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.

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.

With the onset of a more conservative political climate in the 1980s, social and especially labour history saw a decline in the popularity that they had enjoyed throughout the 1960s and 1970s. This led to much debate on its future and function within the historical discipline as a whole. Some critics declared it dead altogether. Others have proposed a change of direction and a more or less exclusive focus on images and texts. The most constructive proposals have suggested that labour history in the past concentrated too much on class and that other identities of working people should be taken into account to a larger extent than they had been previously, such as gender, religion, and ethnicity. Although class as a social category is still as valid as it has been before, the questions now to be asked are to what extent non-class identities shape working people's lives and mentalities and how these are linked with the class system. In this volume some of the leading European historians of labour and the working classes address these questions. Two non-European scholars comment on their findings from an Indian, resp. American, point of view. The volume is rounded off by a most useful bibliography of recent studies in European labour history, class, gender, religion, and ethnicity.

Following World War II, the AFL-CIO pursued an ambitious international agenda. To its leaders, the imperatives of saving Western Europe from Stalinism, rolling back Soviet gains in Eastern Europe, containing Communism around the world, throwing off the shackles of colonialism, and overcoming "uneven development" justified extraordinary measures. They sought to protect international labor while fostering American-style "business unionism," which used collective bargaining and strikes to capture a greater share of the capitalist system's economic pie. At the same time, they believed that thwarting Communist designs on local organizations was a prerequisite to cultivating free labor movements and creating prosperity for the world's workers - and battling Communism often meant working in conjunction with the US government, including even the Central Intelligence Agency. This sweeping state-of-the-field collection brings together contributions from leading diplomatic, labor, and transnational historians to explore and assess the AFL-CIO's successes, challenges, and inevitable compromises as it pursued these varied initiatives during the Cold War era.

Capitalism has been a controversial concept. In the second half of the 20th century, many historians have either not used the concept at all, or only in passing. Many regarded the term as too broad, holistic and vague or too value-loaded, ideological and polemic. This volume brings together leading scholars to explore why the term has recently experienced a comeback and assess how useful the term can be in application to social and economic history. The contributors discuss whether and how the history of capitalism enables us to ask new questions, further explore unexhausted sources and discover new connections between previously unrelated phenomena. The chapters address case studies drawn from around the world, giving attention to Europe, Africa and beyond. This is a timely reassessment of a crucial concept, which will be of great interest to scholars and students of economic history.

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.

Capitalism has proven much more resilient than Marx anticipated, and the working class has hardly lived up to his hopes. What might a critique of the political economy of labour look like that critically reviews the experiences of the past 500 years while moving beyond Eurocentrism? In Beyond Marx, 22 authors offer their thoughts on this question, both from a historical and theoretical perspective.

With the onset of a more conservative political climate in the 1980s, social and especially labour history saw a decline in the popularity that they had enjoyed throughout the 1960s and 1970s. This led to much debate on its future and function within the historical discipline as a whole. Some critics declared it dead altogether. Others have proposed a change of direction and a more or less exclusive focus on images and texts. The most constructive proposals have suggested that labour history in the past concentrated too much on class and that other identities of working people should be taken into account to a larger extent than they had been previously, such as gender, religion, and ethnicity. Although class as a social category is still as valid as it has been before, the questions now to be asked are to what extent non-class identities shape working people's lives and mentalities and how these are linked with the class system. In this volume some of the leading European historians of labour and the working classes address these questions. Two non-European scholars comment on their findings from an Indian, resp. American, point of view. The volume is rounded off by a most useful bibliography of recent studies in European labour history, class, gender, religion, and ethnicity.

There has been a growing recognition amongst scholars that labour historians need to look beyond national borders in order to place the history of the working classes into a much broader context than has hitherto been the case. Whilst studies focused on individual countries are essential, it is only by comparing and contrasting the experiences across time and space that a true understanding of the subject can be attempted. Professor Marcel van der Linden, has contributed much to the debate on cross-border processes and comparisons. This volume makes available in English a collection of twelve of his most important essays on the theme of transnational labour history. Previously published in a range of journals and volumes, with two original contributions, Transnational Labour History brings them together in a single convenient collection, together with a new introduction. This work will undoubtedly provide an invaluable resource for all students of European labour history.

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. The Global History of Work: Critical Readings is a major scholarly reference work for all researchers interested in the history of work.

Divided into two volumes, The Cambridge History of Socialism offers an up-to-date critical survey of the socialist movements and political practices that have arisen thus far throughout the world. A much-needed corrective of the current state of the study of socialism from a historical perspective, the volumes use a wider geographical and temporal focus to track the changes and trends in global socialisms and to move beyond the European trajectory. Together they cover anarchism, syndicalism, social democracy, labour, the New Left, and alternative socialist movements in the Global South in one encompassing reconstruction. Featuring 55 essays by experts across the field, the volumes will serve as examples of the rich variety of socialist histories and, together, endeavour to reveal the major contours of its development.

