Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-j7cmm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-10T07:31:35.084Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Promise and Peril of the New Global Labor History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2013

Dorothy Sue Cobble
Dorothy Sue Cobble*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Information

Type
Responses
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 82 , Fall 2012 , pp. 99 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2013

We are all in debt to Marcel van der Linden and the extraordinary center, the International Institute of Social History (IISH), where he serves as research director. Founded in 1935, IISH quickly became and remains the premier institution in the world for archival resources and collaborative research on international labor and social movements. Over the last two decades, van der Linden's encouragement of labor scholarship, particularly in South Asia, and his efforts to forge regional and transnational networks of labor researchers in the Global South enabled IISH to internationalize more fully and resulted in significant collaborative research projects and publications. We have all benefited as well from van der Linden's own prodigious scholarship on syndicalism, mutualism, labor internationalism, and a host of other topics.Footnote 1 His contributions to ILWCH alone are impressive and range from review essays and articles such as his 2004 piece, “The ‘Globalization' of Labor and Working-Class History and its Consequences,” to the coediting of special issues on “New Approaches to Global Labor History” (with Michael Hanagan) ILWCH 66 (Fall 2004) and “Free and Unfree Labor” (with Carolyn Brown) ILWCH 78 (Fall 2010).

In his essay in this anniversary issue of ILWCH, van der Linden once again traverses the globe, offering a stimulating account of what can be called the “global turn” in labor history. Understandably, given the brevity of his essay and the enormity of the territory to be covered—spatially and intellectually—much is left unsaid.Footnote 2 Nevertheless, in a few pages, van der Linden provides much to ponder. He describes the rise of “global labor history,” identifies what he sees as its core concerns, specifies how these concerns differ from those of “traditional labor history,” and points to research topics global labor historians are and should be pursuing. Van der Linden is one of the most influential proponents of “global labor history.” His characterization of past scholarship in labor history and his framework for future research have circulated widely and are becoming conventional wisdom. It is important then for historians to take stock of his arguments and consider both the promise and the peril of the new global labor history he is advocating.

According to van der Linden, a new field, “global labor history,” is emerging in the twenty-first century that is an alternative to “traditional labor history.” “Global labor history” parallels the larger historiographical shift to global, transnational, and comparative history since the 1990s in its desire to transcend “national” histories that confine the historical frame to the nation-state.Footnote 3 And like the new global and transnational history more generally, “global labor history” is concerned with “interconnections”.Footnote 4 Yet in van der Linden's formulation, “global labor history” is not just about transcending nationalist methodologies and tracing global circuits and exchange. It is distinguished by its break with the primary subject of “traditional labor history”: the classic waged industrial proletariat. According to van der Linden, “global labor history,” unlike “traditional labor history,” has a broad definition of who is a worker and who is in the working class; it also moves beyond industrial settings to study workers in a variety of workplaces and modes of production and expands labor history's temporal frame into earlier preindustrial eras. There is much to applaud here. At the same time, there are serious problems in van der Linden's account. He constructs a false portrait of “traditional labor history” that cuts scholars off from the richness of their past. And in an ironic twist, he ends up calling for a particular kind of new “global labor history” that in many ways is remarkably traditional.

Certainly, global consciousness and global history is to be encouraged. The salutary effects of the rise of global and transnational history have been many. For US historians—to take the example I know best—the “global turn” has encouraged more multipronged frameworks for understanding US developments and rendered suspect explanatory models relying solely on domestic or internal forces.Footnote 5 As Eric Rauchway puts it, “the world made America.”Footnote 6 It also has spurred a rethinking of the exceptionalist viewpoint in US history with its presumption—often based on very little knowledge about the “rest of the world”—that the United States is different from all other regions. This problematic approach not only fails to see the United States as part of the world, influenced by global forces like other countries, but it also homogenizes the “rest of the world,” creating a fictive “other” for comparison.Footnote 7 Indeed, under the sway of the new global and transnational history, historians of all stripes have come to view national borders and identities as artificial and constructed and hence more permeable and thus capable of deconstruction and reinvention. And who knows, the denaturalizing of national boundaries in historical writing may have positive political effects, helping delegitimize xenophobic sentiments and embolden policy premised on global interdependence and mutuality.

I am thus a strong advocate of globalizing labor history and welcome the global turn in labor history as in other fields. Yet we should not fool ourselves into thinking we are the first generation to think globally or to write global labor history. The older global labor history certainly had its biases and limitations, and it's easy to see how earlier generations failed to acknowledge what we now consider self-evident. But the real question for labor historians is not how we write global labor history for the first time, but how should our global labor histories differ from those that came before.

