This is a remarkably ambitious and useful study, a series of offerings (many of them previously published) from the author’s career-long musings on labour history and the possibilities of a global labour history. Thus, it reflects his extraordinary researchings into the nature of labour history, mainly as experienced in Europe and the United States but with considerable materials drawn from other regions as well. It is an introductory work, albeit a very complex one, based on secondary sources, and indeed should serve as a handbook for those concerned with labour and global labour issues.

Van der Linden divides the book’s sixteen chapters into five sections, the first of which grapples with definitions of workers, free labour, and chattel slavery. Here and throughout the work, I was glad to encounter a scholar not bound into rigid orthodoxies but rather struggling to capture the daily experiences of workers – whatever the form of labour commodification – in worlds dominated by state and capital. His discussions of the evolving and inverse relationship in the frequency of free and unfree labour typify the flexibility of his overall approach.

The second major section, ‘Varieties of mutualism’, rests upon the author’s grounding in west European history, a training that, in my view, helps him to draw attention to cooperative endeavours often overlooked in global labour studies. In four chapters, he traces varying forms of mutualism, including mutual insurance and consumer and producer cooperatives. His examples are draw, from the Cameroons, various South American locations, Mexico, and East Asia, as well as the United States and Europe. I found the geographic sweep of such examples impressive; more importantly, they reflect van der Linden’s underlying goal of moving towards a global perspective.

The third section, ‘Forms of Resistance’, embraces such diverse topics as strikes, consumer protests, unions, and labour internationalism. Here, I found the overarching rubric of resistance, while certainly an accurate descriptor, to be less than optimal in portraying the goals of such strikes, protests, and unions. After all, these sought to create and perpetuate an alternate universe for workers and their families, as did the mutualisms of the previous section. This is an organizational quibble: mutualisms could easily be considered as resistance as well.

In the following section, the author encourages the reader to reach beyond the discipline of history. He first presents the contributions of world systems theory and of the Bielefeld school towards the making of labour history. He presents the constructive aspects of each, even while carefully dissecting their respective weaknesses. Correctly preferring not to discard the bathwater, he encourages historians to reconsider the babies’ beauty. He argues that global labour historians have much to learn from these two important collective efforts. Both have demonstrated the extraordinarily varied ways in which labour has interacted with capital, and we need to reconsider their accomplishments. He follows with a third chapter, an extended case study of a people in Papua New Guinea and their encounter with global capital, seeking to illustrate the value of ethnographic studies.

The final chapter aims to begin rebuilding the ‘ship of labor history’ (p. 359), van der Linden’s own borrowing from another scholar. This chapter by itself can be read with great profit, for here the author lays out some of his own hopes for the construction of global labour history. I found his discussion?of a ‘universal history of work’ and ‘a history of globalized work’ (p. 360) especially valuable.

And so I found reading this book an immensely rewarding undertaking and will continue van der Linden’s insights in my own work on labour history. The going was sometimes difficult, almost overwhelming, in the face of two torrents. The first was one of examples, a mass of materials drawn from many corners of the globe. The second was a torrent of nuance, in which the author refused to simplify the discussion but pressed to explore the issue at hand in its many dimensions.