Global Labor History

Van der Linden and Touraj Atabaki, both from the International Institute of Social History, copresented a methodological paper. Marcel van der Linden, who is arguably one of leading architects of the global labor history project, summarized the recent developments in this international academic endeavor and the importance of broadening its scope and comparative perspective. Marcel van der Linden outlined possible directions for the future research agenda of the global labor history project. In doing so he highlighted the importance of historical actors beyond blue collar, unionized male workers as well as broader comparative perspectives on the history of those workers. He also emphasized the significance of a more integrated approach to the history of work and the methodological openings generated by utilizing new kinds of source material. Touraj Atabaki provided a critical assessment of the holdings of the global labor history archive at the institute in Amsterdam.

Global Labor History—India

The study of Africa and South Asia has been central to the conceptual and methodological developments Marcel van der Linden outlined in his talk. We were pleased to have four papers on Indian labor history. The first, by Prabhu Mohapatra, Delhi University, entitled “What Does the Global Turn Mean for Indian Labour Historiography?” gave a historiographical assessment of the impact global labor history has on Indian labor historiography. He began by acknowledging the validity of a major critique of global labor history: that it can be homogenizing and Eurocentric even as it aims to combat Eurocentricism. Nevertheless, he argued that global labor history still has a number of productive possibilities given its focus on the spatial dimension of work, which enables historians to compare different forms of labor diachronically. Another constructive approach to emerge from global labor history, he contended, was an expanded understanding of labor to include informal labor. In India informal labor has historically constituted the vast majority of labor relations. The framework of global labor history has therefore, he concluded, enabled a shift in Indian labor history from a focus on institutionalized forms of labor to everyday labor practices.

Chitra Joshi, also from Delhi University, in “Doing Labour History: Possibilities of the Oral” reviewed the possibilities and limitations of using oral history to do labor history in India. Oral history, she argued, has rich potential to push beyond the sometimes very rigid limits of written documentary sources. Moreover, as new labor history continues to challenge the boundaries of official state documentation, historians will have to use other kinds of sources, like oral history interviews, increasingly to meet its demands. Additionally, given the virtual absence of and limited access to alternative archives, like those of trade unions, in India the possibilities of oral history testimonies become even more important. Of broader methodological significance, Joshi questioned whether oral history, which has generally been associated with microprocesses and individual experience, could be used to develop a more global understanding of the lived experience of work. By concentrating on oral history interviews, she argued, historians could provide a different perspective on the global by linking individual life stories with larger macronarratives. Joshi concluded that through such individual stories scholars could better elucidate the ways in which marginalization is intimately connected with processes of globalization today.

The remaining two papers on India dealt with organizing labor and labor relations. Ravi Ahuja, Center for Modern Indian Studies, Göttingen University, in his paper “The Indian Labour Interlude: Contours and Three Elements of India's Mid-Twentieth-Century Cycle of Social Regulation,” analyzed the dynamics and cycles of mid-twentieth century Indian social regulation and its impact on labor relations. He argued that crests and ebbs in the power of the state in social regulation constituted the major axis of the regulation of labor relations in India. Ahuja claimed that the Indian state's regime of social regulation experienced cycles throughout this period. To a large extent, however, such regulation was state-led and industry focused. The shifts between different modes of social regulation should be seen in the form of regulation, but not in the degree of regulation. He delineated temporal patterns, or cycles of social regulation, within the broader regulatory regime. Systematic and comparative studies of various fields of social regulation could reveal dynamic trajectories and counter-tendencies in the field of social regulation, which has generally been conceived as a stable and coherent field.

