This issue celebrates the fortieth anniversary of International Labor and Working-Class History. A relative youngster, it was a product of the second of two waves that resulted in the foundation of many labor history journals and societies.Footnote ¹ The first wave, between roughly 1956 and 1962 included the Dutch-based International Review of Social History; Footnote ² the Feltrinelli Institute's Annali in Italy; Le mouvement social in France; Labor History in the United States; the British Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History;Footnote ³ the West German Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte; and Australia's Labour History. These journals developed at a time when organized labor and left-wing politics were strong and confident of their future,Footnote ⁴ although many who were active in these journals were highly critical of the political strategies of the existing Left and, in Eric Hobsbawm's words, viewed them “as an attempt to find a way forward in Left politics through historical reflection.”Footnote ⁵ The second wave of journal creation in labor history took place in the 1970s and included not only ILWCH (1972), but Radical History Review (1975), Labour/Le Travail (1976), and History Workshop Journal (1976). These journals were especially shaped by the radicalism of the 1960s—the Vietnam War, the Cuban revolution, and the wave of student, feminist, and left-wing unrest in Europe and the world in 1968 and subsequently.Footnote ⁶ The new journals were more transnational and more comparative; malleable youths, these journals were more susceptible to the influence of the social movements evolving around them. They were more attentive to the relationship between metropole and colonial territories and more focused on the burgeoning fields of black studies and women's history than was true earlier. Drawing upon the work of sociologists, political scientists, and demographers, they were also animated by the tremendous explosion of social history in the 1960s and 1970s and new research underway on social protest movements, race, and social conditions.Footnote ⁷

The moving spirit behind ILWCH in its early years, as David Montgomery explains in his interview in this issue, was a young historian of Germany, Robert F. Wheeler. Along with several others, he formed the Study Group in European Labor and Working-Class History, which began issuing a Newsletter in May 1972, basically designed to create a scholarly community and to share news about research, archives, conferences, and work in progress.Footnote ⁸ Those involved were engaged in a wide range of research topics, but what drew them together was a desire to revise older institutional labor history and to incorporate into their work many of the insights and approaches to social class and labor being developed by American sociologists and by European, mainly British, historians. After graduating from a small Catholic university in upstate New York where he also joined the Marine Corps Reserve, Wheeler entered the graduate history program at the University of Pittsburgh. There he worked with several Europeanists (David N. Hunt, Robert Colodny, Samuel Hayes, and Seymour Drescher) and started research on German socialism in the Kaiserreich, which eventually led to several years in East and West German archives and a close engagement with new developments in European social history. While his only book concerned the Independent German Socialists (USPD) in 1919–1920, Wheeler's approach was far broader, and his larger unfinished project was a synthetic study of the German working class—in David Hunt's words: “[M]ethodologically, he stood at the juncture between traditional kinds of labor history and newer social and quantitative approaches.”Footnote ⁹

While its goal of forging closer community among scholars working on related labor and social themes continued, the journal's format evolved quickly, altering its name to International Labor and Working-Class History and beginning to publish short, four- or five-page, essays on more substantive topics. Wheeler's sudden death in 1977 at age thirty-seven could easily have ended ILWCH's short but promising existence, but after a brief period when David Hunt and David Montgomery (who had arrived at Pitt in 1963) acted as coeditors, it was Montgomery who agreed to take responsibility for the journal, and when he moved to Yale in 1979, it moved with him. Montgomery shepherded ILWCH's transition from a journal of short essays to a more standard format featuring article-length essays. He was well positioned to do so. Not only was Montgomery one of the most prominent American labor historians, but he also had close connections to a network of European scholars and had spent two years as Senior Lecturer in American Labor History at the University of Warwick,Footnote ¹⁰ working with Edward Thompson, whose seminal study, The Making of the English Working Class, was arguably the dominant influence on labor and social history at the time.Footnote ¹¹

In these years, ILWCH published articles on American and West European labor history, including contributions from the Lyonnais regional historian Yves Lequin, the post-modernist Jacques Rancière, and the historian-sociologist Charles Tilly. There were also analyses of artisanal culture (reflective of Marxist debates about the labor aristocracy), responses to Tilly and Scott's Women, Work and the Family (1978), and essays on Stalinism and Soviet historiography, while several authors reported on current research on modern Chinese labor history, work by Japanese historians of European labor, and on Egyptian and Brazilian workers. The latter were indicative of the journal's aspiration to be truly international in scope. ILWCH also continued to perform its early function of networking scholars; indeed, in some issues, review essays and reports on conferences and archives occupied more space than articles. The journal's array of authors, many of them recent Ph.D recipients, also shows that it had successfully developed close ties to a large cohort of graduate students and young faculty who were then at the start of their careers but later became leaders in the field.

