports on Labour in India (1926–1928)

"The Distress is Impossible to Convey"

The twenty-seven articles presented in this volume mark the first stage of an international research project set up after the comprehensive reorganization of the International Institute of Social History in 1987. The aim of this extensive book project is to study the development of working-class movements using comparative research in an international framework in the time-period 1870-1914. Included in this study are papers by experts on as many countries (both European and non-European) as possible with a modern labour movement: Britain, Belgium The Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, The Czech Workers' Movement in the Habsburg Empire, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, The Jewish Workers' Movement in the Russian Empire, Poland, Finland, United States of America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, and Japan.

The sixteen essays in this collection discuss the direct and indirect impact of the British Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1807) on labor relations in the Americas, Africa and South East Asia.

Marcel van der Linden

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