By investigating the hitherto unstudied trans-colonial migration between Mauritius and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century, this article complicates liberal Eurocentric perceptions of global labor force formation under the auspices of colonial capital. Indeed, coercion, as depicted in liberal historiography, was a crucial component of indentured migration but indentured workers themselves sometimes availed of the opportunity of the global demand for their labor by engaging in trans-colonial migration. The dialectic of the formation of globalized indentured labor regime was such that while capital sought to confine workers to specific plantations, the very nature of the demand for labor enabled workers to defy the dictates of capital and further enabled them to move from one colony to another in search of better livelihoods and thus made them globally mobile. These migrations did not follow the so-called boundaries between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. Rather such migrations reflected workers’ search for jobs through trans-colonial networks within the framework of imperial domination.

“The Abstract Slave: Anti-Blackness and Marx's Method” presents an immanent critique of the Marxist value-form. While Marx could historically think the empirical reality of slavery appearing together with capitalism, the value-form theoretically unthinks the significance of the conjuncture slavery and capitalism. Even with attempts to recuperate Marxism from some of the errors of evolutionism, the content and form of slavery is not usually up for debate, only the status of its interaction with capitalist circuits (a rearrangement of difference within unity). Mirroring the Marxist methodology of rising from the “abstract” to the “concrete,” this article moves to substitute the abstraction of labor with that of slavery and closes by restaging the concrete development of “real subsumption” through the problem of abolition. Such a substitution deconstructs Marx's method by situating slavery's transposition to brute force (and race's reduction to false consciousness) as the productive source of the capitalist form of value.

This article examines the historical processes by which low or non-caste groups have situated themselves in Pakistan's waste economy. Adopting caste as a category of governance, the colonial regime implemented policies and interventions that not only impacted these groups in the Punjab, but also cemented enduring connections between caste, waste work, and governance, which have subsequently shaped the trajectories of waste work in cities like Lahore. Moving beyond the framework of the “abject,” this article emphasizes caste as a historical category through which social stratification and exclusions have materialized across South Asia, and examines how low or non-caste groups have organized themselves in Pakistan's waste economy, which has resulted from rapid urbanization, bureaucratization and informalization, regional labor migration, consumptive economies, urban development, and sociopolitical relations. Rather than inhabiting the abjectness of capitalism, modernity, or caste hierarchy, this article argues that these groups have carved out a space for themselves and their wider social relations in cities like Lahore in Pakistan, where social inequalities and stratification are undeniable facets of urban life.

This article highlights the heterogeneity within the Mexican women's labor force after the 1910 Mexican Revolution by profiling the coffee sorters in the Central Veracruz export industry. It contends that working women were not entirely subordinated to the patriarchal culture usually found in the workplace despite the seasonal and low-skilled nature of their work. Their work experience, ability to support their families, and the new social networks on and off the shop floor contributed to the shaping of their dual identity as women and as workers. In their life histories, these working women sought to construct an alternative working-class women's culture based on the meaning and importance of women's work, which reconfigured provincial conceptions of gender and class.

Building upon theories of the state as an “effect” of multiple, sometimes contradictory practices and narratives, I argue that Indian business elites in Dubai play an important role in both bounding the state as distinct from the economy and legitimizing its power. I focus, therefore, on the forms of citizenship and subjectivity that are being produced in Dubai and how the legitimacy of the state relies not just on the recruitment of citizen subjects, but also on those who are excluded from belonging—like Indian elites in Dubai. Neoliberal narratives and practices of economic “freedom” by elite expatriates mask the ways in which foreign elites are complicit with the state in producing social and economic hierarchies that benefit both citizens and elite expatriates while maintaining a structure of labor migration that significantly disadvantages the majority of foreign residents living in the United Arab Emirates.

In 1905, Henry Nevinson, at the time a well-known British journalist, visited Angola. He discovered that the slave trade was still going on in secret in that region, many years after it had officially been abolished. Deep inside Southern Africa slaves were caught; they were forced to walk hundreds of miles to the coast until they arrived at Katumbella, where “the slaves were rested, sorted out, dressed, and then taken on over the fifteen miles to Benguela, usually disguised as ordinary carriers.” In Benguela's main street,

In the late 1920s, the colonial government of French Equatorial Africa decided to employ Chinese workers to complete their railway line. The employment of Chinese indentured labor had already become the subject of considerable international criticism. The Chinese government was concerned that the French could not guarantee worker health and safety and denied their application. However, the recruitment went ahead with the help of the government of French Indochina. This article explores the nature of Chinese worker protest during their time in Africa and their struggle against French notions of what constituted appropriate treatment of so-called “coolie” labor.

