At the beginning of the 1990s the discipline of labour history seemed to be in serious crisis. The editorial in Supplement 1 to this journal in 1993 was seriously concerned that, having peaked during the 1960s and 1970s, interest in labour history had declined very rapidly by the 1990s. The decline of “old labour history” prompted the question whether this was the end of labour history itself. The current phase of globalization, coinciding with the rapid decline of the industrial working class in advanced capitalist countries, the retreat of the state, the emergence of subcontracting, and the demise of the Soviet Union, was the context for nascent doubts about the foundational basis of labour history.