Dirk Hoerder, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, and Silke Neunsinger, eds., Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers (Leiden: Brill 2016)

MANY OF THE STORIES and statistics about the working conditions faced by domestic and caregiving workers around the world are shocking. For example, in April 2017 a video that circulated online showed an Ethiopian maid in Kuwait clinging to a window sill and yelling for help before falling several stories while her employer not only stood by but filmed the incident. Fortunately, the worker survived. According to Human Rights Watch, however, it is not the first time that a domestic worker has fallen from a building in Kuwait. In response to abusive and exploitative working conditions, workers, some of whom have been locked inside their places of employment, attempt to escape by whatever means necessary, risking deportation, physical harm, and even death. Much of the discussion about how to improve the lives and working conditions of domestic and caregiving workers focuses on contemporary issues--how current social, political, and economic factors shape domestic labour. Yet as the contributors to Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers show, this type of work has a long history around the world, and many of the contemporary issues facing domestic workers have deep historical roots. Addressing problems pertaining to caregiving and domestic work thus requires a solid historical understanding of its development and practice in particular contexts. This edited collection aims to address this need.

The book emerged from the annual International Conference of Labour History and Social Movements in Linz, Austria that brought together over 50 scholars of domestic work in September 2013. The resulting edited collection features the work of more than twenty scholars from a range of disciplines and interdisciplinary fields, including history, sociology, anthropology, political science, gender studies, and migration studies. They examine the dynamics shaping domestic and caregiving work over four centuries and in a number of countries. As editors Dirk Hoerder, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, and Silke Neunsinger explain in the first chapter, the collection "aims to contribute to a global history of work, in which the history of domestic work and domestic workers are not discarded as 'unproductive' and therefore insignificant to labor history." (4) The central argument of the book is "that domestic work has not only been an important social and cultural factor throughout space and time, but that its economic ('productive') value has for long been underestimated, misunderstood, or negated." (4-5)

Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers is comprised of 25 chapters grouped into three parts. An introductory essay by the editors provides an overview of the collection and issues related to terminology (domestic worker, servant, household worker, etc.) and theory (domestic work as "productive" or "unproductive" work) and outlines the volume's contribution to global labour history. Using a "broad and inclusive definition," the editors define domestic work as "work in the households of others [that] includes all tasks concerning household work... as well as care work. (2) The next two chapters, by Raffaella Sarti and Hoerder respectively, offer valuable reviews of existing scholarship and the historical development of domestic work around the world. By summarizing and analyzing the theoretical debates, historiographical developments, and changes and continuities in domestic work from a global perspective, these three chapters advance our understanding of the history of domestic work and the research on it.

The remaining chapters are divided into three parts. Part One examines workers' strategies, agency, and self-assertion. As Hoerder explains, although much of the scholarship on domestic work focuses on either exploitation or agency, in reality these competing frames intertwine: domestic work can be a source of oppression and liberation depending on the specific historical circumstances. The chapters in this section look at how this dynamic shapes the lives of workers in a variety of national and transnational contexts, from older Czech women's experiences caring for the children of Vietnamese immigrants, to Indian workers' efforts to organize, strike, and secure improvements in their working condition, and to Filipina caregivers' ambivalent feelings about returning "home" to the Philippines after working abroad.

Part Two explores domestic work in imperial and colonial contexts, paying particular attention to how gender, race, and ethnicity influenced relations between workers and employers. The essays in this section cover more than 300 years, from the mid-17th century through to the late 20th. They look at how such factors as power, knowledge, and emotions shaped relations between employers and workers in South Africa and colonial Tanganyika; migrant women's entry into domestic work in countries that had colonized their places of origin; and attitudes and policies regarding domestic work in Southeast Asia and the immigration, wages, and labour of Chinese and Native American workers in the United States.

Part Three examines how domestic labour has changed and remained the same over the 20th century and how activists, employees, governments, and international organizations have supported and hindered improvements. Most of the essays are detailed case studies of specific countries and regions (Austria, Chile, Cyprus, Morocco, Yemen, and China, Hong Kong, and Malaya). In contrast, the final chapter analyzes the factors that led the International Labour Organization to approve Convention 189 in 2011 that established standards for domestic work and extended protections to domestic workers.

Overall, Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers is an impressive collection. Its interdisciplinarity and international scope allow the reader to take a broad view of domestic work, trace continuities and changes over time, and better understand the similarities and differences experienced by workers around the world and throughout the past four centuries. That being said, some scholars may take issue with the editors' assessment of current academic attitudes towards domestic work and their claim that domestic work is more complex than other forms of labour. In the introductory chapter, they state that "many economists and labor historians remain welded to the proposition that 'production' or material goods creates 'surplus value' for capital and capitalists while production of a healthy family is mere 'reproduction' without value added" (17). This statement may accurately describe the situation in some fields and regions of the world, but the lack of a citation and sufficient explanation leaves the reader with no way to evaluate the veracity of such a broad claim. Also problematic is their assertion that "because of the intricacies of domestic work... work in the domestic sphere requires a far more complex analysis than work in factory or in offices." (23) Particular workplaces and employment relations may need different analytical tools, but to suggest that domestic work is inherently more "complex" and is the only type of work that involves emotion and intimacy is to ignore the intense feelings experienced by and the complicated emotional labour required of other types of workers, such as flight attendants, nurses, and teachers, to list only a few.

Nevertheless, by examining the particular dynamics shaping domestic work in four centuries, in a number of countries, and from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, this edited collection makes a valuable contribution to the study of global labour history and will appeal to anyone interested in domestic work, globalization, and worker organizing.

JULIA SMITH

Rutgers University