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  • On the Road to Global Labour History: A Festschrift for Marcel van der Linden ed. by Karl Heinz Roth
  • Julia Martinez
Karl Heinz Roth, ed., On the Road to Global Labour History: A Festschrift for Marcel van der Linden (Leiden: Brill, 2018). pp. 433. €156.00 cloth.

This inspiring Festschrift for historian Marcel van der Linden is aptly titled On the Road to Global Labour History, recognising the pivotal role that Marcel played in developing this field. Included in the bibliography are Marcel’s publications over five decades, revealing the extent of his geographic breadth. The theme of moving beyond national boundaries is prominent in his work, with titles such as Workers of the World, Labour History Beyond Borders, and Transnational Networks. His internationalism is also indicated in the many translated works, in Italian, Spanish, and Chinese, as well as many in the original German. In this Festschrift several chapters have been translated from the German by Ben Lewis.

Part One of the collection contains chapters combining historiography with a fond nostalgia, paying tribute to Marcel’s intellectual curiosity and generosity. As Karin Hofmeester explains, Marcel’s ambitious quest has been [End Page 253] to transform the field of labour history using a combined “comparisons and interactions” (6) method. This method is evident in his edited collections, as well as in the journal International Review of Social History during his time as editor. While Marcel has written on the particular – including strikes, trade unionism, and certain occupation groups – he is best known for asking broad questions of labour history. Aiming at a more inclusive historiography, he asked: how can we combat Eurocentrism in labour history? How do we include those workers left out of narrow formulations of the working class? How can we unpack categories such as free and unfree labour? As Angelika Ebbinghaus notes, Marcel also took up feminist critiques, calling for a feminist reading of “workplace, organisation and ideology” (25). Many of his questions were challenging, requiring collaborative comparative research: Why did revolutionary syndicalism expand in some countries and not others?

In the concluding chapter, editor Karl Heinz Roth acknowledges Marcel’s rare form of cosmopolitan “encyclopaedic thought” (263). Tracing his career, we learn that Marcel was an early advocate for international history. In 1985, he ran the 50th anniversary conference for the International Institute for Social History with global themes of colonialism, racism, and internationalism. While initially his research was transatlantic in scope, Roth explains that by the 1990s Marcel was moving towards a global or transnational perspective, eschewing labour history’s earlier reliance on the nation-state as a “natural framework” (317). One important aspect of Marcel’s global agenda was to bring together Asian and European labour historians. In chapter 2, Chitra Joshi, Prabhu P. Mohapatra and Rana P. Behal recall the inauguration of the Association of Indian Labour Historians in 1990, an inspiring event with Marcel and Jan Breman, that brought together “the major practitioners of labour history of India” (12).

Marcel was one of the advocates for a new “translocal” analysis whereby micro-histories of working communities take on global significance, demonstrating local connections to the world. Perhaps with this in mind, Part Two includes an eclectic mix of chapters from the broadly comparative to local studies, covering slavery in Spanish Americas, the global silver trade, post-war Iran and Turkey, and post-socialist China.

Part Three explores key methodological and conceptual questions in labour history, with chapters on comparison, migration, labour relations, and capitalism. Dirk Hoerder’s chapter concerns migration historiography and its limitations. He remarks on the problematic separation in the 1980s of the sub-fields of white European migration, African Atlantic slavery and Asian migrations. He takes the term migration to cover a range of mobilities, not limited to permanent migration. Concerned also with a denial of agency to certain migrants, he is critical of how “slaves and other forced worker-migrants were considered passive” (205) and how women migrants (before [End Page 254] the 1990s feminisation of migration) were “subsumed under men” and “made invisible” (206).

While mentioned only in passing, during a visit to Australia some 20 years ago, Marcel worked with Australian labour historians. Andrew...

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