This article introduces the main topics and intellectual concerns behind this Special Issue about Brazilian labour history in global context. Over the last two decades, Brazilian labour history has become an important reference point for the international debate about a renewed labour and working-class history. It has greatly broadened its conceptual scope by integrating issues of gender, race, and ethnicity and has moved towards studying the whole gamut of labour relations in Brazil’s history. Furthermore it has taken new perspectives on the history of movements. As background to this Special Issue, this introduction embeds current Brazilian labour historiography in its development as a field and in the country’s broader political and social history. Presenting the contributions, we highlight their connections with current debates in Global Labour History.

Precarious labour has been on the rise globally since the 1970s and 1980s. Changing labour relations in the cleaning industry are an example of these developments. From the 1970s onwards, outsourcing changed the position of industrial cleaners fundamentally: subcontracting companies were able to reduce labour costs by recruiting mainly women and immigrants with a weak position in the labour market. For trade unions, it was hard to find a way to counteract this tendency and to organize these workers until the Justice for Janitors (J4J) campaigns, set up by the US-based Service Employees International Union (SEIU) from the late 1980s, showed that an adequate trade union response was possible. From the mid-2000s, the SEIU launched a strategy to form international coalitions outside the US. It met a favourable response in several countries. In the Netherlands, a campaign modelled on the J4J repertoire proved extraordinarily successful. In this article, transnational trade unionism in the cleaning industry based on the J4J model will be analysed with a special focus on the Dutch case. How were local labour markets and trade union actions related to the transnational connections apparent in the rise of multinational cleaning companies, the immigrant workforce, and the role of the SEIU in promoting international cooperation between unions?

From the twelfth and certainly from the thirteenth century onwards, a social group of artisans with their own political and economic aspirations can be clearly delineated in Netherlandish towns. Bound through common skilled work, they made up a distinctive group with a self-image and a developing political vision and economic programme. Their “guild ideology” is increasingly clearly expressed in the sources they produced from the fourteenth century onwards as a self-confident group in urban society. Labour, certainly when organized within guild structures, was the cornerstone of community life, cultural experiences, and practical ethics. Even though there were socioeconomic differences among guildsmen and many geographical and chronological variations in the degree of political power they wielded, the ideal of artisan ideology in the late medieval Low Countries was one of a community of brotherly love and charity centred on the value of skilled labour.

This article explores the motives of Ghana’s Trades Union Congress in securing development assistance during the era of decolonization and early independence. African interests and agency in these complex processes of negotiation have not been sufficiently untangled to highlight the decisions that African trade unionists made as they aligned with, and fostered, international networks and alliances to meet particular development goals. By highlighting the perspectives and actions of Ghana’s trade union officials, the article demonstrates what Africans sought to achieve through connections to international trade union organizations. The Ghana case illustrates the ways in which African trade unionists actively engaged in the variable and competing politics and policies of local, regional, and global trade unionism in order to strengthen their union apparatus and meet shifting needs.

Samir Amin (1972) divided the African continent into three “macro-regions of colonial influence” with distinct socio-economic systems and labour practices: Africa of the colonial trade or peasant economy, Africa of the concession-owning companies, and Africa of the labour reserves. We argue that Mozambique encompassed all three different “macro-regions” in a single colony. We reconstruct government revenue (direct/indirect taxes) raised at a district level between 1930 and 1973 and find persisting differences in the “tax capacity” of the three regions throughout the colonial period. The tax systems, we claim, developed in response to existing local geographic and economic conditions, particularly to labour practices. Portuguese colonial rule adapted to and promoted labour practices such as migration and forced labour to maximize revenue. The extent to which the lack of integration played a role in the post-colonial state and fiscal failure should be studied further.

The nineteenth-century Brazilian Amazon was characterized by a wide variety of unfree labor performed by Indians, mestiços, free blacks, freedpersons, and slaves. Since the mid-eighteenth century, the Portuguese Crown’s failure to promote the mass influx of enslaved Africans resulted in legislation that successively institutionalized and regularized coerced labor, limiting the mobility of individuals in the lower classes and obligating them to work against their will. Initially, this was restricted to Indians, but the measures were eventually applied to the entire free population of color. This article discusses the conditions under which these laws emerged and their impact on the living conditions of the population subject to them, placing the nineteenth-century Amazonian experience within wider historiographical debates about free and unfree labor.