The Old Global Labor History

Unfortunately, the long tradition of scholarly attention to the global, to global processes, and to considering questions comparatively gets relatively short shrift in van der Linden's essay. In this fortieth anniversary issue, it seems appropriate to take a moment to mention the journal's own longstanding efforts in this regard. ILWCH in the 1970s and 1980s was filled with news of labor history conferences and scholarship around the world as well as reviews of non-English language publications. Europeanists started the journal, and the first issues, not surprisingly, centered on Western Europe, particularly Germany and France. But quickly the geographic focus expanded to encompass Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, North America, Latin America, Asia (particularly Japan and China), the Caribbean, and other regions. Long review essays introduced readers to the labor history literatures of Latin America, Egypt, Russia, and other regions. Comparative symposia routinely included perspectives from multiple regions and continents.Footnote 8 The “scholarly controversies” in ILWCH in the 1970s and 1980s also grappled with issues central to the present-day concerns of global labor history, including comparative and global perspectives on industrialization processes, immigration patterns, religion and the working class, workers and war, the global eight-hour movement and other issues.Footnote 9 As David Montgomery emphasized in his “Editor's Remarks” in the late 1970s and 1980s, the journal had a “continuing concern for global scope” and for following the global “movement of people and ideas.”Footnote 10 In 1995, ILWCH published a special issue on “Global Flows of Capital and Labor,” with essays by Charles Tilly, Immanuel Wallerstein, Aristide Zolberg, Eric Hobsbawm, and Lourdes Beneria. Wallerstein's piece was particularly prescient. Wallerstein challenged Tilly's narrative of declining labor movements and social democracy by calling attention to the rising power of Third World social movements and to their demands for democracy and a fairer share of the world's wealth.Footnote 11 Still, as David Montgomery reminds us in this issue in one of his last interviews, before the 1990s many scholars concerned with global labor processes were caught within the confining terms of modernization and dependency theory with their Eurocentric bias and overemphasis on common global patterns.Footnote 12 It is also true that earlier comparative work often relied on comparisons between nations and hence, according to some critics, had not yet freed itself from its “nationalist methodology.” Yet the old global labor history concerned itself with transnational phenomena and its comparative methodology utilized transregional and translocal frameworks as well as national ones. This large accumulated body of global and comparative literature has much to offer and we ignore it to our detriment.

Global labor history of the twenty-first century will need to rely on the vast empirical literature of past national labor histories as well as on the old global history. I have found it impossible to write about the connections between actors from different places and the ways in which ideas, institutions, and policies circulated and transformed without having some sense of place (including the nation). Context matters, and without it we cannot construct or understand the global. Indeed, without attention to what Michael Adas describes as the “cultural nuances and the intricacies of the internal histories of the societies” being described, global history begins to suffer from some of the same overemphasis on structure and homogeneous processes that marred world history of the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 13

How Traditional Was “Traditional Labor History”?

According to van der Linden, “global labor history” is new because it is more inclusive than “traditional labor history.” I welcome van der Linden's call for a broad definition of who is a worker and who qualifies as a legitimate subject of study. Indeed, one of the fundamental insights of the worldwide upsurge of feminist labor history since the 1970s has been that limiting labor history to “waged work” meant not only excluding the work and lives of most women historically but also making it impossible to understand the politics, institutions, and identities of male wage workers. Men, like women, relied on the reproductive labor of others to sustain their market work. Men, like women, also were social beings, embedded in families and communities. The goals of the movements built by men and women, as well as the successes and defeats of these movements, are not fully grasped without connecting the public and the private, the individual and the social, market work and family work.

Unfortunately, van der Linden's portrait of “traditional labor history” renders invisible this pioneering work of women's labor history. It also denies the richness and variety of earlier labor history scholarship as a whole. Studies of waged industrial labor do predominate on labor history shelves. At the same time, labor and social historians writing before the advent of the new “global labor history” produced numerous accounts of workers and social movements of all types. I remember in graduate school savoring such 1960s classics as Eric Hobsbawn's Primitive Rebels or George Rude's The Crowd in the French Revolution.Footnote 14 And in part due to Herbert Gutman's influential 1970s studies of black workers, slave and free, and of America's immigrant work force and their preindustrial ways, US labor historians following in his wake hardly limited themselves to the classic waged proletariat.Footnote 15 Who Built America, the popular two-volume textbook inspired by Gutman's social history project, took “working people” as its central subject; slavery and other forms of unfree labor were given full treatment as were tenant farmers, women working in the home, small proprietors, factory, white collar, and service workers.Footnote 16 Moreover, some of the most influential “new labor history” monographs by US historians focused on the nineteenth century and on the “producing classes,” a broad category including the self employed, small businessmen, farmers, wage workers, housewives, and others.Footnote 17 Another body of literature in US labor history developed around the question of the transition to waged labor (never complete given barter as well as subsistence and household labor) and the persistence of preindustrial norms and practices in the seismic shift from farm to factory.Footnote 18 In the decades before the 1990s, US and non-US labor historians profiled a wide range of nonindustrial workers as well. The list is long but includes studies of seamen, department store workers, waitresses, hospital workers, barmaids, canal diggers, sewermen, transportation workers, and many others.Footnote 19

The Traditionalism of the New “Global Labor History”

In many ways, the global labor history van der Linden proposes reinscribes an old-style class analysis. Despite his call to move beyond “traditional labor history,” the theoretical framework upon which he relies is actually quite traditional. There is as much that is old as new in van der Linden's global labor history.

