This collection of seventeen essays takes its inspiration from the scholarly achievements of the Dutch historian Jan Lucassen. They reflect a central theme in his research: the history of labor. The essays deal with five major themes: the production of specific commodities or services (diamonds, indigo, cigarettes, mail delivery by road runners); occupational groups (informal street vendors, prostitutes, soldiers, white-collar workers in the Dutch East India Company, VOC); geographical and social mobility (career opportunities on non-Dutch officers in the VOC, immigration into early-modern Holland; the influence of migrants on labor productivity; income differentials as migration incentives); contexts of labor relations (late medieval labor laws, subsistence labor and female paid labor, Russian peasant-migrant laborers, diverging political trajectories of cane-sugar industries); and the origins of labor-history libraries and archives.

Critically examines the usefulness of the 'household; concept within the historically and culturally diverse context of Indonesia, exploring in detail the position of women within and beyond domestic arrangements. So far, classical household and kinship studies have not studied how women deal with two major forces which shape and define their world: local kinship traditions, and the universalising ideology of the Indonesian regime, which both provide prescriptions and prohibitions concerning family, marriage, and womanhood. Women are caught between these conflicting notions and practices. How they challenge or accommodate such forces is the main issue in this book.

In seeking to provoke debate, the book reveals the variety of experiences evident in countries and regions marked by capitalist and (post) socialist regulatory frameworks, and contrasting labour regimes, histories and cultures. The contributions show the importance of critically examining both the complex nature of global-local links and the particular ways economic processes are around the themes of labour regimes, labour processes, labour mobility and labour communities, the essays show how economic development is not only shaped by market forces but is also interlocked in systems of meaning.

Given the transformations taking place in many parts of Southeast Asia, the question of labor remains as pertinent today as it ever has been. Labor issues are central to the social tensions marking the transformations taking place in both rural and urban areas, and underscore the myriad ways people have responded to economic and political crisis. In seeking to understand the multiple and specific dimensions of labor across a range of time-frames (colonial and contemporary), economic sectors, labor processes and community contexts. In seeking to provoke debate, the book reveals the variety of experiences evident in countries and regions marked by capitalist and (post) socialist regulatory frameworks, and contrasting labor regimes, histories and cultures. The contributions show the importance of critically examining both the complex nature of global-local links and the particular ways economic processes are around the themes of labor regimes, labor processes, labor mobility and labor communities, the essays show how economic development is not only shaped by market forces but is also interlocked in systems of meaning.

Explores in detail the position of women within and beyond domestic arrangements, and looks at the way in which women's agency finds different formats and functions at different levels. Topics include dominant ideologies, spatial mobility, and dichotomies between workplace and home.