"The amount of sources the author has studied is staggering . . . the book has] an encyclopedic value and is] accessible to all scholars interested in political history."--Martin Kragh, Stockholm School of Economics

"Since the Russian experience is still used to vilify the idea of socialism, the debate remains relevant. Van der Linden . . . has now produced a comprehensive scholarly account of the arguments."--Ian Birchall, London Socialist Historians Group

The "Russian Question" was an absolutely central problem for Marxism in the twentieth century. Numerous attempts were made to understand the nature of Soviet society. Here Marcel van der Linden describes the development of these theoretical contributions since 1917.

Marcel van der Linden is research director of the International Institute of Social History and professor in the History of Social Movements at the University of Amsterdam.

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.

After World War II, the AFL-CIO pursued an ambitious agenda of containing global communism and helping to throw off the shackles of colonialism. This sweeping collection brings together contributions from leading historians to explore its successes, challenges, and inevitable compromises as it pursued these initiatives during the Cold War.

Marriage choice plays a crucial role in the formation and decay of social classes. Endogamy, the custom forbidding marriage outside one"s social class, is thus central to social history. The study considers the factors determining who married whom, whether partner selection has changed over time and regional differences between Europe and South America. The volume also questions to what extent these factors have changed over the past three hundred years. The case studies presented are preceded by a state-of-the-art theoretical introduction on the determinants influencing trends in social endogamy. Each contributor has employed the same social-class scheme and thus the volume is the first comparative study of social endogamy in an historical context.

August Sartorius von Waltershausen (1852-1938) was an eminent German economist who visited the United States at the beginning of the 1880s and wrote a series of articles on the US labor movement, which were published in Germany. His training in the historical school of economics provided him with a different perspective from that of laissez-faire economists or socialists of his time. The articles are translated in this book, and presented with a biographical essay by Marcel van der Linden and Gregory Zieren and with an essay on his contribution to the writing of American labor history by David Montgomery. This book provides rich insights into the character of American workers' organizations as they recovered from the depression of the 1870s, before the establishment of strong national institutions.

What are the consequences of de-industrialization for working-class families and their communities? How does it affect working-class culture, trade unions traditional labor parties, and the regional social, educational and cultural infrastructure? Are gender relations changed by de-industrialization? These essays cover a broad range of topics relevant to the study of industrial devolution.

During the two decades prior to publication of this book, sociologists had developed a range of new research methods that could be of much use to social historians. This 1999 collection of essays introduces some of the most interesting of these methods: event structure analysis, words-to-numbers, network analysis, qualitative comparative analysis, fuzzy logic, and recursive regression. All essays are written by outstanding experts, address non-initiated readers and use as little jargon as possible. Methods are explained through the use of historical case studies; annotated topical bibliographies have been added.

August Sartorius von Waltershausen (1852-1938) was an eminent German economist who visited the United States at the beginning of the 1880s and wrote a series of articles on the US labour movement, which were published in Germany. His training in the historical school of economics provided him with a different perspective from that of laissez-faire economists or socialists of his time. The articles are translated in this book, and presented with a biographical essay by Marcel van der Linden and Gregory Zieren, and with an essay on his contribution to the writing of American labor history by David Montgomery. This book provides rich insights into the character of American workers' organizations as they recovered from the depression of the 1870s, before the establishment of strong national institutions.

This volume takes an alternative look at the notion of 'wage-workers'. The contributors suggest that the idea of a 'pure' working class should be reconsidered and examine specific South Asian and Latin American case studies. A large part of the working class in the so-called third world and also in the main capitalist countries is either free (but coerced through non-economic means) or does hidden work labor e.g. as formally self-employed producers. By rethinking the fundamental assumptions of 'classical' labor and working-class history, the volume contributes to the development of a non-Eurocentric historiography.

The view that labour history is now unredeemably marginalized is a prevailing one. This collection of essays is a scholarly attempt to integrate labour history within the broader discipline of social history and to demonstrate the continuing vitality and validity of the sub-discipline. Each essay is in itself a response to criticisms of the ways in which labour historians have approached their subjects whether the environment, household or everyday life, entrepreneurship, race and gender as well as being a case study of interest to social historians.

For almost 150 years, scholars have been debating how to interpret Marx's seminal work Capital while they had access to just some of Marx's economic manuscripts. This changed in 2013 with the publication of all the known economic writings of Marx and Engels in the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). One can now reconstruct the lines of intellectual development, and one can also explore in detail how Friedrich Engels went about compiling volumes II and III of Capital from the vast legacy of manuscripts that Marx left behind after his death in 1883. It should be possible, now, to develop a more comprehensive and accurate picture of Marx as an economic theoretician. This volume of essays aims to initiate this process. Contributors are: Christopher J. Arthur, Matthias Bohlender, Timm Grassmann, Jorge Grespan, Gerald Hubmann, Heinz D. Kurz, Marcel van der Linden, Kenji Mori, Fred Moseley, Lucia Pradella, Geert Reuten, Regina Roth, and Carl-Erich Vollgraf.

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.