In “A Pragmatic Intimacy? Familiarity, Dependency, and Social Subordination: Domestic Workers in Kolkata,” Samita Sen, Jadavpur University, presented social subordination and dependency as two key characteristics of domestic service, a specific kind of labor relation in contemporary India. Sen argued that domestic service as wage labor circumscribes class confrontation within the privatized space of the home. In this way the conventional understanding of wage labor and its association with public life enters into the private domain of the home. She argued that in the sphere of familial domesticity this labor relationship may seem to be outside of exploitative capitalist forms of employment, yet as a form of wage labor it has direct connections with other more conventional forms of capitalist labor relations. Domestic labor as a form of employment is becoming a more prominent topic on the labor history research agenda, and Sen's work contributes to this emerging scholarship.Footnote ⁷

Global Labor History—Africa

There were five papers related to African labor history. Bill Freund, University of KwaZulu-Natal, gave an overview of recent developments in the labor history of South Africa in his paper, “The Evolution of South African Labour Studies Since the End of Apartheid.” Freund argued that the end of apartheid, contrary to the expectations of black workers, did not necessarily bring about less inequality and improved living conditions for the large majority of the black population in South Africa. Then he identified two related tendencies in the postapartheid labor historiography. The first one was growing interest in studying issues of labor and the history of organizations of labor independent of the rise of trade unions, and the second was the tendency in the existing literature to analyze the fraught (and likely future) relationship between the African National Congress (ANC), the ruling party in South Africa, and Congress of South Africa Trade Unions (COSATU), the largest trade union federation. In his review of the recent literature, Freund highlighted the need to reconceptualize the meaning of work and forms of resistance in South African labor history and international labor historiography more broadly. Finally, he emphasized the importance of delinking the history of the Left from labor history.

Following this lead, Jon Soske, McGill University, in “Structural Violence and the Writing of Labour History: Some Reflections on the Anti-Apartheid Struggle,” examined a 1984 asbestos miners' strike in Penge, South Africa. Occupational health and workplace safety were key tenets of the workers' demands. Ultimately, the strike was not successful, and the workers were fired. In the aftermath of the strike's defeat, the union aligned with the health secretariat of the Azanian People's Organization (AZAPO), a liberation organization, to launch a nationwide antiasbestos campaign. Soske situated this action within the complex, multifaceted apartheid regime, which went beyond a racial capitalist structure to produce a complicated system of large-scale social engineering with multiple structures of oppression. The workers, in turn, also developed multiple strategies of resistance beyond the confines of union activism. Soske concluded by underlining the need for labor historians to engage concepts like structural violence and biopolitics.

The remaining three interventions on African labor history took a comparative approach. In fact, the paper of Alex Lichtenstein, Indiana University, “From Detroit to Durban: Writing a ‘Global' Labor History of the US and South Africa” went beyond a comparative approach. Lichtenstein initially used a comparative methodology within the framework of binational history in his ongoing research project that looks at race, labor, and the state in the United States and South Africa. Yet in order to align with the aims of the global labor history project, he switched to a transnational analysis. In doing so, he acknowledged the limitations of conventional comparisons that seek to identify the similarities and differences between their objects of study. In his critical review of comparative history writing, he emphasized that the primary category of analysis has generally been the nation-state. Rather, he argued for redirected attention to race and labor as historical phenomenon beyond national boundaries. He contended that his subject matter could be better analyzed in a relational, dynamic, and transnational context. The productive insights Lichtenstein shared are very much at the core of recent comparative labor historiography based on reciprocal comparisons.

Gareth Austin, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, followed the same trajectory in his paper “The Emerging Global Labour History: Africanist and Comparative Perspectives.” He gave an overview of the recent developments in global labor history writing and their relationship to earlier trends in comparative labor history in the African context. Noting that the field's movement away from the figure of the male proletarian and the process of proletarianization as experienced in the “West,” Austin argued that this created important openings for global history from an African perspective. Based on his own research in Asante/Ghana, he argued against the exaggerated distinction between unfree and free forms of labor as well as the importance given to the presupposed transition from the former to the latter. He concluded with a discussion of the advantages and limitations of the main categories of sources he used. How, for example, does one detect African voices within the European colonial archives?