The mechanization of Guadalajara's corn mills—along with the building of the new revolutionary state, competition between secular and Catholic labor movements, the conflict between church and state, and changes in the labor force—created the conditions for a militant feminist working-class politics in the Mexico of the late 1920s and 1930s. The convergence of these processes sheds light on how men and women workers, entrepreneurs and the revolutionary state, and male and female labor leaders attributed different cultural meanings to sexual difference, work, and politics at this time. The example of women workers in the tortilla industry highlights how differences in gender and class became culturally significant and why specific gender differences changed and became politicized when mechanization at the corn mills was accelerated in the 1930s. This story challenges the myth of women's passivity, reveals the significance that women's mobilization and militancy had on the labor movement, and illustrates the difficulties encountered by secular feminists and organized women workers in a male-dominated trade union movement. It concludes that women gained a bittersweet victory by obtaining certain rights while remaining marginalized by male-dominated institutions.

This article reveals the range of tasks performed by military laborers in twentieth-century Bolivia, distinguishing between martial and nonmartial labor to understand how productive tasks became central to the military's mission. The detailed exploration of soldiers' laboring lives shows that their work as strikebreakers, builders, agriculturalists, and domestic servants reinforced social hierarchies and supported private capital. Despite hopes that military service would unify a diverse populace, soldiers on the indigenous end of the spectrum disproportionally performed the more abject labors. The first section charts the development of nonmartial labor and shows how some soldiers objected to working conditions by invoking the dissonance between martial discourse and nonmartial experiences. The article then turns to the increasing legibility of nonmartial labor in the aftermath of the Chaco War (1932–1935). The final section details the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement's efforts to fold the army into the 1952 Revolution by emphasizing soldiers' productive labor.

How do migrants assert their rights as workers when they do not enjoy the rights of citizenship in their countries of employment and are unable to assert their human rights through international conventions? This article focuses on the work of Migrante-International's Middle East chapter in Saudi Arabia. Specifically, it examines the ways Philippine migrants strategically assert their rights as Philippine citizens transnationally in local labor struggles. This case study of transnational labor activism in a region where migrant workers enjoy limited rights not only highlights how migrants exercise their agency in spite of major obstacles, but it also offers up novel ways to think about worker organizing within the context of contemporary neoliberal globalization for labor activists and scholars concerned with the labor rights of migrants.

Most efforts of the current domestic workers’ rights movement in the United States have focused on ending the exclusion of domestic workers from employment protections that were institutionalized during the New Deal in the 1930s. These victories have been significant in both policy and culture. They have brought public attention to the invisibilized world of domestic work, and state recognition has validated this often-degraded occupation as “real work.” However, enforcement has been a problem. As domestic worker organizing has matured, it has expanded to include pushing the boundaries of state-ensured minimum standards as well as raising standards in the industry through direct intervention in the relationship between workers and employers. These programs are significant in that they reflect a different strategic approach—often with the goal of base building—than the earlier model of domestic worker advocacy and organizing.

Cheshire, Britain, and the towns of Widnes and St. Helens, where many of the world's first chemical factories and towns were created in the nineteenth century, is an especially important place to study historical responses to industrial pollution and its social costs. This paper, based on newly recovered archival sources about the Victorian alkali industry, explores the role of visual imagery, particularly drawings and lantern slides, in materializing the connection between labor in chemical trades, the disposal of waste, and poor health outcomes for diverse communities in the late nineteenth century. The paper will focus on the writer Robert Sherard's article “White Slaves of England” (1897), a work that, more than many of its time, drew national attention to the plight of nineteenth-century chemical workers by pictorializing the ways that work in heavy chemical industries, many of them involving waste and its disposal, affected individual workers and their lives. The paper concludes with critical reflections on the current state of scholarship on images, waste, and labor, areas for more needed work, and paths forward.

Beginning in the mid-1930s, Western Hemisphere nations turned to social insurance legislation—guided by the new concept of social security—in response to the economic crisis of the Great Depression. Supported by the International Labor Organization (ILO), national-level policy makers introduced a range of measures in recognition of the 1935 US Social Security Act. As Europe descended into a war, inter-Americanism served as way to maintain regional economic, and later military, security. This article describes an era of social welfare diplomacy in the Americas, one in which countries south of the US border projected their own distinct visions of social policy. Regional solidarity served as an integral step in the development of ideas concerning international social and economic rights. Placing President Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy in a wider frame, this analysis of ILO inter-American activities reveals an intriguing moment in history, when leaders from several nations saw economic development, trade, future growth, social security, and labor rights as integrally bound together.

