For a few years after its foundation in 1920 the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) attempted, energetically prompted by the Comintern, to work in solidarity with anticolonial movements in the British Empire. But after the Nazi victory in Germany the Comintern's principal concern was to defend the Soviet Union and the liberal democracies against the threat of fascism. British communists criticized the British Government for failing to defend the Empire against the threat from its imperial rivals. After the entry of the Soviet Union into the war in 1941 they vigorously supported the British war effort, including the defense of Empire. This was not though simply a manifestation of chauvinism. British communists believed that imperialism was suffering a strategic defeat by “progressive” forces and that colonial freedom would follow the defeat of fascism. These chimerical notions were greatly strengthened by the allies' promises of postwar peace, prosperity and international cooperation. In the last year or so of war British communists were clearly worried that these promises would not be redeemed, but nevertheless supported British reassertion of power in such places as Greece, Burma and Malaya. For the great majority of British communists, these were secondary matters when seen in the context of Labour's election victory of 1945 and its promised program of social-imperialist reform.

This essay adds the story of the Indian Labour Corps (ILC) to the narratives of the various “coloured” units brought in to France to deal with the manpower crisis that had overtaken that theater of the First World War in 1916. The label “coloured” or “native labour” justified inferior care and a harsher work and disciplinary regime than that experienced by white labor. However, official reports and newspaper coverage also expose a dense play of ethnographic comparison between the different colored corps. The notion was that to “work” natives properly, the managerial regimes peculiar to them also had to be imported into the metropolis. The register of comparison was also shaped by specific political and social agendas which gave some colored units more room than others to negotiate acknowledgement of their services. One dimension of the war experience for Indian laborers was their engagement with institutional and ethnic categorizations. The other dimension was the process of being made over into military property and the workers own efforts to reframe the environments, object worlds, and orders of time within which they were positioned. By creating suggestive equivalences between themselves and other military personnel, they sought to lift themselves from the status of coolies to that of participants in a common project of war service. At the same time, they indicated that they had not put their persons at the disposal of the state in exactly the same way as the sepoy.

Based on the combination of colonial archives and the analysis of several complaints published in Senegalese newspapers, this article sheds light on the daily compulsory reality experienced by local populations with regards to forced labor in colonial Senegal (1920s–1940s). In contrast to analyses approaching forced labor systems through the study of colonial bureaucratic routines, this article studies the reactions of local populations and the consequences for colonial labor policies. I introduce the notion of resilience in order to overcome the pitfalls of the resistance paradigm and bring new insight into attitudes of distance, refusal, and adaptation used by local populations as methods to “absorb the shock” of everyday colonial coercion. More broadly, this analysis leads us to interrogate the limits and fragility of the colonial enterprise, recalling that the colonial state was not an almighty administration and that it was, above all, based on abiding adaptations and empirical decisions.

This work analyzes evidence of the resistance of poor shantytown dwellers during Brazil's First Republic period (1889–1930), which corresponds to the emergence and consolidation of these favela settlements into the city of Rio de Janeiro. This text not only addresses the different forms of resistance practiced by shantytown residents during the attempts by the government to demolish their homes, but also pays special attention to the years between 1907 and 1927 when the people of Morro da Favela (currently Morro da Providência) ensured the permanence of their houses through street protests.

Cooks exploited the leverage offered by the publication of information about the prevailing insalubrity in restaurant kitchens when Paris was at the center of global attention during the World Fairs of 1889 and 1900. They framed the issue of workers’ health in connection with consumer safety and gastronomic reputation. Their movement succeeded in securing the law of July 11, 1903 with its encompassing, indeed ecological and ergonomic (rather than toxicological) perception of health risks on the job. Its principles benefitted a great majority of workers and employees. The chronicle of labor's contribution to the identification and regulation of health and safety issues on the job refutes claims about the indifference of the French working-class movement with regard to workers’ health. Attention to the cooks’ workplace experience, their politics, and the elaboration of labor legislation is an antidote to the tendency of narrating state- and institution-building as the history of providential individuals with big ideas.