Henrique Espada, Federal University of Santa Catarina, presented “African Trajectories in Southern Brazil: Life Cycles, Generational Transits, and Survival Strategies of African Workers and their Descendents between Slavery and Freedom.” Until the last decade, studies on the working classes and on slavery remained largely separate avenues of research. Overcoming the limitations of categories like “free” and “unfree” labor meant these two fields could converge, creating a new field of research that allowed scholars to better integrate categories like ethnicity and gender into their analyses. Espada noted that other binary categories, for instance, formal versus informal or modern versus archaic forms of labor, are also losing ground in the current scholarship. In his view, the methodological approach of microhistory was key in challenging the limitations of these binary categories. His own research follows this broader trend in examining the individual experiences of African workers and their descendents living on the Santa Catarina Islands as they transitioned from slavery to free labor after the abolishment of slavery in Brazil in 1888.

Ottoman and Turkish Labor History within an International Labor History of the Middle East and the Balkans

The second group of papers had a regional focus and were all related to the Middle East and the Balkans. In order to internationalize Ottoman and Turkish labor history, it must first be linked with labor studies in the Balkans and in the Middle East. The remaining conference papers that are the second part of this report follow three thematic and methodological groups: organizing labor, labor organizations, and new sources and methods in Ottoman labor history.

Organizing Labor—Unfree Labor?

The first topic under the heading of organizing labor and work was unfree labor, a current subject of debate in labor history. These papers elaborated on practices and discussions of labor enforcement in the Ottoman Empire, mid-nineteenth century Egypt, and postindependence Greece.

Gülay Yılmaz, McGill University, in “Unfree Labour Recruited Through The Devshirme System in Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Society” analyzed a centuries-old Ottoman military and administrative practice in its connection to the creation of an artisanal workforce. Her novel approach to this topic, which has never been conceptualized as labor history before, serves as an example of the potential to interlink subjects, which were studied in depth but only within the confines of Ottoman history, with labor studies. Analyzing military recruitment and service in terms of labor relations is a state-of-the-art development.Footnote ⁸ Yılmaz found different modes of employment of these Christian boys, who were recruited forcibly by the Ottoman administration for the needs of the state. These laborers were integrated into state workshops, mines, construction sites, and other artisanal production units run by the state. She claimed that this forced recruitment functioned as an institution to organize unfree labor for various sectors of the Ottoman economy while providing soldiers and administrators to the state apparatus.

Uğur Bahadır Bayraktar, Boğaziçi University, in “Unveiling Rural Labour: A Discussion on Non-Free Labour and Forced Labour in the Tanzimat Period” explored discussions among Ottoman administrators regarding the advantages and negative consequences of recruiting and using forced labor in the Ottoman Empire in the mid-nineteenth century. When the reform edict of 1839 abolished corvée, administrators held conflicting views on this decision. He traced the dynamics of these debates, the vested interests represented in the edicts, and their problematic implementation, especially in rural areas. While nineteenth-century Ottoman reforms have been an active and a fruitful field of research over the last few decades, they have not yet been studied from a labor perspective.

In his paper “Forced Labour in Mid-Nineteenth Century Egypt” Abdelwahab Shaker, of Bibliotheca Alexandria, focused on practices of forced labor in Egypt during the mid-nineteenth century, which were almost simultaneous to the Ottoman reforms and abolishment of corvée. There are studies on how Muhammad Ali, the Albanian Ottoman army commander who became the self-declared Khedive of Egypt and Sudan, forcibly recruited Arab peasants for his new army and the military factories that equipped it. However, little work has been done on the use of forced labor in Egypt after Muhammad Ali's reign. Shaker considered forced labor in the construction of large-scale public works projects in the years following Muhammad Ali's death. For centuries the Egyptian state had used forced labor in the construction of irrigation networks. With the Suez Canal, which was a new international capitalistic enterprise, the Egyptian state adapted the terms of forced recruitment and employment of conscripts according to the new needs of a modern construction project.

