It is emblematic that Marcel van der Linden's essay on the recent construction of Global Labor History begins with the founding in 1971 of the newsletter that would become ILWCH, for the two have taken complementary if somewhat different paths from that common point of departure. Significantly, van der Linden starts his account from the same place as David Montgomery does his history of ILWCH in the first part of this issue, but Marcel then views the trajectory of the international labor history that follows from a synoptic global perspective that alters his vision—and ours.

Global Labor History—“GLH” to its initiates—has come a long way in a very short time, mostly during the past decade. Marcel van der Linden, as a historian, promoter, and organizer, has played a leading role in its advances.

Marcel's excellent essay synthesizes his own work and reflections on Global Labor History and those of other scholars in both the Global North and South. It is a valuable contribution to ILWCH's fortieth anniversary issue, focusing our attentions on a cutting edge of international labor history in the present and pointing the way to its future, one in which he envisions that GLH will unite scholars and activists from both the Global North and South, around a shared purpose and a common history (albeit viewed from different perspectives). In this optimistic vision, GLH will enable labor history to retain its relevance in both developed and developing countries during an era of transition in which labor is being both transferred and transformed, in which capital is being reorganized and production restructured on a global scale, and in which labor has begun to realize that it, too, must begin to think and organize globally if it is to deal with this globalization of capital and production.

Van der Linden's article is really a “threefer”—three pieces in one. It is part historiography, part manifesto, and part research agenda. Its first part offers an invaluable historiography of GLH, which turns out to be longer and richer than most would think this new field of study possesses. Later in his piece Marcel talks about commodity production chains that span the globe. If knowledge is a commodity (and in this era of the “information economy,” it would seem to be), then Marcel van der Linden and his International Institute of Social History [IISH] have long been at the top of that chain, placing him in an ideal position to command the complex and disparate work undertaken by scholars in different fields and nations on what he would come to call GLH. The result is as authoritative a synthesis as we are likely to get of the history—and prehistory—of GLH, one that highlights advances in the Global South and does not privilege achievements—or crises—in the Global North. Still, a key date in his story is 1999, the year in which van der Linden and Jan Lucassen published their Prolegomena for a Global Labour History, a manifesto that Marcel himself declares dated, making his ILWCH essay an update that summarizes the considerable advances in GLH since 1999.Footnote ¹

Yet, this article too is a manifesto of sorts, one that seeks to persuade the reader that GLH is the cutting edge of the present, the wave of the future, and the salvation of international labor history in the Global North as well as the Global South. Like all manifestos, it is promotional, and in the service of his cause van der Linden selects those examples that support his case—and often ignores those that cut the other way. As a result, an opposite argument could be constructed by a more skeptical analyst, one that challenges some of his optimism, if not his objectives.

A couple of examples will have to suffice, one from Latin America, my area of specialization; the other from my 2008 experience of China. Key to Marcel's argument is his vision of GLH being embraced and developed in the Global South—with Brazil and India his shining examples. Yet, as a historian of Latin America, I am acutely aware of the hold of national histories over both established historians and young students of history, and of how difficult it is to get them to look beyond their own borders. Even Latin American history is a hard sell in Argentina or Chile or Uruguay, let alone Global history. They do have courses on “Universal” history, but they turn out to be about European history—not Global history.

When it comes to Global Labor History, the situation is no better. Some of the most vibrant labor history in Latin America can be found in Chile, as practiced by returning exiles from the Pinochet dictatorship who had taken advantage of their exile to study for advanced degrees at North American, Latin American, and European universities. When they returned to Chile in the 1980s and 1990s, they brought back with them a vision of social history informed by the latest Anglo-American and continental schools, including a Thompsonian vision of labor history at odds with the orthodox Marxist histories of labor organizations and modes of production that they had read in Chile before the 1973 military coup.Footnote ²

In the neoliberal democracy of post-Pinochet Chile, governed by the center-left Concertación, labor unions declined in membership and influence, and social movements were demobilized, but leftist labor history flourished.Footnote ³

Moreover, it flourished not only among the middle-aged returning exiles who found university posts and became the dominant generation intellectually in the 1990s, but also among the young Chileans who became their students. Among the younger generation, social history—including labor history—became all the rage and its professorial practitioners became culture heroes.

In the early twenty-first century, while US and other Global North labor historians worried about attracting enough students to have a seminar on labor history, Chilean labor historians had no such problems.