Recent research on consumer culture and working-class femininity in the United States has argued that attention to fashionable clothing and dime novels did not undermine female working-class identities, but rather provided key resources for creating those identities. In this essay I consider whether we can see a similar process of appropriation by working-class women in Latin America. There women employed in factories had to contend with widespread denigration of the female factory worker. Looking first at the employer-run “Centers for Domestic Instruction” in São Paulo, I argue that “proper femininity” in these centers—frequented by large numbers of working-class women—reflected middle-class notions of the skilled housewife, and situated working-class women as nearly middle class. What we see is a process of “approximation,” not appropriation. I then look at the case of Argentina (especially Greater Buenos Aires) where Peronism also promoted “traditional” roles for working-class women but where Eva Perón emerges as a working-class heroine. The figure of Evita—widely reviled by women of the middle and upper classes—becomes a means to construct an alternative, class-based femininity for working-class women.

This essay considers the biomedical framing of labor in tropical Australia from the late-nineteenth century until the early twenty-first century. This entails critical inquiry into racialized estimates of labor capacity or fitness, as well as skeptical examination of medical assumptions of risk and danger. Racial theories and medical conjectures have constituted flexible analytic toolkits that might adjust, adapt, and justify a variety of exploitative labor practices in Australia’s tropical north. Debates about coolie or indentured labor were never simply economic calculations: They also concerned notions of races and their proper places, and expressed particular moral sensibilities and medical fears. Thus labor history becomes entangled with histories of racial formation and of science and medicine

During the US military occupation of Haiti, domestic workers performed the crucial labor that allowed Marine households, the city of Port-au-Prince, and the entire country to function. In this sense, they represented a human infrastructure for the entire occupation. Their experiences show that the debates over labor, race, and sovereignty that defined the high politics of the occupation actually reached into private spaces where face-to-face interactions between occupier and occupied occurred. Domestic work, like other types of labor in the occupation, ran the gamut from highly coerced forms of unpaid child labor and convict work to various configurations of wage labor. Domestic sites influenced mutual processes of race-making, including the US exoticist obsession with Haitian Vodou. Servants’ conflicts with their Marine employers included—but ultimately went beyond—daily struggles over labor. Their proximity to marines influenced domestics’ participation in acts of anti-imperial activism, such as the Caco rebellion, and explains why servants were invoked by radical journalists and cultural nationalist writers who opposed US rule. Domestics’ activities also highlight under-explored areas of Haitian activism, such as their use of formal state institutions to seek redress and their participation in emerging forms of urban protest that included other members of the urban working class. Although novel and relatively small during the occupation, such urban protests have become a staple of Haitian politics in the present day.

This article examines the history of development and forced labor in Barue, a rural district in central Mozambique, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Barue was designated as a labor reserve, whose economic role was to send forced workers into migrant labor elsewhere. This was slated to change in the early 1960s, with the rise of a new developmental discourse in the Portuguese empire. This discourse promised to transform the economic model of Barue and other rural districts, by outlawing forced labor, minimizing migrant labor, and promoting rural agriculture. The Portuguese government, however, lacked the resources and the commitment necessary to actually change Barue's economy. Instead of development transforming Barue's economic model, the economic model transformed development, which was redefined as a series of modest social and economic improvements which neither changed Barue's economy nor reduced its dependence upon migrant labor. Nonetheless, while this narrower definition of “development” did not fulfill the transformative promise of its discursive progenitor, it was compatible with development's broader objective of defending and justifying the Portuguese empire against the threat of decolonization. The ultimate goal of safeguarding Portuguese rule made it possible to reconcile a discourse founded on change with a reality marked by continuity.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, critical attention has increasingly focused on the remaining world system, capitalist in nature and anchored in the World Trade Organization (WTO), founded in 1994 as the successor to the 1948 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). As the 1990s progressed, a smattering of exciting new intellectual work began to appear on the social and environmental impacts of the international trade and investment regime, especially given its apparently negative impact on many developing countries and the world's working people. “The distinction somewhat comfortably maintained by ‘trade hands’ who managed the post-World War II international economy—that trade is strictly a commercial function with no immediate connection to social concerns—has evaporated under the pressure of political and social forces generated by the globalization of the economy.”