Christos Hadjiiosif, University of Crete, presented an in-depth analysis of unfree labor in Greece. In “Dependent Labour in Greece during the Passage from Ottoman Rule to Independence,” Hadjiiosif argued that although slavery was not common practice in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, it gained impetus in Greece during the war of independence from 1821 to 1828. He claimed that there was not a universal moral disapproval of slavery in revolutionary Greece. The ambiguity in the social attitude toward slavery stemmed from the difficulty of distinguishing slavery from other forms of dependent labor including the ones performed by unskilled laborers. Moreover, for many laborers security of employment was more important than abstract freedom. Only gradually in the second half of the nineteenth century did a clear distinction between waged labor and slavery emerge in Greece. This change in attitude, he contended, had less to do with economic reasons, like capitalist modes of production and the commodification of labor, than with specific political conditions within Greece. Hadjiiosif's argument makes a valuable contribution to the blurred distinction between free and unfree forms of labor and the importance of the self-perception of the people who worked within these labor systems.

Organizing Labor—Connecting the Urban with the Rural

The conference offered a thought-provoking perspective on labor organizing by linking rural agricultural and industrial production directly to consumption needs of urban populations. Alp Yücel Kaya, Istanbul Technical University, in his paper “Comparative Analysis of Labour Organization in Ciftliks in the Hinterland of Izmir and Salonica (1840–1912)” investigated how agricultural labor was organized on big farms in the hinterlands of two of the largest eastern Mediterranean port cities. Kaya argued that sharecropping was the dominant labor relation in the Salonica hinterland and was only occasionally accompanied by agricultural wage labor. In contrast, tenancy was more common in both the northern and southern plains outside of Izmir. He claimed that during the second half of the nineteenth century the Ottoman countryside experienced intensive commercialization; however, labor organizations did not change dramatically. Here, he argues, the structure of labor organization was shaped by such factors as population growth, immigration, urban employment, indebtedness, and dispossession that interacted to entrench rather than change the structures of labor organization in these two locations.

Fatma Öncel, Boğaziçi University, also investigated the organization of the labor force in rural industries in the same period. In her paper “Artisans in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Countryside: Textile Workers in the Villages of Plovdiv,” Öncel used a protoindustrial model to analyze textile production in the Balkans. She selected three villages with such intensive small-scale textile manufacturing that most of the inhabitants in the villages became textile workers. Öncel claimed that a significant percentage of the village population became wage earners in textile production without possessing their own shops or looms. This research shed light on an understudied topic of becoming wage laborers in the Ottoman countryside. Although this model of “protoindustrialization” has been out of fashion for good reasons in economic and labor historiography elsewhere, her work indicates that it still offers possibilities for studying labor in the Ottoman countryside.

Organizing Labor—Migration and Modes of Reimbursement

Sinan Dinçer, Ruhr University, in his paper “Armenian Labourers in the Black Sea Basin” brought labor migration, a very important and highly understudied topic of Ottoman labor history, to the fore. Dinçer discussed the seasonal migration of unskilled Armenian workers from the Black Sea Basin to Istanbul. The Berlin Congress of 1878 brought drastic political changes to the Caucasus and the Balkans, including increased ethnic tension following the mass killings of Armenian workers in late-nineteenth century Istanbul. Armenian migrant workers in Istanbul are an interesting example of labor migration in the late Ottoman empire since they were also targets of state social engineering strategies. Dinçer found connections between the presence of Armenian migrant laborers in Istanbul and the rise of Armenian revolutionary politics as well as the 1909 Ottoman vagrancy law. Dinçer's work is a good example of how the perspective of labor reveals the connections between ethnicity, migration, and political transformation.

In her paper “Wage Systems and Organization of Labour: From Family Labour to Subcontracting Systems (Greece 1800–1900)” Leda Papastefenaki, University of Ioannina, identified modes of remuneration and transformations in forms of organizing the labor force in Greece. She argued that prior to the nineteenth century, the dominant form of remuneration in rural industries in Greece was based on piecework. Through two case studies, textiles and mining, Papastefenaki determined that both sectors established complicated piecework systems, which enabled employers to adjust the amount of compensation according to fluctuations in production. Addtionally, in both cases, the organization of production and remuneration were designed not only for individual workers, but also to accommodate entire households as single units of production within the workforce. Papastefanaki concluded that worker households or families had an inner division of labor that their members performed in textile mills and mines. This division of labor along the lines of gender and age influenced the level and mode of reimbursement.

