In the decade since International Labor and Working-Class History (ILWCH) published its special issue on “Labor and the Military,” treating military service as a problem of labor has grown from a provocation into a major debate. By surveying five recent books on soldiering as a form of labor, this essay poses a set of questions about warfare and work. Is military service best understood as a form of labor, and what might that perspective reveal, or occlude? How do militaries draw the line between those who work and those who fight? Where does that line become blurry? How do soldiers themselves understand the peculiar forms of “work” that war demands? War and work are not separate domains of experience, as these books show. But in some respects, they still demand different tools of analysis.

This review article proposes new directions for the field of labor studies in the Middle East and Islamic world. It does so by examining a diverse array of recent works that are not framed as studies of labor and class per se, but that illustrate what this field might look like through their respective concerns with space and materiality. Taking such concerns together unites these otherwise disparate studies of class, oceanic connections, gender, urban transformation, and the environment. We have organized this essay around the themes of space and materiality because of the utility that they hold for the study of labor and class in the Middle East and Islamic world. They enable us to attend to the basic aims of older scholarship on labor and political economy while also internalizing the critiques of that tradition mounted by scholars of race, gender, and colonialism. We moreover suggest that the theoretical developments outlined here can inform scholarship on labor and class across regional divides.

In many ways, the vast industrial complexes that developed on the Central African Copperbelt and the Fushun coalfields in the early twentieth century were very different places. One on a high plateau stretched out across the border between what is now Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia with a sub-tropical climate; the other on the rolling foothills of Changbai Mountains in what is now Liaoning Province, northeastern China, with a humid continental climate. Yet anyone who visited either of these places would immediately and unavoidably have become aware of a basic fact about both: that racial hierarchies governed life and work on the mines. This article is about that basic fact, and in it we aim to make a two-fold contribution: First, it is a comparative history of mining regions, which, although it might seem an area of study ripe for comparison, is seldom undertaken. Second, through this comparison to argue that the prevalence and significance of race as a way of organizing life and work in the mining industry has been underestimated. We support this claim with an overview of production and everyday life in two seemingly very different mining regions: the Fushun coalfields and the Central African Copperbelt (see figure 1).

The history and iconography of trade union banners has been surprisingly under-explored since it was first taken seriously as a subject of study in the early 1970s. The nostalgia evident in these early accounts for an age that seemed to contemporaries then to be fleeting seems particularly incongruous given the more recent reinvigoration of the trade union demonstration. This article seeks to redress the balance by focusing on the Follonsby miners’ lodge banner. First unveiled in 1928, in a pit village on the northern edge of Durham coalfield in northeast England, the Follonsby miners’ banner was later hailed as a foremost candidate for the most revolutionary trade union banner in British history. This unsubstantiated claim is important in itself, as mass trade unionism in Britain is characterized by moderation and a reluctance to engage in radical politics; an observation that broadly stands for the influential British coal miners’ unions and, more specifically, for the miners of the Durham coalfield itself.

The article's argument has both narrow and broad dimensions. Narrowly, it argues that the Follonsby banner has a strong claim to be regarded as the most revolutionary in Britain, albeit with “revolutionary” understood in certain theoretical and context-specific ways. The broader argument develops the claim that the iconography of the Follonsby banner is more significant for what the process of interrogating its “revolutionary” credentials reveals about the complexities of the political culture of the mainstream British Left in the twentieth century and after. In this broader respect, the Follonsby banner—iconography, birth, life, purgatory, and rebirth—is more important for its curious representatives rather than its individuated existence as an “extreme revolutionary” outlier.

Marble mosaic and terrazzo were a very common type of stone paving in Venice, Italy, especially between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout the period, migrant craftsmen from the nearby Alpine foothills area of Friuli (in northeastern Italy) virtually monopolized the Venetian marble mosaic and terrazzo trade. Thus, on February 9, 1583, the Venetian Council of Ten granted maestro (master) Sgualdo Sabadin from Friuli and his fellow Friulian workers of the arte dei terazzeri (art of terrazzo) the capacity to establish a school guild dedicated to St. Florian. The first chapters of the Mariegola de’ Terazzeri (Statutes of the Terrazzo Workers Guild), which set the rules for the guild of terrazzo workers, was completed three years later, in September 1586.