The 1980s and 1990s were decades of great creativity in Indian labor history. The study of labor moved from a long-standing institutional focus on trade unions to a study of workers themselves, as well as from the economism and determinism that had characterized many previous writings. A growing interest in labor led to the first conference devoted to Indian labor history at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam in 1995 and the founding of the Association of Indian Labour Historians the following year. The dynamism and the new intellectual horizons of Indian labor history in that period are captured in the work of three major historians: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, and Chitra Joshi. For the purposes of this essay, there is no need to review their contributions in detail (not least because such overviews may be found elsewhere), but it is nevertheless essential to provide a quick sketch of the arguments of each.

Japan's war in Asia and the Pacific would have ground to a halt long before 1945 without the labor of millions of foreign workers, most of them mobilized against their will. For example, production of coal (then Japan's primary energy source) depended in large part on coerced labor from Korea, a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945. Throughout Japan's wartime empire, at least fifteen million Asians were put to work, often under brutally exploitative conditions, constructing roads, bridges, and air fields; digging minerals; and building boats, among many other projects. Untold thousands died because of harsh treatment, inadequate food and medical care, and poor planning. Many surviving workers, some of whom were left permanently disabled, are still waiting today for the wages they were promised. Such a large, destructive enterprise naturally had consequences that outlived the war. Coercive labor mobilization tore families and communities apart and sharpened class resentments, contributing to revolutionary upheavals after August 1945 in Korea and Indonesia, for example. In Japan itself, where mobilization took place on a relatively small scale and with comparatively little coercion, it left a complex, contradictory legacy, invigorating the labor movement in some ways and strengthening the hand of capital in others. Unlike the situation in Germany, where corporations have recently agreed to compensate wartime forced workers, both the state and corporations in Japan have refused to consider compensation for the foreign workers who kept Japan's war machine running from 1939 to 1945.

Labor historians have heretofore presented bifurcated portrayals of the relationship between defense workers and the wartime, corporatist state during the Second World War. While liberal CIO leaders energetically tried to establish labor's greater representation in wartime mobilization and politics through patriotic social unionism, militant rank and filers turned out to be antistate wildcatters. In contrast, this local study of Brewster workers producing naval aircraft suggests that the wartime fetish with patriotic productivity had converging impacts on the relationship of both international union leaders and rank and filers with the state. Industrial mobilization by the military simultaneously demanded and impeded orderly expansion of production, which in the process manufactured faltering companies like Brewster. Brewster workers, criticizing corporate and military mismanagement and calling for state intervention as a political remedy in their political letters and confidential reports, intensified their contests for joint control of production, employment, and planning. However, their struggles for patriotic control were contingent upon the Navy's continuous demands for Brewster planes, skills, and facilities and thus could not survive reconversion downsizing in defense production. Union leaders retreated into organizing new shops in metropolitan New York, which primarily involved routine interplays between few union leaders and NLRB officials. The reconversion at Brewster marked the postwar bureaucratization of defense workers' relationship with the state.

Focusing specifically on colonial Ghana between 1855 and 1914, this article aims to situate the history of child labor in colonial Africa within the larger historiography of African labor history. Relying primarily on the records of the Basel Mission, this article complicates the narrative of labor history by studying how the mission acquired and sustained the labor of children and youth at various mission stations as part of the greater “missionary project.” This article argues that childhood in colonial Ghana can be viewed as a site of contestation between the competing interests of patriarchy, race, and colonial and missionary authority, in which the labor of children was used to achieve a larger degree of control and influence in the region.

The notion of the “second serfdom” has to be revisited. I claim that the introduction, the evolution, and the abolition of serfdom in Russia should be seen as a long-term process, beginning no later than the late sixteenth century and ending at the eve of the First World War. In particular, I show that serfdom was never officially institutionalized in Russia and that the rules usually evoked to justify this argument actually were not meant to “bind” the peasantry but to distinguish noble estate owners from state-service nobles and “bourgeois.” Contrary to what has been argued by Witold Kula and Immanuel Wallerstein, the rise of capitalism in the West did not exploit the rise of serfdom in the East, but both East and West were part of the same global wave of commercialization, protoindustrialization, and industrialization.