Labor Organizations

Six papers were case studies of particular labor organizations, yet none of them focused exclusively on trade unions. This parallels the current agenda of international labor historiography to include nonunionized forms of labor resistance and other organizations of the labor movement. Some investigated the transregional, international, as well as transcommunal dynamics of labor organizations in Athens, Rethmyno-Crete, Istanbul, and Alexandria at the turn of the twentieth century. Others questioned class formation and class solidarity from a broader perspective rather than assume class consciousness as the default form of worker solidarity.

Nikos Potamianos, University of Crete, in his paper “Greek Workers and ‘National Preference' Demands: Athens and Pireaus (1890–1922)” examined the dynamics of solidarity and exclusion among the Greek workers in Athens and its port Piraeus during the 1910s. Potamianos argued that the status of citizen and foreigner were fluid categories in early-twentieth century Greece. He explored the tensions between local workers and recently arrived Greek refugees from Anatolia in Athenian industrial settings. Due to the deprived refugees' readiness to work in poorer-paid positions, they were in some instances employed as strikebreakers, thereby creating further antagonisms between them and the largely unionized local workers. To combat low wages and exclude refugees from the labor market, organized local workers insisted that only men who had served in the Greek army were eligible for employment. The lines of division among workers, however, were not only between locals and newcomers; there were also different ethnic and regional solidarities articulated within labor organizations. Multiple identities of Greek workers have shaped the multifaceted forms of labor resistance within and outside the unions.

Elektra Kostopoulou, Columbia University, in “Bi-Religious Labour in the Late Ottoman Empire: The Case of Autonomous Crete” discussed specific forms of labor organizations in the exceptional bi-religious setting of late-nineteenth-century Crete. In 1898 the island population was one-third Muslim and two-thirds Greek-Orthodox Christian. It gained a unique autonomous status within the Ottoman Empire that lasted until its union with the Greek nation-state in 1913. During this short period of autonomy, Muslim and Christian inhabitants of the island reorganized local administration, economy, and political life in an unprecedented bi-religious manner. Local clubs, associations, and unions formed during this era. Labor alliances organized in fratern associations as well as unions reflected (on both the membership and administrative level) proportional representation of the island's religious demographic groups. In a structure very similar to the organizational logic of clubs and associations, labor organizations were formed with a shared Cretan identity. In stark contrast to the situation in Athens, which Potamianos described during the same years, Kostopoulou argued that ethnic and religious affiliations of the islanders played, at most, a secondary role in the logic of their self-organizations.

Chiara Maritato, University of Torino, in her paper “The Italian Workers' Mutual Aid Society of Constantinople” explored how workers in Istanbul's Italian community organized themselves during the second half of the nineteenth century. Since its establishment in 1863, the Società Operaia Italiana di Mutuo Soccorso in Costantinopoli worked toward two objectives: first, to provide mutual aid and assistance to Italian workers and their families and, second, to engage politically around the unification of Italy. In terms of the organization's second objective, it was not strictly an association of workers for workers. Maritato argued that the organization was worth studying because of its hybrid character, its direct connection to the nationalist movement in Italy, and its base in the multicultural capital of the Ottoman Empire. She noted that the Italian community in Istanbul closely followed developments in Italy, where workers’ mutual aid organizations were also forming in the same period. In Istanbul the society aimed to provide Italian workers with subsidies, medical care, legal aid, and compensation for widows and orphans. Although the society did not function solely as a labor organization, the ways in which it defended the interests of Italian workers in Istanbul compels further analysis.

