Description
Book SynopsisThis collection of seventeen essays takes its inspiration from the scholarly achievements of the Dutch historian Jan Lucassen. They reflect a central theme in his research: the history of labor. The essays deal with five major themes: the production of specific commodities or services (diamonds, indigo, cigarettes, mail delivery by road runners); occupational groups (informal street vendors, prostitutes, soldiers, white-collar workers in the Dutch East India Company, VOC); geographical and social mobility (career opportunities on non-Dutch officers in the VOC, immigration into early-modern Holland; the influence of migrants on labor productivity; income differentials as migration incentives); contexts of labor relations (late medieval labor laws, subsistence labor and female paid labor, Russian peasant-migrant laborers, diverging political trajectories of cane-sugar industries); and the origins of labor-history libraries and archives.
Table of ContentsIntroduction, Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen WORK PROCESSES Working for Diamonds from the 16th to the 20th Century, Karin Hofmeester Green Plants into Blue Cakes: Working for Wages in Colonial Bengal’s Indigo Industry, Willem van Schendel Dak Roads, Dak Runners and the Re-ordering of Communication Networks, Chitra Joshi Changing Production Systems and Forms of Labor Control in the Javanese Cigarette Industry: 1920s-1930s, Ratna Saptari OCCUPATIONS Selling in the Shadows: Peddlers and Hawkers in Early Modern Europe, Danielle van den Heuvel The Worst Class of Workers. Migration, Labor Relations and Living Strategies of Prostitutes around 1900, Lex Heerma van Voss Fighting for a Living in Europe and Asia, Erik-Jan Zürcher White Collar Workers of the VOC in Amsterdam, 1602-1795, Karel Davids MOBILITIES The Career Ladder to the Top of the Dutch East India Company: Could Foreigners also Become Commanders and Junior Merchants?, Jaap R. Bruijn & Femme S. Gaastra Demographic Change and Migration Flows in Holland between 1500 and 1800, Jan Luiten van Zanden & Maarten Prak The Economic Contribution of Labor Migrants in the European Maritime Labor Market of the Long Eighteenth Century, Jelle van Lottum Income Differentials, Institutions, and Religion: Working in the Rhineland or Pennsylvania in the Eighteenth Century, Richard W. Unger CONTEXTUALIZATIONS Labor Laws in Western Europe, 13th-16th Centuries: Patterns of Political and Socio-economic Rationality, Catharina Lis & Hugo Soly The First “Male Breadwinner Economy”? Dutch Married Women’s and Children’s Paid and Unpaid Work in Western Europe Perspective, c. 1600-1900, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk Wage Labor and the Household Economy: a Russian Perspective, 1600-2000, Gijs Kessler Cane Sugar and Unlimited Supplies of Labor in the 1930s: New Thinking and the Origin of Development Economics, Ulbe Bosma SOURCES Unwritten Autobiography: Labor History Libraries before World War I, Jaap Kloosterman Notes on Contributors Tabula Gratulatoria Index
