The global or international division of labour refers to the transnational organization of production and how labour is mobilized and distributed across space, often crossing the boundaries of the nation state. During capitalism the global division of labour underwent important transformations, driven by capital's need for cheap labour and resources under the evolving conditions created by technological advancement. From the time of sixteenth-century colonialism, the European expansion into other parts of the world set the foundations for an organization of production and trade that saw the colonies become exporters of primary inputs, through the appropriation of land and the use of enslaved labour. The transfer of surplus from the colonized to the colonizing countries made it possible for the latter to embark on a process of industrialization that created a growing economic divergence between the industrializing countries in the West and the rest of the world. In the post colonial time, countries in the Global South have experienced economic growth and, in a few cases, industrialization, but this was not sufficient – for the vast majority of them – to catch up with the first industrializers. As production was increasingly organized into global supply chains, different stages of the productive process were relocated where the production costs were cheaper: in the Global South. This phase of neoliberal globalization constituted another key turning point in the global division of labour, when jobs in the export-oriented labour-intensive manufacturing and agriculture were created in the Global South and blue-collar jobs were lost in the deindustrializing Global North. Feminist analyses of the global division of labour at different historical times offer at least two central insights. First, the global division of labour entails not only production but also reproduction – from the early colonial time in the Americas and the Caribbean, where the control of reproduction was a crucial dimension of labour extraction, to the era of neoliberalism, marked by the rise of global care chains. Second, the transnational organization of production and reproduction is gendered, in that women take up specific types of employment that tend to be lower-paid and less secure. Not only that, there are also important dynamics of racialization that place women of colour and migrants in specific positions of disadvantage in the global division of labour.