Anthony Gorman, University of Edinburgh, in his paper ‘ “True Brotherhood, True Liberty, True Justice:' The Internationalist Current in the Labour Movement in Egypt (1882–1914)” focused on international unions and other labor associations in Alexandria, Egypt, at the turn of the twentieth century. These unions served as platforms for both Egyptian workers and local foreign workers, mainly Italians and Greeks, to engage with internationalist currents in socialist and anarchist movements of the era. Italian workers and anarchists in Alexandria were key players in these organizations. Consequently, these organizations adopted an internationalist discourse that appealed to universalist values and the brotherhood of all workers to construct a common project for all workers in Egypt. This countered the claims of nationalists and the logic of imperialist rhetoric while also being strongly influenced by anarcho-syndicalism. It asserted the legitimacy of workers to represent themselves and called for the recognition of workers' rights.

None of the four papers discussed above were confined to the borders of nation states. However, the following two papers deal with labor movements in closer connection to national labor struggles. Nevertheless, the authors do not limit their perspective to class struggle.

Serhan Afacan, Leiden University, talked about the petitioning practices of Iranian factory workers. Afacan explained that traditional labor history left Iranian labor on the sidelines since the great majority of Iranian workers were neither organized in trade unions nor went on strike. In his paper “Working for Bread, Writing for Redress: Petition as a Source for Early Twentieth-Century Iranian Labour History,” Afacan used individual and group petitions of factory workers to investigate worksite experiences and everyday lives of laborers. The information derived from petitions could enable labor historians of Iran to gain invaluable insights into the working and living conditions of workers and other labor-related matters such as gender, recruitment policies, as well as relations with employers and other ruling agents. Afacan concluded that by using petitions, workers' actions, such as strikes or slowdowns, could also be analyzed through workers' own perspective, and one could reinstate workers' agency.

In their joint paper “The Rise and Decline of the Zonguldak Coalmining Industry and Its Impact on Worker Identity: From the Ottoman Period to the Present,” H. Tarık Şengül and E. Attila Aytekin, Middle East Technical University, questioned the operational value of class in this key state industrial enterprise. They used an interdisciplinary approach in this study, which covered a century-long period. First, they analyzed the late-Ottoman early-Turkish Republican years of coal production in Zonguldak. In this period the coal mines had one of the highest concentrations of industrial workers in the country. In so doing, they underlined the continuities between the Ottoman and Republican era such as the distinction between underground and surface workers, village-based recruitment methods, and labor militancy. The second part of their paper examined the effect of privatization attempts and the post-1980 decline of coal mining in the region on worker identity. Şengül and Aytekin argued that as the importance of the state as employer eroded, workers' identity became multifaceted, and other loci of identification gained importance, like community and family. They concluded that despite decades of deindustrialization, class is still an important locus of identity for the workers of Zonguldak.

New Sources and New Methods in Ottoman Labor History

The last section of the conference addressed new sources and methods in Ottoman labor history. Three papers on artisans and occupations in the Ottoman Empire used a newly developed research tool, STRATA, designed and coded by Murat Güvenç and Savaş Yıldırım from the Center for Urban Studies at Istanbul Şehir University. STRATA is a graphical user interface (GUI) devised for compression of large contingency tables. It operationalizes the methodological solutions stipulated by Lebart.Footnote ⁹ The GUI makes joint use of clustering and correspondence analysis. By utilizing this innovative tool, initial attempts have been made to perform qualitative analysis of categorical data in Ottoman economic and labor history.

Suraiya Faroqhi, Istanbul Bilgi University, in her paper “Cheap Textiles: Manufacture and Marketing in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul” worked on a list of artisans. As an expert on Ottoman artisans she located producers of a variety of relatively cheap “mass market” textiles in the city. Faroqhi then asked whether religious affiliations of the textile producers resulted in their segregation along religious lines within the city. She concluded that the evidence was not yet suffiently rich to conclusively answer that question.