This article explores the discursive and practical entanglements of women’s work and sex trafficking, in Britain and internationally, in the early twentieth century. It examines discussions about trafficking and women’s work during a period that was instrumental in codifying modern, international conceptions of ‘trafficking’ and argues that porous and faulty borders were drawn between sex work, women’s licit work, and their sexual exploitation and their exploitation as workers. These borders were at their thinnest in discussions about two very important sectors of female-dominated migrant labour: domestic and care work, and work in the entertainment industry. The anti-trafficking movement, the international labour movement, and the makers of national laws and policies, attempted to separate sexual labour from other forms of labour. In doing so, they wilfully ignored or suppressed moments when they obviously intersected, and downplayed the role of other exploited and badly-paid licit work that sustained the global economy. But these attempts were rarely successful: despite the careful navigations of international and British officials, work continued to find its way back into discussions of sex trafficking, and sex trafficking remained entangled with the realities of women’s work.

This article focuses on the lives of workers in small commerce and in domestic service in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. It seeks to understand both what united and what differentiated maids (criadas) and clerks (caixeiros), two types of laborers whose lives and work had much in common, and two categories of labor that, although ubiquitous, are frequently overlooked in Brazilian labor history. We consider how, together, class, gender, and race shaped the divergent trajectories of criadas and caixeiros over the course of the nineteenth century, and what the legal disputes in which they were involved during that period can teach us about the shifting dynamics in labor relations in a society marked by both slavery and labor dependency more broadly. As sources for this analysis, we draw on documents produced by legal proceedings from the 1830s through the 1880s, in which men and women involved in petty commerce and domestic service presented their cases before the courts to claim their unpaid wages.

Marcel van der Linden has championed Global Labour History (GLH) as a solution to the decline of Labour History as an academic field. His 2008 Workers of the World (and other writing) strives to transcend methodological nationalism and provides a new global framework to study labour through the ages. This British liberal-pluralist critique argues that Van der Linden’s version of GLH is essentially a re-packaging of Marxism that narrows the conceptual foundations of the field and overlooks both the full political crisis of state-socialism and its limited historical appeal to working people. The article concludes by defending a national approach centred on civil society institutions, as represented in the 2016 collection edited by P. Ackers and A.J. Reid, Alternatives to State-Socialism in Britain: Other Worlds of Labour in the Twentieth Century.

This paper discusses Pietro Gori’s charismatic leadership of the Italian anarchist movement at the turn of the nineteenth century and, in particular, the characteristics of his political communication. After a discussion of the literature on the topic, the first section examines Gramsci’s derogatory observations on the characteristics and success of the communicative style adopted by anarchist activists such as Gori. The second investigates the political project underpinning the kind of “organized anarchism” that Gori championed together with Malatesta. The third section unveils Gori’s communication strategy when promoting this project through those platforms considered by Gramsci as being primary schools of political alphabetization in liberal Italy: trials, funerals, commemorations, and celebrations. Particular attention is devoted to the trials, which effectively demonstrated Gori’s modern political skills. The analysis of Gori’s performance at the trials demonstrates Gramsci’s mistake in identifying Gori simply as one of the champions of political sentimentalism.

This article is a case study of wrecking, based on a database of hundreds of shipwrecks that occurred between 1780 and 1870, in what is today Estonia. Through a qualitative analysis of narrative sources, it examines the wrecking activities of manorial lords as well as of their peasants. Contrary to the international scholarly tradition, which views wrecking as an activity of the common people, this article sheds light on the deceptive and opportunistic activities of manorial lords, who were responsible for enforcing the law at the local level by performing police and court functions, but who, at the same time, benefited on a large scale from wrecking. The article contrasts this with the opportunities coastal peasants had to wreck for their own profit. In wrecking and salvage, the three characteristic elements of peasant-landlord relationships – exploitation, partnership, and patronage – emerge. In contrast with studies focusing on the friction between peasants and their lords in regions dominated by manorialism, this article argues that, in wrecking, their collaboration apparently proceeded without much conflict in this period.

