Discussion of the current Information Revolution tends to focus on technological developments in information and communication and overlooks both the human labor involved in the development, maintenan
Colonial and post-colonial port cities in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions brought together laboring populations of many different backgrounds and statuses - legally free or semi-free wage-laborers, soldiers, sailors, and the self-employed, indentured servants, convicts, and slaves. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century the labor of these 'motley crews' made port cities crucial hubs of the emerging capitalist world market and centers of imperial infrastructure. The nine chapters in this volume investigate the interaction between different groups of laborers around the docks and the neighborhoods that stretched behind them. How did the mixture of many different groups of laborers shape patterns of work and life, authority and control, exclusion and inclusion, group-competition and joint resistance? What roles did gender, race and status play in maintaining divisions or enabling solidarities? Together, the nine case studies present a vibrant picture of social relations and
This volume examines Brazilian labour history, integrating issues of gender, race, and ethnicity by addressing topics such as free and unfree labour in the nineteenth-century Amazon, the transnational contexts of urban sex work, the intersection of 'class' and 'community' in a São Paulo workers' bairro, and the (legal) struggles of sugar cane workers in Pernambuco. At the same time, this volume presents a renewed historiography of movements and organisations (often with an emphasis on transnational dimensions), covering issues from revolutionary syndicalism in Rio, through the role of World War II in the formation of Brazilian populism, to the intervention of US 'free unionism' during the military dictatorships in Brazil and Argentina. This volume goes beyond a survey of more recent Brazilian labour history and offers articles that enter into conscious dialogue with the debates and findings of scholarship in other world regions.
This volume explores the transnational dimensions of mutiny and maritime radicalism during the great cycle of war and revolution that began in the mid-1750s and continued until the 1840s. The central theme of the volume is mutiny - its causes, frequency, forms, patterns and outcomes - charting, linking and comparing maritime insurrections in different oceans, on warships, merchant vessels and convict ships. The contributions concentrate on the mutineers themselves, their social composition, self-organisation, objectives and ideas. Also included is unrest in port cities, sites of international exchange between maritime and landed forms of resistance. Sailors spent significant amounts of time in port, sometimes connecting shipboard unrest and radical movements on land in personal, political and social ways. The contributions cover the age of revolution in its full geographic extent, including the Atlantic with its wars and revolutions, but also the Indian and Pacific Ocean and the South
In pre-industrial Europe, as in developing countries today, much of the population had to struggle to survive. The livelihood of all those who lived by the work of their hands was highly insecure. This book considers the 'labouring poor' not simply as victims, but as actively pursuing a whole range of strategies for survival. These strategies included many economic activities. Building and maintaining networks of kinship and neighbourhood was equally important, as was negotiating support from institutions. Sometimes, strategies were successfully integrated within a household, while in other instances the domestic group was split and members preferred to pursue individual strategies. This illuminating book examines the European past using case studies from present-day situations in Asia and Africa.
This book looks at petitions over the last five centuries to reconstruct the lives and opinions of 'humble' petitioners. Since Pharaonic times, governments have allowed their subjects to voice opinions in the form of petitions, which have demanded a favour or the redressment of an injustice. To be effective, a petition had to mention the request, usually a motivation and always the name or names of the petitioners. As a result, grievances of ordinary people which were not written down anywhere else are now stored safely in the archives of the authorities to which the petitions were addressed. The petitions considered in this book, which come from all over the globe, offer rich and valuable sources for social historians.
In the Middle East and Africa, deteriorating living conditions have given rise to a variety of social movements and unrest since the 1970s. Although each of these events and movements had its own logic, they all took place in the context of the implementation of neoliberal economic policies, generally referred to as structural adjustment reforms. Structural adjustments have been the subject of extensive literature, but most existing studies have focused on the logic of international financial institutions, national governments, and private enterprises. By focusing on the revolts against, and more generally on the multiple social responses to structural adjustments policies, this volume suggests that the perspective should be reversed. It investigates the ways in which the upheavals brought about by this new liberalization were actually experienced by the people of Africa and the Middle East in their daily and material lives and their shared concepts of fairness and unfairness.
The ten contributions to this volume provide a new perspective on the history of convicts and penal colonies. They demonstrate that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were a critical period in the reconfiguration of empires, imperial governmentality and punishment, including through extensive punitive relocation and associated extractive labour. Ranging across the global contexts of Africa, Asia, Australasia, Japan, the Americas, the Pacific, Russia, and Europe, and exploring issues of criminalisation, political repression, and convict management alongside those of race, gender, space and circulation, this collection offers a perspective from the colonies that radically transforms accepted narratives of the history of empire and the history of punishment.
Transport labour has been a fundamental feature in every economic system and in every epoch of humanity worldwide. This volume considers the history of labour in transport from 1750 to 1950, in the context of globalisation and the evolution of capitalism. The nine articles presented in this collective work span these two centuries and address a largely neglected aspect of labour history in transport: the stories from the Global South (Africa, Asia and Latin America). The transport sectors touched upon in these studies are wide-ranging, encompassing a variety of workers, from porters to boatmen in India, from Mongolian caravanners to Filipino rickshaw drivers, from truck drivers to postal runners in west Africa, from wage-earning slave porters to immigrant railway workers in the cities of Brazil. These histories from the South are a constitutive part of the global history of labour.
Starting from a broad definition of labour relations as the full range of vertical and horizontal social relations under which work is performed, both within and outside the household, this volume examines the way states have shaped and interacted with labour relations in a wide range of periods and places, from the sixteenth-century silver mines of Potosí in the Andes to late twentieth-century Sweden, and from seventeenth-century Dzungharia to early twentieth-century colonial Mozambique. The articles presented look at very different types of states, from local and regional power holders to nation states and empires, and explore the activities of these states and their impact on labour relations in three roles, as conquerors, employers and arbiters. The volume finds diversity, but also a remarkable degree of similarity across space and time in the mechanisms deployed by states to extract and allocate the labour required to carry out their essential tasks.
Coal has been fundamental for the development of industrial and transport technologies since the nineteenth century. Globalisation, including colonialism, would not have been possible without coal-based energy and thus the exploitation of coal in every part of the world. But coal mining is a labour-intensive activity and mine operators had to find, mobilise and direct workers to these sites to enable exploitation. The recruitment of miners often targeted groups with a perceived inferior status. This turned coal mining communities into dense social spheres characterised by the intricate dynamics of ethnic identifications, interracial relations and class formation. The twelve articles presented in this volume cover cases from Africa, Asia, the Americas, Turkey, the Soviet Union and Western Europe, as well as a broad range of topics, from segregation, forced labour and subcontracting, to labour struggles, discrimination, ethnic paternalism and sports.
All forms of popular protest include a specific category of 'popular intellectual' who reflects social reality. This volume looks at the experiences of popular intellectuals in non-western societies,