Betül Başaran, St. Mary's College of Maryland, and Cengiz Kırlı, Boğaziçi University, also used STRATA in their joint paper, “Sultan Selim III and the Esnaf of Istanbul at the End of the Eighteenth Century” to analyze data on shop ownership in Istanbul. The dataset they constructed has an impressive coverage. While it excluded large state enterprises, bazaars, taverns, hans, and hamams, the data gave detailed information on roughly forty-five thousand people, the majority of Istanbul's labor force in the late-eighteenth century. The source material they used was also a crucial resource for the reconstruction of the spatial and social topography of the Ottoman capital for the same period. This research tool offers rich potential to assess the validity of long-prevailing assumptions about religious division of labor and spatial organization of crafts along ethnoreligious lines in Ottoman Istanbul.

The third and the last paper that used STRATA was from M. Erdem Kabadayı, Istanbul Bilgi University, entitled “Occupations in Ottoman Cities in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” Following a similar approach to Başaran and Kırlı, Kabadayı analyzed an 1845 databank of occupational titles of the heads of 45,000 households—the entire urban population of twelve Ottoman cities—Vidin, Niş, Skopje, Bitola, Salonica, Edirne, Bursa, Manisa, Ankara, Konya, Sivas, and Erzurum. With STRATA Kabadayı investigated whether ethnoreligious affiliations of Ottoman urban dwellers were influential in shaping the occupational structure in the chosen cities. Secondly, he questioned the unchallenged but strongly accepted argument that the opening of Ottoman markets to mass-produced European goods in the first half of the nineteenth century resulted in an abrupt and lethal drop in urban Ottoman artisanal production. Rather Kabadayı discovered the total number of artisans in all of the cities under investigation strongly suggested that craft production continued to be the backbone of Ottoman urban economies.

The last paper making use of new sources was from Gülhan Balsoy, Işık University, “Where are the Female Workers? Profile of the Female Workers of the Cibali Regie Factory and the Feshane Factory.” Building upon her previous work on photographs of an Istanbul factory from the early 1900s,Footnote ¹⁰ she successfully applied a gendered perspective to make critical use of visual material to investigate the working conditions and a possible gender division of labor within the factory. Balsoy then attempted to conduct a comparative examination of the female labor force of the two factories: the Cibali Regie Factory, for which photographical documentation is available, and the Fez Factory, for which there is ample official archival documentation.

Where Do We Stand in Labor History and Where Do We Go from Here in Turkey?

In a final note we would like to underline the prominent role unions and laborers have played in bringing about recent political and social change in the geographic regions the conference covered, especially the Middle East. As organizers we had hoped to frame the conference proceedings with a paper by Joel Beinin, Stanford University, entitled “Arab Workers and the Arab Awakening.” Beinin had planned to provide some historical background to the critical role workers and their organizations have had in bringing about the so-called “Arab Spring.” Unfortunately, Beinin was not able to join us for the conference in Istanbul. Due in part to his absence, the contemporary relevance of the labor movement was a topic we failed to cover at the conference.

The aim of global labor history is not to replace class as a unit of analysis with another common denominator, but rather to enrich it and consider the interaction of workers' multiple entangled identities. In this respect the history of the working classes should remain central to the research agenda of a new labor history. To this end, the conference did not fully achieve its objective of bridging the gap between the Turkish labor historiography and the international historiography of the labor movement. Still, the conference was partially successful in situating Ottoman and Turkish labor history within the broader regional context of the Middle East and the Balkans. We were happy to have had interventions on and participants from Bulgaria, the Caucasus, Egypt, Greece, and Iran. We feel that this conference was a small, yet important step toward fulfilling Donald Quataert's desire to regionalize and internationalize the study of Ottoman and Turkish labor history. Lastly, but for our purposes as the organizers, most importantly, we hope we can say that our goal of bringing scholars working on Ottoman and Turkish labor history into dialogue with prominent figures of the new global labor history project was not a failure. We are still far away from integrating the realms of the former Ottoman Empire into this new and active area of historical research. Nevertheless, we hope that both the papers and the discussions of this conference can provide orientation and direction for future scholarly cooperation and collaboration with historians of labor around the globe.