Labour Movements in Global Historical Perspective: Conceptual Eurocentrism and Its Problems

Abstract

For a long time labour historians have focussed on labour movements that emerged in the developed West during industrialization in the nineteenth century and, in their organizational and ideological concerns, homed in on the wage-earning industrial working class. The developed West also marked the space of the metropolitan centres of nineteenth-century capitalism and imperialism—with one exception, namely Japan, which formed its own ‘West’ in the East. The West, in the course of its imperial endeavours, exported all sorts of ideas and practices to the imperial margins, where they were rarely adopted or copied in a straightforward way. Instead they were adapted, changed and often re-exported into the metropoles, where they in turn influenced a range of developments.

Further Readings

A global labour history is still very much in the making. A pathfinder on the road to a potentially global labour history was Eric Hobsbawm—see for example his Worlds of Labour, London: Orion, 1984. Good current surveys include Jan Lucassen (ed.), Global Labour History. A State of the Art (Berne: Peter Lang, 2006); Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World. Essays Toward a Global Labor History (Leiden: Brill, 2008), Andreas Eckert, ‘What is Global Labour History Good for?’ in Jürgen Kocka (ed.), Work in a Modern Society. The German Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective, (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010), pp. 169–182, and Andrea Komlosy, Arbeit: eine globalhistorische Perspektive, 13.–21. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Böhlau, 2014).

Furthermore, over the last decades, a number of excellent collaborative projects with a global reach have been initiated by the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. They include Lex Heerma van Voss, Els Hiemstra-Kuperus, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk (eds), The Ashgate Companion to Textile Workers (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010); Sam Davies, Colin J. Davis, Lex Heerma van Voss, Lidewij Hesselink, David de Vries and Klaus Weinhauer (eds), Dock Workers, 2 vols, (Aldershot: Ashgate 2000). The journal of the IISG, the International Review of Social History (IRSH), published by Cambridge University Press, has also been in the forefront of publishing cutting-edge research on global labour history for many years. Some of its recent supplements had strong global themes, for example Labour in Transport: Histories from the Global South, 1750–1950, ed. by Stefano Belluci, Larissa Rosa Corea, Jan-Georg Deutsch and Chitra Joshi (2014). The turn to global labour history in IRSH is complemented by transnational and comparative work in other labour history journals, including International Labor and Working Class History, published by Cambridge University Press, and Moving the Social: Journal for Social History and the History of Social Movements, published by the Institute for Social Movements in Bochum. The latter also publishes the book series Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, published by Palgrave Macmillan, which encourages transnational, comparative and global labour history.

Over recent years the Re:Work Centre at the Humboldt University in Berlin has also become a major hub for the promotion of global histories of work and labour. Not publishing its own journal or book series, the fellowship programme has produced much cutting-edge work in global labour history, e.g. Alice Mah, Port Cities and Global Legacies. Urban Identity, Waterfront Work and Radicalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and Babacar Fall, Ineke Paff-Rheinberger and Andreas Eckert (eds), Work and Culture in a Globalized World, (Paris: Karthala, 2015).

There is also a host of networked labour archives, libraries and research institutes, the International Association of Labour History Institutions (IALHI)—mainly located in Western Europe and North as well as South America—that have been increasingly promoting transnational and global perspectives on labour history. (see http://www.ialhi.org) The so-called Linz conferences of labour historians that had been started originally as a meeting place between East and West European historians during the Cold War, has also more recently turned its attention to global and transnational themes. For a full list of their published conference proceedings see http://www.ith.or.at.

Given that the centres of labour movements have been in Europe and North America we also have a number of good surveys on those regions of the world, including Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Donald Sassoon, Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth-Century, (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), For North America there is also, in comparative perspective with Britain, Neville Kirk, Labour and Society in Britain and the USA, 2 vols, (Aldershot: Scolar, 1994). For South America see Susan Eckstein, Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements, new edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). For the Middle East see John Chalcraft, Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). A huge step in the direction of a global history of the communist movement has been taken by Steve A. Smith, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). On the anarchist movement see James Joll, The Anarchists (London: Eyre &Spottiswoode, 1968); Irving Louis Horowitz, The Anarchists (New York: Aldine Transaction, 2005).

