M. van der Linden

Workers of the world: Essays toward a global labor history

The studies offered in this volume integrate the history of wage labor, of slavery, and of indentured labor. They contribute to a Global Labor History freed from Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism.

Mutualist microfinance: informal savings funds from the global periphery to the core?

A a Small mutual funds once flourished in nineteenth century Europe and North America. They still abound in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In recent years they have come back to European and North American cities with the immigrants from the global South. Some of the small mutual savings funds use the accumulated sums to provide financial assistance to members in distress and thus fulfil an insurance function. Others make loans regardless of their members’ individual needs, in which case it is the savings or credit function that predominates. In this volume, five authors describe and analyse the results of their fieldwork among mutual fund members in Hyderabad, Yogyakarta, Ayelitsa (a township near Cape Town), among Surinamese in both Paramaribo (Suriname) and Amsterdam, as well as among Senegalese Peul who migrate from Tilonge to Dakar and on to Paris. The studies are based on field observations and personal interviews. The two editors, Abram de Swaan and Marcel van der Linden, provide a common comparative approach, and a shared historical and theoretical perspective. The essays explore the varieties and the logic of mutual funds, emphasizing the importance of peer pressures as a ‘social constraint’ to increase ‘self constraint’ on spending. Cooperation in a mutual fund, whether for insurance or saving purposes, can proffer the participants advantages which they can not realize on their own.

Green plants into blue cakes: working for wages in colonial Bengal’s indigo industry

In the extensive historical literature on indigo, the factory that turned green plants into cakes of blue dye remains uncharted territory. This chapter intends to begin redressing the balance by looking at labor in indigo factories. It concerns with Who worked there? Where did they come from? What is known about their social and economic backgrounds? What was life in and around the factories like? How was the labor process organized? What did laborers earn? Investors provided the capital to set up indigo factories and pay the wages of factory laborers. For over 150 years the literature on indigo has been remarkably vocal about the injustice meted out to cultivators and remarkably silent about the fate of indigo factory workers. Just as indigo was an indigenous natural dye that colonial enterprise developed successfully for European markets, so jute was an indigenous natural fibre that gave rise to a booming industry. Keywords:blue cakes; factory laborers; green plants; indigo factories; wages

The Growth of a European Network of Labor Historians

The first conference of the European Labour History Network (ELHN) took place on December 14–16, 2015, in Turin, Italy. It was, for the time being, the culmination of a development that has been going on for a number of years. Increasingly European labor historians work together across borders. Since the 1970s the number of research projects comparing two or more national cases has grown considerably, while in recent years transnational connections have attracted more attention as well. Likewise, labor historians now take Europes imperial, colonial, and neocolonial past very seriously, and therefore the labor dimension of that past is explored more intensely (chattel slavery, indentured labor, convict labor, and so on).

Robert Castel's Les métamorphoses de la question sociale (1995)

In the scholarly debate about the increasingly flexible, informal, and precarious nature of employment relations, it is often suggested that these trends are new. This is especially true for the advanced capitalist countries. “Previously,” employees had permanent jobs, with good social benefits and a vast array of rights, whereas “nowadays” they are losing these forms of security and are more vulnerable to market whims. These observations do not take into account that standard employment relationships in fact came about relatively recently. In the past, insecurity and absence of rights were at least as prevalent as they are today. Standard employment appears to have been generalized rather briefly in a small part of the world. The crucial question is not why the old lack of security is returning, but why it was possible to reduce such insecurity for a small share of the world population for a few decades. While the answer to this crucial question remains unclear; studies reconstructing the course of events over several centuries will clearly be necessary to solve this problem.

Working Classes, History of

This article discusses the emergence of the concept of the working class in Western Europe during the nineteenth century; the classical patterns of interpretation (structural, agency-focused, and combinations of these two approaches); the rise of ‘peripheral’ working classes, their historiography, and their conceptual implications; and the new insights offered by Third World historians for the analysis of advanced countries.