The event that signaled and symbolized the boom in labor history in this Global South country that was being touted as a model of neoliberal globalism for other nations to emulate was the 2007 commemoration of the centenary of the massacre of a claimed 3000 nitrate miners, their wives, and children in the northern port of Iquique, during a regional general strike, an event made famous not by a labor history book, but by a popular folk “cantata” of the Allende era.Footnote ⁴ In 2007, however, it would be commemorated by a three-day conference of labor historians, with panels on various aspects of the massacre and its context and memory, although it would end with a free outdoor performance of the cantata. There were also roundtables of experts and publication launches of both new books on the massacre, the labor movement, anarchists, and the social question and new editions of older, now classic works, as well as published primary sources.Footnote ⁵ This is hardly the stuff of mass marketing; yet, the response of young Chileans was electric. More than 2000 students attended, most of them traveling for twenty-four to forty-eight hours on cramped buses to get to the conference site in the far north of Chile, some of them joining a “march” from Santiago that covered most of the distance on foot. They slept wherever they could, shared their food and attended sessions enthusiastically, intensely debating what the speakers had said. Moreover, they went to the book launches, bought copies to be autographed, and treated the aging labor historians as models to emulate. Even foreign scholars of Chilean labor history found themselves lionized. I remember three eager young women insisting on having their picture taken with me, because I was a “famous” labor historian. I was interviewed by a student magazine about labor history from below and invited to address student groups at multiple universities. As one graybeard historian explained to me, social and labor historians today are the culture heroes of Chile that leftist sociologists were in the 1960s. It was a labor historian's dream come true.

Yet, the same enthusiasm and engagement did not extend to the presentation of a visiting Mexican labor historian or the publication of the Chilean edition of his book on a strike of Mexican miners during that same era, which were “politely received.” It was Chile's national labor history that turned them on, not a broader Latin American perspective on miners and contemporaneous labor conflicts elsewhere. The exception that proved the rule was the participation of Peruvian and Bolivian workers in the Iquique strike and their class-conscious decision to share the fate of their Chilean compañeros when their consuls came and offered them safe conduct before the massacre. But that was a regional history that was really an extension of Chilean history. There was no presence of or interest in a global labor history except on the part of a few of the more sophisticated older generation of historians who had studied in Europe or the United States. Yet, Chile today is a deindustrialized economy as dependent on its export of commodities to a globalized world as it was during the nitrate boom of a century ago and prides itself on being the most open country in the world to global trade and investment. Perhaps part of the explanation of this paradox is precisely Chile's seeming submission to globalization, which provokes a nationalistic popular response, just as globalization itself has simultaneously provoked localist and nationalist responses in many parts of the world, reactions perhaps to the loss of control over local and national destinies to international actors and forces. But, what is striking is the fierce focus of Chilean labor historians and students on national—not international—labor history. This is true even where the labor history of Chile's new leading trading partner–China—is concerned.

In China, the situation is very different. China is the most dynamic industrial economy on our planet, having now passed Japan, Germany, and the United States to become the world's leading manufacturer and exporter of manufactured goods. Moreover, it is still formally a Communist country, which honors its workers discursively even while it seeks to control them and their organizations. Yet, unlike India, labor history is not flourishing in China. It is hindered by a state that is still Communist enough to fear workers, and to discourage scholarly labor history in the name of order and orthodoxy. The difficulties of doing labor history research in China means that it mostly exists on the margins of academic study or among foreigners, many of them overseas—Chinese or their children or grandchildren.

Moreover, university-educated Chinese historians are not interested in labor history, which has a bad reputation from its propagandistic Maoist past, particularly internationalist labor history. The result is that the boom in Chinese Labor History that Marcel would lead us to expect in the Global South's industrial leader, which is still going through an intense and complex process of industrialization that is penetrating deeper and deeper into China, has not materialized—let alone a boom in Chinese comparative studies of international labor history that go beyond the official story.Footnote ⁶

In other words, had Marcel chosen examples from Chile instead of Brazil, and China instead of India, he might have come to less optimistic conclusions about the embrace of GLH in the Global South. This would not necessarily have changed his larger conclusions, but it might have tempered his optimism and extended his time line.

Why Marcel van der Linden needs a persuasive manifesto that will attract labor historians around the world to GLH is clear in the ambitious research agenda that forms the final part of his essay. This is the case even though van der Linden, who defines work broadly as “the purposive production of useful objects or services,” rejects the largest definition of GLH as “a universal history of work” for a more delimited “history of globalized work” that explores “histories of labor seen as studies of capitalism through its labor aspect.” This restricts the chronological period under study, but allows for the investigation of shifting forms of free and unfree labor around the world—and especially for the study of their interconnections. For it is “the description and explanation of the intensifying (or weakening) connections (interactions, influences, transfers) between different world regions, as well as of the economic, political, social and cultural networks, institutions and media which played a role in it” that van der Linden sees as the primary concern of global history. In this pursuit, Marcel encourages boldness in venturing into the unknown, across national, disciplinary and conventional wisdom boundaries—advice that I endorse.

