This edited volume brings together global interdisciplinary perspectives on work from different regions of the world, including Europe, Africa, and Asia, drawing on both historical and contemporary examples. The contributions address wide-ranging themes such as work and life cycle, work transformation, precarious work, informalization of work, labor migration, labor, conflict and labor relations. The book is timely and innovative in its theoretical, empirical and methodological scope, providing key insights for rethinking work through interrelated global, interdisciplinary, and comparative perspectives.

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.