From the 1830s onward, Friulian craftsmen began to export their skills and trade from Venice across Europe and later, at the turn of the twentieth century, overseas to several American cities. Prior to reaching America, mosaic and terrazzo workers left from their work places outside Italy, initially from Paris. Friulian mosaic and terrazzo workers were regarded as the “aristocracy” of the Italian American building workforce due to their highly specialized jobs: This contrasted with the bulk of Italians in the United States who were largely employed as unskilled. The New York marble mosaic- and terrazzo-paving trade was completely in the hands of the Italian craftsmen, who demonstrated a strong tendency to become entrepreneurs. They made use of their craftsmanship comparative advantages to build a successful network of firms that dominated the domestic market, in a similar fashion to what had already been occurring in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other European countries.

This paper argues that immigrants can be powerful conduits for the transfer of skills and knowledge, and emphasizes the importance of studying skilled migrant artisan experiences. A closer look at ethnic migration flows reveals a variety of entrepreneurial experiences, even in groups largely considered unskilled. The Italian marble mosaic and terrazzo workers’ experience sheds new light on ethnic entrepreneurship catering for the community as a whole, it reveals a remarkable long-lasting craftsmanship experience, thus demonstrating the successful continuity in business ownership and the passing down of craftsmanship knowledge across family generations. Creativity skills and innovative productive methods adopted by firms appear as a key factor that allowed these artisans to control the trade for such a long time.

This essay stitches together the fragments of Marx's work on the United States that are scattered in newspaper articles, letters, notes, in some digressions in his early writings, in his economic manuscripts and in Capital (1867). The main aim is to show that what we can call a “global history of the Civil War” emerges from his pen: a history that is global not simply in a geographical sense, that is, because it expands the European space beyond the Atlantic and towards the Pacific, but also because of the general meaning it takes on in the history of capitalism. The essay highlights how the Civil War opened the Marxian issue of emancipation, his vision of class struggle and his view of the working class, to the presence of a black proletariat that interacted with the struggle of the white working classes, the latter of which until then had been the main focus of his work. It also highlights how the different and disarticulated voices of labor – slave and free, black and white – on both sides of the Atlantic effected a revolutionary shift in the Civil War: interjecting a “revolutionary turn” into what we can call the “long constitutional history” of the political conflict between North and South that changed the economic and social shape of the nation. More importantly, the essay reconstructs what can be termed the “state moment,” which was entangled with the “long constitutional history” and the “revolutionary turn” of the Civil War. As the transnational calls for emancipation from slavery and wage labor impacted the transnational processes of accumulation of industrial capital, the American state became a player in the world market: its financial and fiscal policies became socially linked to the government of industrial capital. In this sense, as the essay underlines in the conclusion, the “global history of the Civil War” that Marx effectively drafted, outlined the theoretical and political hypothesis that formed the basis of his mature reflection in the pages of Capital: the “emancipation of labour” should be thought of as a global issue, “neither a local nor a national, but a social problem.”

In November 1918, the labor movement of Bavaria, Germany, overthrew the monarchist government and, in April 1919, proclaimed a Bavarian Council Republic (BCR). This article analyzes the revolution and its defeat through the lens of class composition theory, thereby suggesting some revisions to the latter. The technical composition of the Bavarian working class fostered the concept of self-management, which lay at the heart of the councils as the organizational form of the revolution. However, it also nurtured authoritarian potentials, which were more in line with-counter revolutionary positions. The article suggests that class composition theory must be expanded by the notion of social composition, taking into account struggles over reproduction and consumption: Inflation, unemployment, food shortages, and disease led to a crisis in material reproduction, which in turn led large parts of the unemployed and of the women's movement to become radical revolutionaries. The article argues to conceptualize technical and social class composition to be in a dialectical relationship with political composition. It thus emphasizes the role of ideologies of anti-Semitism and anti-feminism, both within the counter-revolution and the revolution itself. While the combination of different struggles for emancipation contributed to the early successes of the revolution, their ideological division was as an important factor in its defeat.

In the mid-nineteenth century, when the Ottoman state launched an industrialization campaign within the context of increasing contacts between the Ottoman and British governments, hundreds of British industrial workers migrated to Istanbul to work in Ottoman military factories, along with technology transfer from Britain. This article narrates the history of these workers and of the community they established in Istanbul in a period spanning four decades, from the beginning of the mechanization efforts in the 1830s until the economic crisis in the mid-1870s. Drawing on archival evidence from Ottoman and British sources, it analyzes the larger context of British workers’ migration from Britain, their relations with the Ottoman state officials and local workers, and their experiences and struggles in the workplace and the city. Although both British and Ottoman historians have largely ignored their experiences due to their marginal numbers and distinct statuses, these workers actively took part in the Ottoman industrialization process, in the development of capitalist class relations, and in the social, cultural, and spatial transformation of the capital city in the Ottoman age of reforms. By means of this analysis, the article aims to highlight the significance of immigrant workers as actors of the history of large-scale transformations in the late Ottoman Empire as well as underlining the role of trans-imperial labor migration in the history of modernity.

