Three decades after the cultural and gender turns began to shake up more social science-oriented labor history, where does the field now stand? Have the profound changes in the world economy during the same period—the new globalization—had discernible effects on the discipline? This eclectic volume of essays edited by Jürgen Kocka, the doyen of German labor history, shows today's inchoate condition of labor history, at least in its original, European, proving ground. Work itself has replaced the (politicized) working class as the subject. Even so, Kocka admits, the concept of work may be too vague and changeable across time and between cultures to make a general history possible. These self-doubts notwithstanding, a number of the essays overlap enough to suggest some intriguing possibilities for labor history's revival on a comparative and even global basis.
The nine short essays can be grouped into five thematic categories. The first three entries, all skillfully done, are less about work itself than conceptions of work. Josef Ehmer shows that in fifteenth-century Germany (i.e., before the Reformation and as part of a general European development), work began to assume a more important place in the discourses of and struggles between various social groups (monarchs, urban patricians, guildsmen, and commoners). Gerd Spittler, a social anthropologist specializing in Africa, analyzes the conceptions of work in several foundational nineteenth-century “philosophical anthropologists” (Marx and Weber, but also Riehl, Bücher, and Ostwald). These scholars, Spittler suggests, not only influenced the early twentieth-century birth of empirical ethnography but are also of relevance for thinking about work today. Finally, Thomas Welskopp dissects the subtle differences between the visions of ennobling work in the early German labor movement—whether as an “association” of egalitarian workers and hence full citizens, as the “art” of printers and typesetters organized in the first unions, or finally, from the 1890s in the dominant vision of the skilled worker performing “quality work” and thus earning his position as an “industrial citizen.”
The second thematic category might be called “work and some affective analogies.” Ute Frevert relates work to trust in two senses: the cooperation necessary for most work requires trust, but forming trust also demands ongoing effort (i.e., work). Alf Lüdtke explores the many similarities, as well as some key differences, between working and soldiering, in particular between the small teams of semiautonomous skilled workers in the German variety of capitalism and the Prussian/German military tradition of Auftragstaktik (in which units receive general goals from higher up, but not precise instructions about how to achieve them). These entries make fascinating comparisons and connections, but rely too often on sporadic evidence and remain only suggestive.
The third and fourth categories each contain just a single entry. Karin Hausen's essay is a historiographic survey of the “hesitant process of integrating gender history into the history of work” during the last three decades. Klaus Tenfelde's treatment of Nazi forced labor, on the other hand, is the most concrete, data-rich essay in the volume. Relying mainly on a substantial research project he leads in Bochum, Tenfelde skillfully shows the great variety, in degree and kind, of compulsion used by the Nazis. At the same time, by drawing comparisons to the travails of ostensibly free labor, Tenfelde raises the interesting question of just what forced labor means, thus circling back to the conceptual themes of the earlier chapters.
The last two chapters in the volume focus on non- or only tangentially European themes. The ambitious arguments they make about a new global history of labor can be placed in fruitful dialogue with themes from the other essays. Sebastian Conrad subjects the claim that Confucianism lies behind the Japanese work ethic to a convincing critique. Rather than tracing Japanese (or, indeed, any other) modernity to autochthonous traditions, we must look to the exchanges and power relations between countries and regions. Likewise, Andreas Eckert, an African specialist, calls for a global labor history that addresses the “entanglements” between “the West and the rest” (and presumably within each category as well). While Eckert notes that such connections may produce convergent outcomes (such as the emergence of global labor markets), they may also spark “new fragmentations and particularities.” Indeed, simply surveying the vast diversity of global labor practices and regimes can help us to “provincialize” the recent European form of wage labor, recognizing it as just one kind of work among many. We would thus avoid the impulse to “subordinate the rich histories of labor . . . to the trajectory of globalization.”
A thread tying several essays together is diversity within uniformity—whether in the intensified discourses about work in the late Middle Ages, in nineteenth-century conceptions of ennobling work, or within the broad category of Nazi forced labor. The Africanist Eckert especially emphasizes, alongside the cross-cultural entanglements of globalization, the persistence and even new emergence of diversity. Here a surprising and perhaps productive debate emerges with another contribution: that of Gerd Spittler (intriguingly, the other Africanist), who encourages us to reexamine nineteenth-century attempts not so much to contrast divergence and convergence, but to integrate them. Marx, Weber, Bücher, and the others, after all, offered evolutionist accounts of global labor history in which the particular could still belong to an overall pattern.
