Work Around the World
Series editors: Karin Hofmeester (IISH, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and University of Antwerp, Belgium) and Ulbe Bosma (IISH, Amsterdam, Netherlands and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Executive Editor: Aad Blok, IISH, Amsterdam, Netherlands;
Series advisers: Leo Lucassen, IISH, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Marcel van der Linden, IISH, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Series advisers (Sub-Saharan Africa): Omar Gueye, Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar (UCAD), Dakar, Senegal; Akua Opokua Britwum, University of Cape Coast, Ghana
Series advisers (North Africa/Middle East/Central Asia): Asef Bayat, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Chicago, USA; Peyman Jafari, Princeton University and IISH, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Görkem Akgöz, Humboldt Universität, Berlin, Germany
Series advisers (Asia): Samita Sen, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK; Christine Moll-Murata, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany
Series advisers (Latin America): Paulo Cruz Terra, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Paulo Drinot, UCL, UK; Carlos Illades Aguiar, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico City, Mexico
Over the past six hundred years an increasingly connected and competitive global economy has had tremendous consequences for how people made a living. It has brought unprecedented opportunities for many, but also massive dispossession of people´s livelihood and natural habitat to this very day. People have moved towards agricultural frontiers and industrial centres in growing numbers and over increasing distances for work. Slavery and other coerced labour regimes have shaped persistent social inequalities, racial discrimination and exclusion. Confronted with exploitation, disenfranchisement, gender inequalities, racism and xenophobia, workers have tried to improve their position either individually or collectively.
Drawing on core research at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, this series explores the connectivity between changes in work and shifting labour relations, evolving social and economic inequalities that result from or are connected to these changes, and individual as well as collective responses to these inequalities. Situating these historical dynamics within the context of an unfolding global economy that externalizes social and environmental costs, the series aims for global comparisons across time, space and scale to bring out how evolving social inequalities are connected to the development of work and labour relations, and how these histories may help to understand the causes of the inequalities in the present. By combining broad diachronic, and transnational and transcontinental comparisons, synthetic overviews and exemplary case studies, the series offers a conversant global perspective on how work and the social and economic relations and contexts in which it is performed, has shaped and defined our world.
