Jan Lucassen, ed., Global Labour History: A State of the Art.
Frank, David
Jan Lucassen, ed., Global Labour History: A State of the Art (Bern:
Peter Lang 2006)
THE NOTORIOUS debates of the early 1990s about "the end of
history" had their echo in the field of labour history, where a
number of international journals published discussions under titles such
as "The End of Labour History?" and "What Now for Labour
History?" One sequel to that moment was a conference of labour
historians from around the world sponsored by the International
Institute of Social History in November 2000, which some years later has
produced a substantial anthology on "global labour history."
These pages include expressions of concern, even some cries of alarm,
but on the whole they convey more a sense of measure than malaise,
possibly a sign that the sense of crisis has abated as the challenges
facing labour history in the new century are identified.
There is a good sense of proportion in the two introductory essays,
which emphasize the widening geographic and conceptual scope of labour
history over time as well as the attendant practical and theoretical
questions arising from this extension beyond some of the more
conventional paradigms of North Atlantic capitalism. Marcel van der
Linden notes the ways in which the ideal type of "free"
wage-labour itself has always been qualified by numerous contexts and
conditions, both formal and informal, including those of family and
household, reproduction and mobility, coercion and incentive, individual
and group contracts, gendered and racialized experiences; he argues that
"capitalism could and can choose whatever form of commodified
labour it thinks fit in a given historical context." (26) In a
similar vein Jan Lucassen points out that the so-called "golden
age" associated with the labour history of the industrial
revolution was always limited by its nationalism and periodization;
indeed when "a first attempt at writing global labour history"
(50) was produced in 1837, there were already many centuries of labour
history behind it--"an immense social reality," in the words
of Granier de Cassagnac's Histoire des classes ouvrieres,
"about to knock with the same energy at the doors of the scholars
as of the kings, while saying to the former 'we want to have our
history' and to the latter: 'We want to have our
bread.'" (39)
Labour historians are relatively well-equipped to face the
challenges, given the strong traditions of the field, which include its
often permeable disciplinary and methodological boundaries and its
alertness to the larger social and political world. A reading of this
volume shows that there are at least two or three ways to think of
global labour history: first as an accumulation of "local,"
national, regional, and even continental histories; secondly as
deliberately constructed studies of parallel sectors within the world
economy, with a view to comparing the differences and congruities of
their contexts. Beyond this there is also the need for investigations of
explicitly global forces, including transnational commodity chains and
labour markets, and international activisms and organizations.
Most of the contributions in this volume fall in the first group,
with attention to the evolving genealogies and debates within more or
less definable spatial boundaries. For Canada and the United States, for
instance, Bryan Palmer makes the case for a "selective but
rigorous" (225) attention to the traditions of labour history
scholarship in order to avoid the pitfalls of postmodernist writing. In
the "new" Russia, Andrei Sokolov warns against
"anti-scientific" approaches in the wake of the official
"quasi-histories" (407) of the Soviet era and discusses
opportunities for a vast project of historical recovery for which new
sources are available. In the case of China, Arif Dirlik discusses how
the image of the archetypal proletarian has given way to a compromised
and fractured working class under steady assault from world capitalism.
For Japan, Akira Suzuki examines a legacy of "authoritarian and
status-based labor relations" which has interacted with
"cycles of worker activism and acceptance." (193) Meanwhile,
historians of Africa (Frederick Cooper), South Asia (Sabyasachi
Bhattacharya), Latin America (John D. French), North Africa and the
Middle East (Zachary Lockman) and Australia, New Zealand, and the South
Pacific (Lucy Taksa) identify a dynamic and multifaceted labour history
that is responsive to the articulation of differentiated production
regimes under the prevailing hegemony of capitalism. It is also clear
that in the case of Western Europe, the locus classicus of
industrialization, economic development divided as well as united the
working class; both conditions continue to require historical
explication, and as Dick Geary notes, "the simultaneous
co-existence of different identities on the part of workers" has
been the basis for "a continuing story of solidarities and
divisions." (255)
The chapters in the second section of the volume go a long way
towards demonstrating the strengths of a comparative history that
focuses on themes and sectors in comparable "local" settings.
In the case of agricultural labour, for instance, Prasannan
Parthasarathi shows how a South Indian perspective undermines the
dichotomy of common and individual land ownership as the basis for the
dispossession and exploitation of rural workers. A study of the place of
domestic labour in Indonesia, China, Malaysia, and Hong Kong by Ratna
Saptari shows variations in traditions and trajectories while
contributing to the "de-essentialization of race, gender and class
relations." (484) The practical problems of constructing
comparisons are addressed by Jan Lucassen in a study of brickmaking in
India and Western Europe that finds similarities in the organization of
work, including the prominence of family "gangs." Implicitly
at least, coal-mining has long been a familiar site for historical
comparisons; while some recent studies have made large national
generalizations, Ian Phimister demonstrates the need for microstudies of
local pit culture to facilitate finer comparisons of managerial
strategies, community structure, and collective action. Only a few of
these chapters take up the explicit investigation of global forces, but
this theme is notable in a study of dock work that draws on evidence
from 30 countries on five continents. Lex Heerma van Voss finds that
dock workers have experienced several waves of globalization (and
de-globalization) over the past two centuries and that these have been
accompanied by distinct configurations in technologies of production and
labour relations on the world's waterfronts. Similarly, in a
discussion of railroad labour, Shelton Stromquist examines international
patterns in the recruitment and deployment of technology and labour and
the organization and assertion of working-class interests; at the same
time he shows that a global approach requires increased attention to
additional factors often neglected in Eurocentric models, such as
"the place of an informal labor market sector within an
industrializing economy, the interdependence of rural and urban
locations of railroad labor, the household context of wage labor, the
mingling of wage and non-wage work, and the racially segregated
character of transnational, global labor markets." (631)
This is a bulky volume, almost 800 pages in length and in
appearance perhaps easily mistaken for a definitive reference work.
There are maps, several kinds of index, a cumulative bibliography of
works cited--but it is nonetheless a preliminary work of reconnaissance
that even features the occasional confusion in terminology, such as the
locomotive "engineers" who were not "machinists,"
(642) or the unintended malapropism, such as "the tenants of
historical materialism." (226) Participants in this anthology have
interpreted the mandate of the original conference and of global history
itself in different ways, but many of the essays are models of
historiographic guidance and conceptual clarification. Each contributes
usefully to the emerging agenda for a global labour history.
"Late" capitalism may have another cycle to run, but as long
as work remains part of the human condition, labour history will
continue to fill a need.
DAVID FRANK
University of New Brunswick
