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The Promise and Peril of the New Global Labor History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2013

Dorothy Sue Cobble
Dorothy Sue Cobble*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
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International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 82 , Fall 2012 , pp. 99 - 107
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Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2013

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References

Notes

1. For more on the IISH, www.iisg.nl.

2. English-language anthologies include, among others, van der Linden, Marcel and Mohapatra, Prabhu P., eds., Labor Matters: Towards Global Histories: Studies in Honour of Sbyasachi Bhattacharya (New Dehli, 2009)Google Scholar; Behal, Rana P. and van der Linden, Marcel, eds., India's Labouring Poor: Historical Studies, c.1600–c.2000 (New Delhi, 2007)Google Scholar; Behal, Rana P. and van der Linden, Marcel, eds., Coolies, Capital, and Colonialism: Studies in Indian Labour History (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; Das, Arvind N. and van der Linden, Marcel, eds., Work and Social Change in Asia: Essays in Honour of Jan Breman (New Delhi, 2002)Google Scholar; Koh, Tommy and van der Linden, Marcel, eds., Labour Relations in Asia and Europe (Singapore, 2000)Google Scholar; van der Linden, Marcel and Thorpe, Wayne, eds., Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective (Aldershot, UK, 1990)Google Scholar; and van Holthoon, Frits and van der Linden, Marcel, Internationalism in the Labour Movement, 1830–1940 (Leiden and New York, 1988)Google Scholar. van der Linden's, Among monographs are Workers of the World, Essays Toward a Global Labor History (Leiden/Boston, 2008)Google Scholar; Transnational Labour History: Explorations (Aldershot, UK, 2003)Google Scholar; International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (Bern, 2000)Google Scholar; and Social Security Mutualism: The Comparative History of Mutual Benefit Societies (Bern, 1996)Google Scholar.

3. For a fuller treatment of many of these same issues, see van der Linden, Workers of the World.

4. Since the 1990s, a scholarly consensus has emerged on the need to go beyond “the nation” and “nationalist methodologies.” At the same time, historians continue to disagree on how to define “global” history and how to distinguish it from transnational, world, or comparative history. For an introduction to some of these debates, “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History: A Special Issue,” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999), especially 965–75Google Scholar; Mazlish, Bruce, “Comparing Global History to World History”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28 (Winter 1998): 385–95Google Scholar and “ AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111 (December 2006): 1440–64Google Scholar.

5. I agree with van der Linden that global history is concerned with “interconnections”. Yet so is transnational history with its focus on cross-border exchange, networks, and the circulation of ideas, peoples, and commodities. Thus, it is not clear how global labor history's attention to “interconnectivity” distinguishes it from transnational labor history.

6. From my own vantage point as a US historian trained in the 1980s, the “global turn” has been exhilarating. Like many of my generation, my parochialism ran deep. Yet inspired in part by the globalizing of gender studies at Rutgers in the 1990s and the work of historians such as Leila Rupp, Daniel Rodgers, Thomas Bender, and Akira Iriye, I, too, began to follow the internationalist threads of US labor and women's movements and to think about the US in a more global framework. My recent work along these lines includes “U.S. Labor Women's Internationalism in the World War I Era,” Special Issue on US Progressivism, Aubert, Didier, ed., Revue Francaise d'Etudes Americaines 122 (2009): 44–57 Google Scholar; “Friendship Beyond the Atlantic: Labour Feminist International Contacts After the Second World War,” Arbetarhistoria (Stockholm) 2009: 12–20 Google Scholar. Available in English online at http://www.arbark.se/2012/03/friendship-beyond-the-atlantic/; and “Labor Feminists and President Kennedy's Commission on Women”, in No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of US Feminism, ed. Hewitt, Nancy (New Brunswick, NJ, 2010), 144–67Google Scholar.

7. Rauchway, Eric, Blessed Among Nations: How The World Made America (New York, 2006)Google Scholar.

8. Rodgers, Daniel T., “American Exceptionalism Revisited,” Raritan Review 24 (2004): 21–37 Google Scholar; Bender, Thomas, A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History (New York, 2006)Google Scholar. Guarneri, Carl, America in the World: US History in Global Context (2007)Google Scholar.

9. See Newsletter, European Labor and Working-Class History, vols. 1–8 (1972–1975); International Labor and Working-Class History, vols. 9–36 (1976–1990). On Latin America, ILWCH 16 (1979): 29–40 Google Scholar; on Egyptian workers' history, ILWCH 18 (1980): 1–12 Google Scholar; on labor, Russian, ILWCH 22 (1982): 39–52 Google Scholar. For a fascinating scholarly controversy on the “new Latin American labor history,” ILWCH 36 (1989): 1–45 Google Scholar.

