The editorial board at International Labor and Working-Class History is pleased to announce an exciting change in the format of the journal. We will be phasing out our standard reviews of single books in order to replace them with fewer but much longer, more substantial, and more provocative review essays on particular issues, themes or problems. Rather than analyzing the merits of particular volumes, we hope to make the review section a forum for drawing together “state of the debate” approaches to knowledge about global labor history. The emphasis will be on the realm of ideas and analysis rather than on simple academic adjudication of books. Our hope is that the essays will not simply review books but also make contributions in their own right to our knowledge of labor and working-class history.

The essay format is familiar to us all, but it will be particularly appropriate for ILWCH, which has a unique scope and mission among academic journals. We hope that the review essays will allow people to craft an essay with a geographic focus on, say, new studies of unfree labor in Latin America, or postcolonial labor in Africa, or Chinese labor since liberalization. Alternatively, an essay could draw various works from different nations or regions together on a specific theme, such as public-sector work, immigration, deindustrialization, slavery, decolonization, or the informal economy. We are wide open to creative ideas in this new venue, including looking at films, revisiting old classics in the literature, and making innovative connections that we would not normally see in book reviews. While we regret that we will not be able to review every deserving book because of this switch—and apologize in advance for that—there are other journals of record that will continue to offer thorough coverage of the published literature.

Review essays will cover approximately three to five books and be 5,000–6,000 words in length. Proposals are very welcome, and we will be more than happy to help reviewers either round out or hone down an appropriate list of books. If you would like to propose an essay idea to the editorial board, please send an electronic query to: