The Promise and Challenges of Global Labor History

Abstract

The idea that the histories of different regions in the world are interconnected is not particularly novel; it already existed several centuries ago. Thus, for example, when the German historian and playwright Friedrich Schiller was granted a chair at the University of Jena in 1789, he declared in his inaugural address that “the most remote regions of the world contribute to our luxury.” After all, he continued, “The clothes we wear, the spices in our food, and the price for which we buy them, many of our strongest medicines, and also many new tools of our destruction—do they not presuppose a Columbus who discovered America, a Vasco da Gama who circumnavigated the tip of Africa”?2 Nevertheless it took quite some time before professional historians began to consider these global connections seriously in their research. Colonial and “imperial” historians led the way. They were joined by economic historians. Labor historians became interested in intercontinental perspectives only more recently; until the 1970s, they typically locked themselves into the framework of individual nation-states. Even great innovators in the discipline, such as E. P. Thompson, thought mostly in terms of “national” working classes.

Historiographies of science and labor: From past perspectives to future possibilities

“…66 Recognizing the simultaneity and compatibility of presumptively antagonistic modes of production encompassed by science aligns with the impulses of a global labor history to emphasize capitalism's capacity to coordinate commodity production across space under disparate, discrete, and dispersed regimes of governance. 67 "Core" and "periphery" -whether the factory and the plantation, or the laboratory and the "field" -have relied on radically different terms of labor, but one could scarcely conceptualize a history of industrialization or, say, botany without both elements in the picture. 68 The ubiquity and persistence of coerced labor have proven animating concerns both for labor historians and historians of science, directing their attention to plantation refineries, subterranean silver mines, and exploratory expeditions in the service of cartography, oceanography, and geology.…”

Workers’ Resistance across Time and Space

“…It must reflect the research agenda formulated by global labour historians. 16 This approach requires historicizing strikes by (mostly) male European unionized industrial wage labourers as merely one type of collective labour action within a specific regional and temporal context. Rather than tracing one type of collective labour action through time, we build on the idea that heteronomous labour relations are always accompanied by resistance on behalf of workers in the past, present, and future alike.…”

Louise Tilly in Intergenerational Perspective

“…It does not assume that borders or states are fundamental units of analysis. In a recent article Marcel van der Linden summarized the group's approach in terms very reminiscent of Tilly's AHA address on “Connections.” Van der Linden (2012) writes: “In my view, global history is primarily concerned with the description and explanation of the intensifying (or weakening) connections (interactions, influences, transfers) between different world regions, as well as of the economic, political, social, and cultural networks, institutions” (p. 62).…”