10. For scholarly controversies on industrialization, ILWCH 33 (1988): 3–38 Google Scholar; on religion and the working class, ILWCH 34 (1988): 3–69 Google Scholar; on Haymarket and its resonance around the world, ILWCH 29 (1986): 1–82 Google Scholar; on the working class during the Second World War, ILWCH 38 (1990): 3–62 Google Scholar.

11. Quotes from Montgomery, “Proletarian Globetrotters,” ILWCH 21 (1982)Google Scholar and Montgomery, “Editor's Remarks,” ILWCH 25 (1984)Google Scholar.

12. Charles Tilly, “Globalization Threatens Labor's Rights”; Immanuel Wallerstein, “Response: Declining States, Declining Rights?”; Aristide R. Zolberg, “Response: Working-Class Dissolution”; E.J. Hobsbawm, “Response: Guessing About Global Change”; Beneria, Lourdes, “Response: The Dynamics of Globalization”; all in ILWCH 47 (1995): 1–55 Google Scholar.

13. Hanagan, Michael and Field, Geoffrey, “Interview with David Montgomery,” ILWCH 82 (2012)Google Scholar.

14. Some scholars, like Ida Blom, reject the term “global history” precisely because it neglects the local, national, and regional contexts and ends up describing a “world without cultures.” Michael Adas, however, the editor of the American Historical Association's essay series on Global and Comparative History, argues that “the best recent works on global history” rely heavily on national and comparative studies. Blom, Ida, “Gender and Nation in International Comparison,” in Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Blom, Ida, Hagemann, Karen, and Hall, Catherine (New York, 2000): 3–26 Google Scholar; Michael Adas, “Foreword”; Moya, Jose C. and McKeown, Adam, World Migration in the Long Twentieth Century (Washington, DC, 2011): viiGoogle Scholar.

15. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (Norton, 1965)Google Scholar; Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1967)Google Scholar.

16. Gutman's essays began to appear in the late 1950s. His best-known books came later and include Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-class and Social History (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; and Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class, ed. Berlin, Ira (New York, 1987)Google Scholar.

17. American Social History Project, Who Built America?: Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture & Society vol. 1 (New York, 1989; Boston, 2007, Third edition)Google Scholar; and American Social History Project, Who Built America?: Working People and the Nation's History vol. 2 (Boston, 2008, Third edition)Google Scholar.

18. Among others, Wilentz, Sean, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; Fink, Leon, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana, IL, 1983)Google Scholar; Levine, Susan, Labor's True Woman: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization, and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age (Philadelphia, 1986)Google Scholar.

19. For example, Dublin, Tom, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Prude, Jonathan, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860 (New York, 1983)Google Scholar. For an excellent recent study, Rockman, Seth, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, 2009)Google Scholar. See also Stansell, Christine, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York, 1987)Google Scholar and Keyssar, Alexander, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (New York, 1986)Google Scholar.

20. Rediker, Marcus, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; Benson, Susan Porter, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana, IL, 1986)Google Scholar; Cobble, Dorothy Sue, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana, IL, 1991)Google Scholar; Fink, Leon and Greenberg, Brian, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: 1199/SEIU and the Politics of Healthcare Unionism (Urbana, IL, 1989)Google Scholar; Kirkby, Diane, Barmaids: A History of Women Workers in Pubs (Cambridge, 1997)Google Scholar; Way, Peter, Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of the North American Canals, 1780–1860 (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Reid, Donald, Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations (Boston, 1993)Google Scholar; Freeman, Josh, In Transit: The Transportation Workers Union in New York City, 1933–1966 (Philadelphia, 1988)Google Scholar.

21. It appears that labor history as a field is at an interesting juncture theoretically. With the “linguistic turn” no longer in fashion, and gender, race, and other theories often reduced to identity politics, some labor historians are celebrating the triumph of class as the primary category of analysis. “Theories of gender and language constituted an innovation of tremendous creative significance,” Labor History Review editors pronounced in their 2010 fiftieth-anniversary anthology, Histories of Labour, but overall “the evidence confirmed that class was the principal, although not the exclusive, instrument structuring experience in capitalist society.” They continue: “Class was the primary, but not the singular, prism through which most men and women in history had grasped the limits and possibilities of their lives.” McIlroy, John, Campbell, Alan, and Allen, Joan, “Introduction,” Histories of Labour: National and International Perspectives, eds. Allen, Joan, Campbell, Alan, and McIlroy, John (Pontypool, Wales, 2010); 11–12 Google Scholar.

22. Eckert, Andreas, “What is Global Labor History Good For?” in Work in a Modern Society: The German Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective, ed. Kocka, Jurgen (Oxford, 2010)Google Scholar; Cooper, Frederick, “What is the Concept of Global Good For? An African Historian's Perspective,” African Affairs 100 (2001): 189–213 Google Scholar.