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The “Globalization” of Labor and Working-Class History and its Consequences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2005

Marcel van der Linden
Affiliation:
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam

Abstract

Labor historians from Europe and North America frequently assert that their discipline is not in a healthy state. Such a picture is a distortion, however, for the world does not stop at the equator: in various regions of Latin America, Africa and Asia the historiography of workers and labor movements has made great strides in the last twenty to thirty years. Labor history's “globalization” calls for a new type of historiography, which transcends old-style labor history from North America and Europe by incorporating its findings in a new globally-orientated approach. This article discusses some of the main issues involved: problems of a general theoretical nature, of conceptualization, multidisciplinarity, and sources. The article also identifies a few research desiderata.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2004 The International Labor and Working-Class History Society

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Jan Lucassen and Alice Mul for their helpful comments on previous drafts. This article is an expanded version of the Third Arvind N. Das Lecture, given at the V. V. Giri National Labor Institute, Noida (India) on March 20, 2004.