Divided between revolutionary syndicalism and reformist unions, Rio de Janeiro’s labour movement represented one of the most complex local cases during the Brazilian First Republic. This article intends to show how relations between these two currents were far from clear cut, and that, despite the confrontational discourse they adopted and the disputes over labour unions they were involved in, they eventually shared common practices and, to some degree, a common culture.

This article proposes a biographical approach to the study of anarchist activism, applied to the French journalist, editor, theorist, novelist, educator, and campaigner Jean Grave, one of the most influential figures in the French and international anarchist movement between the late 1870s and World War I. Adopting a relational approach delineating Grave’s formal and informal connections, it focuses on the role of print in Grave’s activism, through the three papers he edited between 1883 and 1914, and highlights his transnational connections and links with progressive circles in France. Due to the central place of both Grave and his publications in the French anarchist movement, this biographical and relational approach provides a basis to reassess the functioning and key strategic orientations of French anarchist communism during its “heroic period” (1870s–1914), by stressing its transnational ramifications and links beyond the anarchist movement.

This article argues that global labour history (GLH) and global economic history have much to offer each other. GLH would do well to raise sweeping questions – for instance about the origins of global inequality – engage more with theory, and increasingly use quantitative methods. Instead of seeing labour and labour relations as historical phenomena to be explained, they can serve as important explanatory variables in historical analyses of economic development and divergence. In turn, economic historians have much to gain from the recent insights of global labour historians. GLH offers a more inclusive and variable usage of the concept of labour, abandoning, as it does, the often narrow focus on male wage labour in the analyses of many economic historians. Moreover, GLH helps to overcome thinking in binary categories, such as “free” and “unfree” labour. Ultimately, both fields will benefit from engaging in joint debates and theories, and from collaboration in collecting and analysing “big data”.

Since the 1990s, labor history has been presented as “in crisis”. This negative evaluation is an overstatement. It has nevertheless prodded historians, often productively, to rethink the basic orientations of working-class history. This survey article explores three recent pathways to a “new” labor history: the turn to transnational and global study; the “new” history of capitalism; and the study of slavery as unfree labor. These new approaches to labor history highlight an old dilemma: how the structured determinations of laboring life are balanced alongside dimensions of human agency in understanding the complex experience of the working-class past. It is argued that we need to consider both structure and agency in the researching and writing of labor history. If an older “new” labor history accented agency, new pathways to labor history too often seem constrained by “mind forg’d manacles” that limit understandings of workers’ past lives by emphasizing structure and determination.

In our reply to Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk’s “Big Questions and Big Data: The Role of Labour and Labour Relations in Recent Global Economic History”, we focus on her observations on the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations. We endorse many of her suggestions to connect global labour and economic history and to regard labour relations not only as a dependent variable. In fact, as the examples from various Collab workshops and publications show, some of these ideas are already being put into practice. These examples also show that if we seriously want to combine global labour and economic history data and join the debate on the growth (or decrease) in social inequality, workers’ individual and collective agency must be taken on board. Finally, we argue that global labour and economic historians can benefit most from each other’s disciplines by truly working together in collaborative projects, developing new theories, perhaps less grand than those with which economic historians attract so much attention, but more profound.

This article focuses on sex work relations in the Mangue, one of Rio de Janeiro’s red light districts in the 1920s. It follows multiple simultaneous trajectories that converge in Rio’s changing urban landscape: League of Nation’s investigators (some of them undercover), local Brazilian authorities, particularly the police, and Fanny Galper, a former prostitute and madam. It argues that the spatial mobility of the persons involved in sex work is part of broader debates: On the one hand, these experiences of mobility are closely connected to the variegated attempts at surveillance of sex work that characterized Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s and the specific racialized organization of the women’s work as prostitutes. On the other hand, the actors analysed in this article also participated, in different ways, in the production of meanings in broader debates on the international circulation of policies intended to regulate and surveil prostitution. These encounters offer the opportunity to explore some of the intersections between this international circulation of policies, local social dynamics of European immigration, and the racialized history of labor relations in Brazil.