Globalizing Labour History: the case of International Labor and Working-Class History

Abstract

The present article traces the trajectory of the journal International Labor and Working-Class History (ILWCH) over the last two decades as it shifted from a journal focused almost exclusively on Europe to a more global perspective. Although interest in globalization as a phenomenon emerged in the pages of the journal in the mid-1990s, the approach adopted by Charles Tilly, in a major 1995 article in ILWCH on this question, still relected a highly Eurocentric approach to labor history. But in the following decade, the composition of the editorial board began to change, and a series of articles – several authored by the Dutch social historian Marcel van der Linden – argued for a new, genuinely global approach to labor history. Among the implications of this new Global Labor History is a rethinking of the historical category of labor or worker and the relationship of precarious and unfree labor to the history of capitalism. At the same time, historians whose work focuses on regions in the “Global South” have questioned some of the premises of Global Labor History and criticized its tendency to promote a type of “convergence narrative” that still privileges the historical experiences of capitalism in the “Global North.”