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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 study analyzes the establishment of an iron foundry in the interior 18th-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.

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 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.

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.

Law and justice are studied in this book from the perspective of social andglobal history. The main focus of Workers Before the Tribunal is toovercome traditional binary oppositions between corporativist andcontratualist models of labor relations, the former representing a view inwhich the working class would have more autonomy in struggling for betterlabor conditions, the latter meaning the protagonism of the State inpromoting 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 legalorder in Italy, is very different from the Fascist Magistratura del Lavoro. Second, in his comparative analysis with other national cases, such as theUnited States, France, Germany and Australia, the author argues that therewas a large circulation of ideas and practices, resulting in a more complexdynamic of appropriation of international ideas on labor rights andinstitutions 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 politicalapproaches that see labor justice as a weak substitute for classaction. The "jurisdictionalization" of labor relations became aconstitutive 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.

This book series is interested in tracing at the example of work the historical connections between regions and in critically engaging with the idea of the North Atlantic World as ¿normal¿ and the rest as ¿exceptional¿ and ¿in need of explanation¿. Books to be published in the series should address the history of commodified labor and investigate one or more of its many forms on a global scale: wage labor, but also serfdom and slavery, self-employed, domestic and ¿reproductive¿ labor and the various forms of subsistence and cooperative labor - paid and unpaid work beyond wage labor that constantly has been made invisible. These various labor forms need to be studied both in their specifities and as elements in a linked history of labor. The history and current situation of Africa offer rich examples for. If one of the virtues of labor history in recent decades has been its microhistorical focus on workers and work in relation to the range of social processes in a particular milieu, this series mainly attempts to look beyond both locality and region toward wider spatial relationships. The aim is to publish studies that change focus back and forth from the intimacy and complexity of relationships in specific places and their connections to distant places and long-term processes of change. Advisory Board: ¿ Marcel van der Linden (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam) ¿ Sandrine Kott (University of Geneva) ¿ Ravi Ahuja (University of Göttingen) ¿ Susan Zimmermann (Central European University Budapest) ¿ Prabhu Mohapatra (University of Delhi) ¿ Marsha Siefert (Central European University Budapest) ¿ Kim Priemel (University of Oslo) If you want to submit your manuscript, please contact rabea.rittgerodt@degruyter.com

"e;Coolie"e; is a generic category for the "e;unskilled"e; 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 "e;mobilized-immobilized"e; 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 "e;coolies"e; 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 "e;production"e; 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 "e;producing"e; 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.

First title of the new series Work in Global and Historical Perspective that introduces the conceptual approach towards the field of global labour history through a collection of essays chosen by the editors.

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.