Apart from surveys there has also been more detailed comparative and transnational work looking often at two or three, rarely more countries and comparing a variety of labour movements or looking at their inter-relationship and their exchanges. Some of the work in this category includes the book of the already mentioned Neville Kirk, and Stefan Berger, The British Labour Party and the German Social Democrats, 1900–1931, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); both, in their own ways, argue against theories of exceptionalism—in Kirk’s case against an American and in Berger’s case against a British, exceptionalism in labour history.

Some specific sub-themes have also been dealt with comparatively, for example the relationship between socialism and nationalism. For this see John Schwarzmantel, Socialism and the Idea of the Nation (London: Prentice Hall, 1991), and Stefan Berger and Angel Smith (eds), Nationalism, Labour and Ethnicity 1870–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), On migration and the labour movement see Dirk Hoerder, Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies: The European and North American Working Classes During the Period of Industrialization (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985). On labour and the women’s movement see Richard J. Evans, Comrades and Sisters: Feminism, Socialism and Pacifism in Europe, 1870–1945 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987); Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert (eds), Socialist Women: European Socialist Feminism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (New York: Elsevier, 1978); Helmut Gruber and Pamela Graves (eds), Women and Socialism; Socialism and Women: Europe Between the Two World Wars (Oxford: Berghahn, 1998).

Next to the comparative studies stand a variety of transnational studies that look more at transnational networks and connectivities than straightforward comparison. Two examples among many are Dorothee Schneider, Trade Unions and Community. The German Working Class in New York City, 1870–1900 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994), and Ad Knotter, ‘Transnational Cigarmakers: Cross-Border Labour Markets, Strikes, and Solidarity at the Time of the First International (1864–1873)’, International Review of Social History 3 (2014), pp. 409–442; Steven Parfitt, Brotherhood From a Distance: Americanization and the Internationalism of the Knights of Labor, International Review of Social History 3 (2013), pp. 463–491; Frank Wolff, ‘Eastern Europe Abroad: Exploring Actor-Networks in Transnational Movements and Migration History, The Case of the Bund’, International Review of Social History 2 (2012), pp. 229–255. Whilst there has been a vociferous debate between comparativists and those more interested in questions of political and cultural transfer, there is no reason to believe that the two methods cannot and should not be integrated in a truly transnational history of labour. See the methodological remarks in Stefan Berger, ‘Comparative History’, in Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore (eds), Writing History: Theory and Practice, 2nd edn (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).

The overwhelming majority of all studies on labour movement history are still national in orientation, reflecting the strong nationalization of labour history from its inception in the nineteenth century. For the latter aspect see Gitta Deneckere and Thomas Welskopp, ‘The “nation” and “class”: European national master-narratives and their social “other”’, in Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (eds), The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 135–170; Europe and North America are served best with those studies, and the organizational and ideological history of national labour movements has been thoroughly researched here, with a wealth of excellent studies available here. This is not really the case for the non-Western parts of the globe, where much work still remains to the done, in particular with regard to Asia and Africa. For Africa see Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

The strong organizational and history of ideas approach to the history of labour movements was challenged theoretically by the turn to cultural history. Interestingly E.P. Thompson had already stressed the importance of integrating a cultural analysis of labour in the 1960s, constructively taking up some of the ideas of Antonio Gramsci and challenging the dominant Althusserian structuralism of the times. See on the concept of ‘moral economy’, E.P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’ (originally published in Past and Present, 1971), and ‘The Moral Economy Reviewed’ both in: Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: The New Press 1993), pp. 185–351. The more recent merger between cultural and social history is holding out hope that a global labour history will also avoid the sterile attempts to play off one against the other and adopt theoretical perspectives that will be capable of integrating social and cultural perspectives.

The labour movement has also been a strongly internationalist movement almost since its inception in Europe in the last third of the nineteenth century. Hence there is also an important body of work on the institutions of the various Internationals and on internationalism more generally. For reasons of space we can here only mention two good recent examples: Kevin J. Callahan, Demonstration Culture: European Socialism and the Second International, 1889–1914 (Leicester: Troubadour 2010), and Talbot Imlay, The Practice of Socialist Internationalism: European Socialists and International Politics, 1914–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, forthcoming).