This special section can be seen as part of a tradition of special issues of International Labor and Working-Class History (ILWCH) and the International Review of Social History (IRSH) that comment on the state of the field of Ottoman labor historiography, describe its achievements and caveats, and set the agenda for future research. The late Donald Quataert, pioneer of Ottoman labor history, started this tradition in 2001, when he edited this journal's special issue Labor History in the Ottoman Middle East, 1700–1922. Touraj Atabaki and Gavin D. Brockett followed in 2009 with their special issue of the IRSH Ottoman and Republican Turkish Labour History. With the current special section we aim to add to this tradition. In the first section of our introduction, we will provide a brief overview of the main conclusions of the first two special issues, and shed some light on what happened after 2009. In the second section, we will discuss what we hope to add: an approach based on the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations that can help us to reconstruct the development of labor relations in the Ottoman Empire and its successor states. We describe this approach and results of the project worldwide so far. The third section starts with a brief overview of the Ottoman/Turkish Republic branch of the Collaboratory that focuses mainly on Anatolia and its views on sources and methodologies. It will describe the article by Karin Hofmeester and Jan Lucassen in this special section as result of these activities and the articles by Hülya Canbakal and Alpay Filiztekin and İrfan Kovidas and Yahya Araz as results of other projects that link up perfectly with the Collaboratory approach. Special attention will be devoted to the town of Bursa and its hinterland from the sixteenth until the twentieth century, putting the developments in this city in the broader perspective of Ottoman-Anatolian and Turkish labor history.

Recently, Ottoman labor history and historiography has been moving beyond the “classical” labor history period of the nineteenth and twentieth century, shifting attention from mere wage work to other types of labor relations including unfree labor. Often focusing on one particular region, changes in work and labor relations are being followed over longer period of time. This article wants to contribute to this historiography by discussing tax registers as a possible source to reconstruct labor relations. It takes the province of Bursa, its towns and surrounding villages in the late fifteenth and sixteenth century as a case study to reconstruct labor relations, detect shifts over time and to try to explain these changes within the socio- and economic context of Bursa.

The most widely accepted narrative about the long-term history of slavery in Ottoman lands rests on a supply-side story. According to this, military and diplomatic factors reduced the inflow of slaves from the seventeenth century onwards and, consequently, exorbitant prices turned slaveholding into a luxury inaccessible to all but the top elite. Using evidence from probate inventories of the city of Bursa and its hinterland from 1460 to 1880, the present study examines this narrative in light of the incidence of slave-ownership and prices. We observe substantial decline in slaveholding already before the beginning of the government reforms concerning slavery and slave trade in the nineteenth century. We also find a decline in slave prices, both absolute and relative to wages. This is unexpected. Further analysis suggests, on the one hand, that a different supply factor, relative increase in the African slave population due to changes in the global traffic may have been instrumental in these trends, which links Bursa's non-colonial market to world slavery. On the other hand, examination of the consumption/investment preferences of the wealthy suggests that demand for slaves, too, may have declined, we surmise, in response to demographic and social change affecting alternative labor costs as well as cultural change affecting the meaning of slaveholding.

This article focuses on children taken by Istanbulite families for upbringing and employment in the Ottoman capital during the 1800–1900 period. It suggests that domestic child labor which was shaped by the concept of ‘charity’ and economic interests during the first half of the nineteenth century progressively turned into wage labor during the second half of the century. The study claims that the nineteenth century witnessed a transformation of labor relations in the domestic service market, implying the transition from reciprocal to commodified labor. The labor of children employed in domestic services underwent a monetization process throughout the nineteenth century. Parallel to this monetization, the status of children under foster care or in domestic service came to be determined by standardized legal contracts.

This article explores narratives of heterosexual romance and conjugality in Wazirpur, a neighbourhood in north west Delhi, dominated by the steel industry and populated by a largely migrant workforce. Focusing primarily on two generations of women, it considers how the relationship between romantic love and marriage is articulated, performed and imagined. The oral accounts presented here suggest a multidirectional pattern of marital mobility, which is grounded in social conventions of conjugality. Familial tensions and social fault lines appear over marital decisions, crystallizing especially when elopements or ‘court marriages’ take place. The romantic relationships and forms of courtship in Wazirpur have to discursively and spatially negotiate the tensions between social approval and individual choice. While increasingly, a considerable degree of significance is accorded to the emotional bond between the couple, parental support and the public performance of respectability remain central to marital formations. The article suggests that the intimate and the emotional are not only located in the interior of the individual but are forged by intersecting and often competing registers of social regulation.