In 1984 ILWCH moved to New York City where several new developments made it an especially inviting environment for the journal. Helmut Gruber, who had published books on the Second International and French socialism and was working on Red Vienna,Footnote ¹² had recently founded the Labor History Seminar as part of the University Seminar program at Columbia University. Its sessions enabled historians working on common themes of labor and class history, principally but not exclusively concerned with Europe and the United States, to share their ongoing research, and the seminar quickly developed a large following of scholars from across the region. Over the next fifteen years most of the major figures working on labor and working-class history, including a large number from overseas, presented their research there. At around the same time Charles and Louise Tilly moved from Michigan to the New School for Social Research, where, along with Chicago transplants Aristide Zolberg and Ira Katznelson, they established the Committee on Historical Studies. All of these scholars became actively involved in the journal: Ira Katznelson and Louise Tilly as editors and Charles Tilly and Aristide Zolberg as contributors. The Committee on Historical Studies also provided a home for visiting professors from overseas, including Eric Hobsbawm on a regular continuing appointment. ILWCH soon became based at the New School, which also provided funds for graduate student editorial assistance, and the journal benefitted greatly from its interdisciplinary environment and the cross-fertilization of ideas among a remarkable group of historians, economists, political scientists, and sociologists.

With respect to its focus, content, and perception of its goals, ILWCH remained largely consistent over the next decade. Founded by Wheeler as a way of connecting scholars working on diverse topics and national specialties, it had always been eclectic and pluralist in its approach, with the editorial board seeing the journal's function as one of providing a forum for debate rather than adopting specific approaches to labor experience or class relations. ILWCH's chief criterion for publishing an article was its scholarly interest to labor historians. This is evident from the broad array of topics addressed and the range of scholars who wrote for the journal and also in the format adopted of alternating (or nearly so) “controversy issues,” where several historians would respond to a provocative essay, with issues organized around a specific topic. The topics addressed mirrored the trajectories of research in labor history and related fields of women's and social history. In these years this included family history and gender; protoindustrialization; new analyses of welfare states; consumption; mass leisure; the invention of tradition; citizenship; the impact of war on social development; and so on. Over time, as David Montgomery's editorial role was somewhat reduced, the key figure who week-to-week ensured that the journal appeared on time (and it always did) became Helmut Gruber, soon aided by Louise Tilly and Ira Katznelson. All three left a marked imprint on these years. Gruber's research interests on Vienna and France included new work on women, housing, and film. Katznelson's close ties to historians and political scientists based in Britain opened the journal to theoretical debates underway there. And Louise Tilly's central place in the field of women's history and gender studies (she also became AHA president in 1993) as well as her expertise on Italy was enormously important in attracting new authors and board members.

By the late 1980s ILWCH's expanded range of connections also enabled it to cosponsor a series of colloques with European scholars. These began in 1985 in partnership with Patrick Fridenson and Le mouvement social based at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme. The first was devoted to “Worker sociability in Europe and North America from 1850–1950”; this was followed by “Mass Culture and the Working Class” three years later; and then in 1991 by “Working-class Traditions in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.” Another colloque, which took place in 1994—this time in collaboration with Marcel van der Linden, now an Associate Editor of ILWCH, and cosponsored by IISH Amsterdam—focused on “Workers and Citizenship in Europe and North America.”Footnote ¹³

By the early 1990s, while there was no shortage of excellent research underway, labor and working-class history as a field of study was in some turmoil; the mood of that period differed considerably from the expansive, upbeat one of the journal's foundation. As is well known to ILWCH readers, labor history and class-centered history came under theoretical attack from several directions. Historians of women criticized traditional approaches in these fields as too male oriented and centered in the point of production; they expanded elements of class formation to include neighborhood and community ties; they questioned definitions of work and analytically interlinked production and reproduction; feminist theoretical critiques also raised the issue of the significance of class compared to sex (and then to gender) and, by extension, the value of class as an analytical tool compared to other forms of identity. The growing influence of the “linguistic turn” on historical studies and of postmodernism with its emphasis on deconstructing metanarratives—including those anchored in fundamental units of historical analysis such as class—set in motion serious questioning, especially about the assumed connections between social structure and class consciousness. These critiques began to dismantle previously large contexts within which labor history had been situated, such as modernization, industrialization, and proletarianization. Historians soon became more comfortable talking about structures of meaning than social or economic structures. At the same time, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the broader retreat of socialism and organized labor also induced a general retreat of Marxist and marxisant modes of analysis. In short, labor and working-class history seemed to be—if not in crisis—at least a good deal less ebullient than in the heady days of the journal's foundation. That labor history attracted a smaller cohort of dissertation students than before was viewed as conclusive evidence of its decline, without considering the extent to which labor and social history, transformed by cultural analysis, had permeated and reshaped the mainstream of historical practice.