Given the significance of strikes in the history of communist Poland, the strikes that occurred during the era of high Stalinism (1948-53) have received remarkably little scholarly attention. This article deals with one of the most significant strike waves of that period: the occupational strikes that broke out in the Dąbrowa basin after the regime extended the working day in the mines by one hour in April 1951. What lent additional salience to these strikes was that the Dąbrowa basin, nicknamed the “Red Basin” on account of its radical traditions of industrial protest, had been a communist stronghold in interwar Poland and that many card-carrying communists participated in the strikes. The article demonstrates that the strikes were the culmination of a process whereby the “aristocracy of labor” of seasoned activists turned against a regime that increasingly relied on younger migrants from the rural provinces in its campaigns to raise production. If the historical struggles of the miners in the Dąbrowa basin were instrumental in triggering the strikes, however, the article also makes clear how representatives of the regime could invoke these struggles to bring the strikes to an end.

Łódź and Tampere share an industrial and political past. Part of the Russian empire, the cities became major textile hubs crucial for Tsarist industrial economy.1 The cities were also Red strongholds. Historically, they can be seen as socio-economic “experiments” and “islands of modernization” within largely rural societies. Since the 1980s (in case of Tampere) and the 1990s (in case of Łódź) both cities have undergone substantial social and economic transformations connected with the collapse or decline of traditional industries. How do the two cities choose to represent their working-class heritage today? This essay compares how city museums in Tampere and Łódź represent their working-class history in selective and contradictory ways.

The rapid spread of COVID-19 interacted with long-unfolding economic trends to set a global tinder box aflame. Over the past thirty years, the world's workforce has increasingly found employment in low-wage, low-productivity jobs in the global services sector. The pandemic lockdowns hit these sorts of activities the hardest. Opportunities to work evaporated, spreading both poverty and hunger around the world. The same rise in global service sector employment shares, which amplified the pandemic lockdown's destructive effects, will now slow the pace of the recovery. The transition to a services-based economy has accelerated, due to what José Antonio Ocampo and Tomasso Faccio call “too much excess capacity and too little certainty about future demand,” which have depressed levels of investment and ushered in a period of economic stagnation. COVID-19 will make these tendencies worse. Weak economic recoveries will further entrench an economic order in which employers pay little attention to workers’ demands, deepening employment insecurity and economic inequality. The future for labor looks bleak. What that means for the future of working people remains an open question. Their fight for dignity, in the midst of the pandemic and post-pandemic eras, will prove decisive.

The huge parastatal sectors in postcolonial African societies interested sociologists in the 1970s and 1980s, but have never found a historical discussion – and the experience of change towards the democratization (eventually) has not yet been interpreted by historians. This study attempts to bring both elements together for the case of Benin, a country particularly shaken by massive economic decline, lay-offs and unemployment in the second half of the 1980s. It relies on an unusual and spectacular source, a series of petitions sent by workers and workers’ delegates to the presidential office of Mathieu Kérékou in 1989/90 (the presidential office partly added to these petitions whole dossiers of comments and correspondence with other authorities, i.e. ministerial directorates and the police). This analysis highlights how parastatal workers and their spokesmen tried to communicate about economic and social disaster with the authorities, how they protested and attempted to make claims about social norms and justice, and how they attacked “corruption”. I would hold that the cases studied cannot stand for a model of experiences, but they nevertheless represent a number of elements of a social history of decline: as well as protests and arguments, and views on the practice of petitioning, the discussion will also highlight individual trajectories that nevertheless exemplify, in my view, representative experiences and a history of daily life in Benin's parastatal sector. The interpretation also attempts to show how imminent democratization, through the creation of a National Conference in early 1990, changed the strategies and the context of workers’ protest. It includes a number of exemplary, and quite spectacular, cases of mismanagement and closing of parastatal companies, such as the Société Sucrière de Savè and SONICOG. I would think that the approach is unique so far for both Beninese and West African history.

When the curtain closed on the first conference of the German Labour History Association (GLHA) that dealt with the topic “Freedom of Labour under Capitalism” and took place at the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, from February 6 to 8, 2020, the sixty plus members that had been in attendance were agreed: “German Labour History is back.” This was a statement that was repeated on the banner of the GLHA proudly presenting its logo and summarizing its ambitions to unite all labor historians across German-speaking areas.