Marcel van der Linden, “The World Wide Web of Work: A history in the making”
Global Labour History has rapidly gained ground as a field of study in the 21st century, attracting interest in the Global South and North alike. Scholars derive inspiration from the broad perspective and the effort to perceive connections between global trends over time in work and labour relations, incorporating slaves, indentured labourers and sharecroppers, housewives and domestic servants.
Casting this sweeping analytical gaze, The World Wide Web of Work discusses the core concepts ‘capitalism’ and ‘workers’, and refines notions such as ‘coerced labour’, ‘household strategies’ and ‘labour markets’. It explores in new ways the connections between labourers in different parts of the world, arguing that both ‘globalisation’ and modern labour management originated in agriculture in the Global South and were only later introduced in Northern industrial settings. It reveals that 19th-century chattel slavery was frequently replaced by other forms of coerced labour, and it reconstructs the laborious 20th-century attempts of the International Labour Organisation to regulate labour standards supra-nationally. The book also pays attention to the relational inequality through which workers in wealthy countries benefit from the exploitation of those in poor countries. The final part addresses workers’ resistance and acquiescence: why collective actions often have unanticipated consequences; why and how workers sometimes organise massive flights from exploitation and oppression; and why ‘proletarian revolutions’ took place in pre-industrial or industrialising countries and never in fully developed capitalist societies.
Contents
List of tables and figures
Provenance of the texts Acknowledgments
Foreword
Sven Beckert
Introduction
CHALLENGES
1 Tree bark mysteries, or the invisible workers
2 Caribbean radicals, a new Italian saint, and a feminist challenge
3 Six insights from Gujarat
CONCEPTS
4 Capitalism
5 Workers
6 Coerced labour
7 Household strategies
8 Labour markets
CONNECTIONS
9 Global cash-crop transfers, ecology and labour
10 Slavery and convict labour: training-grounds for modern labour management
11 The abolition of the slave trade and slavery: intended and unintended consequences
12 The International Labour Organization: an appraisal
13 How some workers benefit from the exploitation of other workers
CONFLICTS
14 Walking fish: how conservative behavior generates and processes radical change
15 Mass exits: who, why, how?
16 Workers and revolutions: a historical paradox
17 1968: the enigma of simultaneity
18 Epilogue: Global labour history and the crisis of workers’ movements
References
Index
Marcel van der Linden is Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, where he served for fourteen years as research director. His publications include Workers of the World. Essays toward a Global Labor History (Leiden: Brill, 2008; French, German, Portuguese and Spanish translations), and the two-volume The Cambridge History of Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Series: Work Around the World
Publication date: 9 May 2023
Open Access PDF
https://uclpress.co.uk/book/the-world-wide-web-of-work
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