Just about every labor history journal ran issues in these years debating the “crisis,” and ILWCH was no exception. In 1993 Ira Katznelson put forward an essay, “The 'Bourgeois' Dimension: a Provocation About Institutions, Politics, and the Future of Labor History,” and asked for responses from each member of the editorial board. Katznelson's call was for a “playful multi-dimensionality,” a selective incorporation of recent methodology of language, and of new studies of the state, law, and institutions. His capacious, expansive vision of labor history was generally welcomed, as was his call for methodological eclecticism; less agreement was forthcoming for his argument that politics, and in particular reengaging the agenda of liberalism, could offer a way of forging greater cohesion in what he feared was a fragmenting field of study. A good deal of the discussion revolved around how much poststructuralist theory should be taken on board—and the general response was cautious: Less direct focus was given to the explanatory significance of class for historians or rather, in the light of new ideas, how should one now write about class?Footnote ¹⁴ For example, must class language explicitly refer to class as Patrick Joyce assumes, or is class language any language that supports or reinforces class divisions at moments of conflict as Mark Steinberg maintains?Footnote ¹⁵ Later ILWCH issues, notably the controversy issue surrounding Geoff Eley and Keith Nield's “Farewell to the Working Class?”Footnote ¹⁶ took these issues much further, as did the issue devoted to “Labor History after the Gender Turn.”Footnote ¹⁷

Around the same time that ILWCH was responding to these wider debates, the journal also faced other more immediate issues. By moving from the University of Illinois to Cambridge University Press as the publisher, the journal was able to publish more and longer essays. Our contract with the New School was also about to come to an end and the resources, position and personnel of the Committee of Historical Studies had changed with the departure of the Tillys and Katznelson. Moreover, the editorial board was changing as members departed, many of them moving on to other areas of research.Footnote ¹⁸ There was also a feeling that much of the new research in labor history (as well as new archival sources opening up) centered upon the twentieth century and more especially the post-Second World War period. It seemed to many associated with the journal that labor history had still a long way to go in mapping the recomposition of labor, gender, social class, and the dramatic shifts in organized labor in the last half of the twentieth century. At Columbia the Seminar in Labor History no longer existed but was replaced by a Twentieth Century Seminar, cochaired by Alan Brinkley and Geoff Field, in an effort to stimulate a cross-fertilization of ideas among scholars working on a wide range of geographical areas. That seminar also became the place where numerous labor historians and contributors of ILWCH presented papers. There was even some talk about converting ILWCH into a journal devoted to the twentieth century (along the lines of the French journal Vingtièmé siècle), but the present authors remember a strong editorial consensus for maintaining our distinctive focus as an international journal for labor and working-class history. The issue was how should it be positioned to best represent new work in these fields. Our institutional home remained somewhat uncertain until ILWCH moved its base of operations to the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers in 2008, thanks largely to the negotiating skills of Dorothy Sue Cobble, who had played an increasing role since joining the board in 1996, particularly in bringing to ILWCH new scholarship on labor and gender.Footnote ¹⁹

Since Montgomery's reshaping of the journal in the late 1970s, its format has remained largely unchanged although important modifications have been made in some of our features. A majority of issues are now thematic; review essays have replaced individual book reviews as more suitable for a biannual journal, and include more film reviews; an occasional feature, “Reports from the Field,” provides analyses of current labor activism around the world; and most recently “Classics Revisited” reconsiders older works in the light of today's concerns.Footnote ²⁰ Some older features have disappeared, notably the Work-in-Progress section, rendered less important given increased connectivity via the Web and, in part, victims of our ever-growing need for space.

Looking back over the past decade or more, it is clear that while editorial discussions in the mid-1990s about the direction of ILWCH on one level confirmed earlier ideas about the journal's focus, they also helped to reshape it in significant ways. A stronger emphasis on thematic issues has allowed the editorial board more scope for identifying topics that it believes require discussion or deserve more attention—in hopes of influencing the direction of labor history. The regular rotation of Senior Editors and recruitment of new membersFootnote ²¹ to the editorial board have also made the journal more consciously international in scope—with many more articles devoted to Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. In particular, thanks to the efforts of Peter Winn and Tom Klubock, it has become an important forum for current research on Latin America. The transnational, comparative, and global focus of ILWCH issues has also been reinforced, as witnessed by our recent issues that focus on migrant workers in the Middle East, labor and the military, and global commodities.Footnote ²² The rise in digital subscriptions is helping ILWCH reach new international audiences in countries like Brazil, India, and Turkey.