Studies of globalization in India have focused on high-tech industries, such as call centers in urban areas. But a widespread effect of the globalization of India's economy is the growth of “rural outsourcing”—the expansion of urban-based industries into the countryside. Rural outsourcing links to longer histories of decentralized manufacturing in India. This ethnography of the decentralized industry of sari embroidery in Southern Bengal shows that workers are ambivalent toward it. Among villagers who participate in the embroidery industry, I found three scales of ambivalence: ambivalence toward the product; toward the production process; and finally, toward the politics of this form of decentralized production. Ambivalence is not a transient or uncertain position of confusion or ambiguity. Rather, it is a widely-held expression of the dual and contradictory positions that workers and contractors hold in relation to the industry. I argue that the “frictions” of globalization find expression not just in resistance or contestation, but also in articulated positions of ambivalence toward globalization processes.

An examination of the diverse patterns of women's migration challenges abiding stereotypes of Indian history: the urban worker as a male “peasant-proletariat” and women as inhabiting a timeless rural past. When men opted for circulation between town and country, wives and children undertook the actual labor of cultivation for the survival of “peasant-proletariat” households. Men retained their status as heads of the family and, even though absent for long periods, their proprietary interests in the village. Yet towards the end of the nineteenth century, many unhappy, deserted, and barren wives, widows, and other women were able to escape to the burgeoning cities of Calcutta and Bombay and the coal mines, where they experienced new processes of social and economic marginalization.

Much attention has been given to women's migration to overseas colonies and the Assam teagardens. Such migration has been seen as doubly negative, not only harnessing women to the exploitative contract regimes, but also subjecting them to sexual violation. A general assumption is that women were deceived, decoyed and even “kidnapped,” since there was no possibility of “voluntary” migration by women. Such a view of women's recruitment was produced by a variety of interests opposed to women's, especially married women's, migration, and eventually influenced the colonial state to legally prohibit, in 1901, women's “voluntary” migration to Assam plantations. This provision was an explicit endorsement of male claims on women's labor within the family.

This article surveys the evolution of labor history writing as an increasingly vibrant subfield of Ottoman history. It addresses labor historians outside of Ottoman history and for their benefit traces why and how workers almost completely were left out of Ottoman historical writing until c. 1970. Thereafter, Ottoman historians have more frequently discussed workers and their histories. At first focusing on organized workers and their relations with the state, these writings then shifted to labor in action. Thus, Ottoman labor history writing paralleled, in many respects, that of other fields of history. More recently, attention has been given to non-guild, non-union labor—including women and children—and its activities in the workplace.

During the first three decades of the twentieth century, a cluster of self-educated workers that called themselves obreros ilustrados (enlightened workers) sought to dominate the means of knowledge production, reproduction, and documentation. The discourses produced by this group of working-class intellectuals did not challenge but complemented the elite's contempt towards the laboring masses. In order to be legible in the “Archive of Puertorriqueñidad”—an archive crossed by centuries of colonialism, slavery, and imperial violence—these ragged intellectuals created various layers of exclusions that silenced those individuals that unapologetically upheld their Blackness. These silencing practices not only had power in the moment in which they took place but also influenced later historical production. To explore these dynamics, this paper uses the stories of Juana Colón and Mateo Pérez Sanjurjo. Both were highly-respected Black illiterate labor organizers that were absent in the historical narratives obreros ilustrados wrote about the labor movement. Ultimately, this article seeks to create counterarchives by unearthing, imagining, and retelling the lives of those that were not deemed worthy of being represented in the historical record.

The hand has long been a symbol of what makes human beings human. It is still used to convey this meaning, despite the decline of manual labor and the replacement of manual dexterity by machines, robots, and computers. A number of twentieth-century images remind us of the hand's labor power: for example, Fernand Leger's 1951 homage to Vladimir Mayakowsky, his earlier 1918 painting, “The Mechanic,” which is a veritable icon of the worker whose hand forms the dynamic compositional element (Fig. 1), and Diego Rivera's “Detroit Industry Frescoes,” where gigantic hands symbolize humanity's struggle with the material world. In European visual traditions, the iconography of the hand as labor power is imprinted by three types of images: Renaissance imagery, industrial allegory, and artisan and worker iconography. In Renaissance art, Michelangelo, in “The Creation” in the Sistine Chapel, reinterpreted the Biblical reference to God's breathing life into the world by adding the barely touching hands of God and Adam, thereby suggesting the virtue of active work. Industrial allegory, developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, emphasized the “bourgeois” view of work as a sign of goaloriented, planned achievement and success in the world, with the hand depicted as a tool that creates new tools and hence the organ that makes humanity the crowning work of creation.