The research agenda that flows from his analysis, however, is daunting, beginning with a reconceptualization of the working class to include all whose labor power has been commodified and exploited by employers, as well as the changing composition of the global working class in all its diversity and its differential class formation with its intraclass inequalities (which Marcel argues can be pursued by reconstructing commodity chains and following their labor across the globe from raw material extraction to processing and final consumption). This study of global interconnections, he maintains, can shed light on the old question of whether—and how much—workers in the Global North benefit from the low-wage labor of workers in the Global South. Van der Linden envisions that the investigation of international inequalities will, in turn, lead to a study of the transfer mechanisms, including migration and transport workers.

Class culture is another large area in Marcel van der Linden's research agenda, which he argues will also entail investigation of worker socialization in families, education, and social networks, in effect an “intercultural historiography of socialization processes” that shaped worker mentalities around the world in varying molds. Still another topic in the research agenda of GLH is the changing differential awareness of global connections and interconnected processes that form a causal chain. They may lead to international solidarity in some cases but only to isolated memories in others. This also needs to be researched, he suggests, perhaps through “global biographies” of individuals who crossed geographic, ethnic, or religious boundaries, especially those who wrote about their experience—who, in my experience, are few and far between.

In addition to the new questions that a Global Labor History poses to labor historians, van der Linden also sees a global perspective as shedding new light on such classic labor history concerns as forms of worker self-organization (from mutual aid to unions) and resistance (from slave flight and wage strikes to less overt weapons of the weak). But it can also illuminate capitalist strategies and shifting modes of production to counter the strengthened bargaining power of workers in the expanding and profitable sectors of the global economy, yet another item on his research agenda. Lastly, Marcel van der Linden wants labor historians to research the history of worker political organizations such as social democratic or labor parties, which Hobsbawm argued were confined to Europe between the 1880s and 1930s. This research, van der Linden maintains, will not only explain why so few worker political organizations have emerged from the Global South since 1945, but also the exceptions, such as the Workers' Party in Brazil that Lula founded in 1980. And for good measure he asks, what were the roles of radical religions in this limited development of worker political organizations?

So ambitious a research agenda in both geographic and analytic scope will require an army of researchers from many countries and diverse disciplines working over the course of many years before GLH is fully fleshed out and consolidated as a field of study. Now, in my judgment—which differs from van der Linden's—it is still a field “in construction,” whose contours and structures remain to be established, with occasional islands or archipelagos of research and writing scattered on the immensity of the sea of Global Labor History pointing the way. In view of this situation, it is little wonder that Marcel van der Linden promotes contact and cooperation between groups of labor historians in different regions, between labor historians and historians of related themes, and between historians and social scientists.Footnote ⁷

I agree that these collaborations are necessary and potentially fruitful, but I know from my own experience that they require negotiation, compromise, and both time and patience, not to mention funding that is increasingly difficult to obtain in many parts of the world. Moreover, I know from my own Latin American research that these are difficult questions to which past research has provided only partial answers, even within national labor histories.

Yet, a Latin American perspective also reveals the potential of a Global Labor History. In Latin America, the boundaries between work in the formal and informal sectors are fluid and reflect the process of globalization and its transfer of work around the world through global production chains, with capitalists often using a repertoire of strategies to reduce labor costs and resistance. A GLH perspective could shed new light on all of these processes, both within Latin America and beyond its borders. The national labor histories of Latin America, therefore, would be illuminated as well if viewed from a global perspective.

I am more pessimistic than Marcel about the difficulties of constructing a GLH that will be able to reorganize the way labor history is conceptualized, researched, and written around the world. Nevertheless, I share his conviction that it is both a necessary and promising enterprise at a time in which labor history can seem an endangered species in the Global North and stillborn in much of the Global South.

And even if it proves a more difficult and complex enterprise than van der Linden envisions in his essay, whose success is uneven and whose end results are not as transformative as he prophesies, Global Labor History will still be a task worth doing—even an enterprise worth embracing by young labor historians around the world as their life's work.

On this fortieth anniversary of International Labor and Working-Class History, therefore, I want to thank Marcel van der Linden for both his good news about the advance of Global Labor History and for the challenges that he has set for us. For whatever differences we may have on details, I agree with his fundamental argument: In a globalized world, we need a Global Labor History.