David Montgomery suggested in our interview that whereas in ILWCH's earlier decades, the methodologies developed for European and American labor history were then extended to other regions of the globe, today and in the future one could expect a reverse flow with scholarship on other areas provoking new questions and areas of analysis for those working on Europe and the United States. One can point, as an example, to Dipesh Chakrabarty's classic study of the Calcutta working class between 1890 and 1940 that has influenced scholars in Europe and around the world.Footnote ²³ Another clear shift of recent years has been our growing focus on the recent past and topics of social and political concern today—one thinks, for example, of the issues devoted to the shifting boundaries of free and unfree labor, labor flows and migration, privatization, America's broken immigration system, and the rapid changes occurring in Chinese and Latin American workplaces. A very rough analysis of the topical essays (as opposed to theoretical analyses) published by the journal over the last six years indicates that well over ninety percent focus on the twentieth century (and more than half on post-1945).

When we interviewed David Montgomery, our main goal was to discuss ILWCH's last forty years, but, inevitably, the conversation drifted towards directions that the journal might take in the future: whether, for example, the focus on the twentieth century is something that should continue, or if it has become narrow and constraining. Rereading the journal also pointed to some gaps, as well as to the huge diversity of topics examined. One surprise was how few issues were devoted specifically to race and labor. Admittedly, this is partly because race, like gender, is integral to numerous essays in the various thematic issues of ILWCH . But a quick count indicates only three issues have focused directly on race—the last being the much-discussed debate in response to Eric Arnesen's essay “Whiteness and the Historical Imagination.”Footnote ²⁴ No single issue, for example, has examined race and the changing composition of labor forces in Europe since the 1950s. In addition, while we have discussed globalization and its impact upon industrial workers in Europe and North America, we have not explored in sufficient detail the sociocultural impact of these changes since the 1970s or unemployment and underemployment today, as compared to earlier times.Footnote ²⁵

When ILWCH began, its focus was on labor and class in the process of industrialization, and much of the work being done was underpinned by a specific set of assumptions about the relationship of class consciousness and political mobilization. Questions about and criticisms of those assumptions quickly led to the feeling that labor history and social history were “in crisis” or in danger of losing their former cohesion. Reassessment and new methodologies are required, as is true of any dynamic field of study, and various solutions are being advanced as ways of broadening and reconfiguring labor and working-class history. Recently, for example, historians have explored new ways of analyzing sociocultural interactions between nations and regions, highlighting complex, entangled webs of mutual influences that challenge older narratives of national histories. So far, much of this work has centered upon the study of empire, social policy, and on cultural and intellectual history, but these new approaches—labeled histoire croisée or Verflechtungsgeschichte in Europe—hold promise for labor historians, not simply because they transcend a nation-state focus, but because they are theoretically more sophisticated than older examples of comparative history. By bringing greater precision to the study of transnational connectedness (and pointing to potential pitfalls), they can both throw fresh light on old debates like American exceptionalism or the German Sonderweg and help us find better ways of reconnecting national and transnational perspectives in labor history.Footnote ²⁶ Finally, another answer to the perceived fragmentation or lack of cohesion of labor history, suggested more and more in recent years, is a renewed focus on the characteristics and varieties of capitalism. In a recent obituary in the Guardian, Eric FonerFootnote ²⁷ reminded us that years ago in a Radical History Review interview, David Montgomery remarked: “Although my specialty is working-class history, the subject I am trying to get at is the history of capitalism.” Certainly, and especially if we hope to understand the global labor flows and structural inequalities occurring in recent decades, we will need to debate more systematically the changing characteristics of capitalism since the 1970s and the rise of neoliberal globalization as one of its manifestations, one that will further reshape perspectives on labor and class. As our questions suggested, the validity or not of capitalism as an overarching paradigm may be the next item on ILWCH's agenda. At the very least, it would seem to require closer ties with work currently underway by business historians and historically-minded economists—a reforging of links that once existed and a reaffirmation of the social, cultural, and political aspects of capitalism as well as the more narrowly economic.Footnote ²⁸

Last year we reported the death of Don Quataert, a leading scholar of the Ottoman Empire and a promoter and supporter of ILWCH long before he joined its editorial board. David Montgomery's comments on Don in the interview reflect his influence. And now David has died. Although he had been sick for some time, when we interviewed him in the summer, he was characteristically energetic, enthusiastic, and full of plans, his mind racing from one area of potential research and discovery to another. We had not the slightest inkling that he would not be at our next ILWCH board meeting, joking, throwing out ideas for future issues and sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of the research that was currently underway. David's career spanned the development of labor and working-class history as a field of study. To say that he'll be missed is a vast understatement. Not only did we learn so much from him, his sheer enthusiasm and passion for the craft of history was infectious. It was a great privilege to know and work with him.