On November 20, 1997 labor historians from several European countries and North America gathered for a three-day colloquium in Roubaix, France to discuss their research on skilled European workers from the sixteenth through the twentieth century. The location was quite fitting; Roubaix is located in the northeast corner of France near the Belgian border. From the sixteenth century on the textile, coal, and later steel industries further to the south in Lorraine, made this one of Europe's most important industrial regions. Today it is one of Western Europe's most de-industrialized regions. The call for papers published in both French and English explicitly cites unemployment and industrial decline at the dawn of the twenty-first century among the reasons to study industrial skill over the last four centuries. This fine collection of eighteen articles (fourteen in French and four in English) and a brief introduction by the editors is the fruit of that gathering. Individual papers explore how skill intersected with patterns of labor migration, the ongoing process of skill formation and construction, and labor markets. Taken together, the papers offer a rich base of comparison across time and space. Unfortunately, limited space prevents discussion here of all of the contributions.