Starting in the late 19 th century, workers from north India came to constitute the backbone of the urban and industrial labour force in Calcutta and neighboring mill municipalities. As they settled in and around the colonial metropolis, these Hindustani workers maintained strong connections with their rural homes. One generation after the other, they reproduced this dual settlement over the following decades. This bi-local structure of labour circulation, which linked village and city through the constant coming and going of men and women, progressively broke down from the late 20 th century onwards, following the closure of the large textile, engineering and paper industries which underpinned the economic vitality of the Calcutta region. The article sketches out the history of this socio-spatial configuration over the second half of the 20 th century, through the life histories of two migrant Hindustani workers. Born around 1940, Siraj Prajapati and Mohan Lal both spent the greater part of their working lives in Calcutta's industrial suburbs. Siraj, a potter by caste, was engaged in the artisanal production tea-cups in Howrah. Born into one of the most marginalized sections of north Indian society, Mohan managed to train as a mason, and was employed in the Titagarh Paper Mill through the 1960s and 70s. Both have now settled back in their respective villages of eastern Uttar Pradesh. Teasing out the contradictory ways in which both men frame their life trajectories, the article contributes a micro-perspective to the social history of rural-urban migration in post-colonial north India.

The geographical term “Southeast Asia” dates from the 1930s, and came to denote a topic for academic studies in the early days of the Cold War. As such, it includes Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indochina, Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines. Southeast Asia has become thoroughly incorporated in the global economy over the past 150 years; first, as a producer of commodities, and later, as a supplier of cheap garments and electronic components. Under Dutch colonialism and British hegemony—the latter established by the conquest of Burma and the imposition of free trade on Siam and the Philippines in the 1850s—Southeast Asia was turned into a key provider of commodities for the industrializing countries. During high colonialism, from 1870 to 1930, the region became increasingly intertwined, via Singapore as the central port and through the role of mainland Southeast Asia as the rice basket for the plantations of maritime Southeast Asia. After the Second World War, the region was the world's most violent frontier of containment for communist expansion. In recent decades, Southeast Asia has become integrated in global commodity chains as a producer of cheap industrial goods, often as a subcontractor for more advanced economies, such as those of Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, and later on, Southeast China.

Crumbling smokestacks, shuttered furnaces, and abandoned quarries are all striking representations of deindustrialization. These and other images construct a discourse whose ideological undertones, far from confining them to the realm of symbolic nostalgia, have profound effects on contemporary societies. In 2015, within the European Labor History Network (ELHN), a working group on historical cultures of labor under conditions of deindustrialization (working group) began to critically study and reflect on this nascent theme. It grew from a small group of researchers to a network of academics across Europe and beyond. Though the study of deindustrialization is not new, contemporary work offers insights into the continuing struggle over the meaning of classical industrial work and its loss, revealing unresolved social, cultural, and political tensions. Yet, existing representations of deindustrialization have been criticized as “smokestack nostalgia.” In order to chart how we understand contemporary industrial decay in our political, cultural, and economic climate, the working group explores representations and more-than representations of loss and regeneration in deindustrialized regions, primarily in Europe but widening to include a growing global network.

When the curtain closed on the first conference of the German Labour History Association (GLHA) that dealt with the topic “Freedom of Labour under Capitalism” and took place at the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, from February 6 to 8, 2020, the sixty plus members that had been in attendance were agreed: “German Labour History is back.” This was a statement that was repeated on the banner of the GLHA proudly presenting its logo and summarizing its ambitions to unite all labor historians across German-speaking areas.

There are multiple public agencies in Brazil that operate for the purpose of inspection, investigation, and the levying of penalties for the crime of exploitation of labor in conditions analogous to slavery: These include the civil police, Federal Police, the Ministry of Labor, the Regional Labor Tribunals, the Public Ministry of Labor, the Federal Public Ministry, and the state-level public ministries, with branches that encompass the entire nation and others that focus on specific regions. The activities of each one of these entities is recorded in different types of documents that are processed at various levels and can cover considerable amounts of time, depending on the deadlines and procedures involved. While the volume of this documentation is quite substantial, these records are not especially well known or widely used.

To scholars of labor and working-class history, police pose a problem—though, one less grave than the problem they pose to contemporary life in the United States, where roughly 10 percent of all homicide victims, and fully one-third of all people killed by strangers, die at police hands. How should police be categorized, and are they worthy subjects for the field? They are workers, of course, but they are also front-line agents of state repression and shock troops for capital. They remain robustly unionized, at least by US standards, but their unions are regressive and politically conservative, more concerned with shielding cops from accountability than with building solidarity. As individuals, many hail from working-class communities of color, but as a social and political category, their effect is to rationalize, reproduce, and fortify axes of racial and class difference. Their labor power is undoubtedly appropriated to produce surplus value, but is the exploitation they suffer superseded—or, to use a newly vexed word, “trumped”—by the work they do as exploiters?