For one, he sidesteps what I take to be one of the fundamental theoretical challenges of women's labor history to traditional class analysis. And I'm not talking about discourse theory or poststructuralism. Rather, I'm talking about the household mode of production and the necessity to understand the labor of production in relation to the labor of reproduction. Take Christine Stansell's 1987 classic, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, or Jeanne Boydston's Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (1994). For Stansell, the sweated system of labor that emerged in the garment industry in New York City in the early nineteenth century cannot be understood apart from the hierarchical relations of production in the home. With the growth of market work, capitalists relied upon these household norms and structures to extract extraordinary profits from women and children. For Boydston, industrialization and the rise of wage work rested on the devaluing and invisibility of women's unpaid household labor. Such devaluation allowed capital accumulation; it also masked the true worth of market labor.

Equally troubling is his concept of class. For van der Linden, class is objectified, a category external to culture. Class formation exists outside history and can be abstracted and universalized. E.P. Thompson argued that class is made between people at a particular time and in a particular place. It is not a structure or a process that can be studied apart from human relationships or the meanings people give to it. Van der Linden's formulation of class as a universal process and a structure extracted from particularities returns us to a pre-Thompsonian era.

Van der Linden presumes class is always the primary and determining system of exploitation. I disagree. No a priori category, whether class, gender, or any other, can predict before we even begin what we will find. We need a labor history, global and local, national and transnational, that insists upon the saliency of class but remains open to the possibility that at some moments, in some places, class relations may not be the only or even the primary form of marginalization.Footnote 20

It is true that van der Linden broadens the definition of “working class” to include new groups of “commodified workers.” But why should labor historians limit their study of labor to “commodified workers”? Why not study all working people whether or not they are “commodified”? How will we even know whether they are “commodified” until we study them? The concept of “commodification,” as van der Linden applies it, also ends up arbitrarily excluding the work of reproduction. Why should subsistence workers who grow carrots be “commodified” and hence part of labor history, but not household workers who cook and serve them to the family? Why does one have to sell one's labor power or its product in the market in order to make it into labor history? And why privilege “commodification” as the most important form of exploitation? Along with a wide range of other subjects, labor history should be concerned with the multiple structures, processes, and ideologies that disadvantage workers, how workers themselves define their exploitation, and how they combine to lessen their disadvantages.

The Global as Local

Let me conclude by adding to van der Linden's list of the challenges posed by global labor history. Andreas Eckert, echoing Fred Cooper, has argued that questions of power and of the asymmetries between “the west and the rest” can sometimes get lost in the focus on global circuits, processes, and connectivity.Footnote 21 A related issue is how we take into account our own global location as historians and how asymmetries of power and resources shape the global labor history that is written. Who gets to do “global history” and who gets to define the “global”? Do those who have greater access to English language publishers or resources to travel or the luxury of having multiple versions of their own “national” histories in print have an advantage? Global labor history may thus be more possible and more desirable in some places than others. It behooves us to ask, who is writing global history, and whose global history are we writing?

Recently I took my first trip to Belgium and to the European Social History Conference where I represented ILWCH on a panel of six labor history journal editors. It confirmed my sense that increasingly labor history journals in richer countries, particularly English-speaking ones, define their mission as “global.” In contrast, labor history journals in smaller, non-English speaking countries, which on this panel included journals from Belgium, Sweden, and Brazil, seemed more concerned with writing their own histories, which, while attentive to the world and its shaping influence, do not aspire nor claim to span the globe. It made me acutely aware of global differences among regions and how such differences can affect the writing of history.

At a later panel at the same conference, Mieke Aerts, a professor of Dutch political history at the University of Amsterdam, offered perhaps the wittiest pricking of the global balloon. Asked to comment on a panel featuring a new English-language anthology on “global feminisms” by a US-based scholar, she asked if “the global” wasn't really just another “local”? In other words, our particular vantage points do influence how we see our world, and we can only begin to see it with any clarity when we realize the flaws, biases, and parochialisms in each of our maps.Footnote 22

References

Notes

1. For more on the IISH, www.iisg.nl.

2. English-language anthologies include, among others, van der Linden, Marcel and Mohapatra, Prabhu P., eds., Labor Matters: Towards Global Histories: Studies in Honour of Sbyasachi Bhattacharya (New Dehli, 2009)Google Scholar; Behal, Rana P. and van der Linden, Marcel, eds., India's Labouring Poor: Historical Studies, c.1600–c.2000 (New Delhi, 2007)Google Scholar; Behal, Rana P. and van der Linden, Marcel, eds., Coolies, Capital, and Colonialism: Studies in Indian Labour History (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; Das, Arvind N. and van der Linden, Marcel, eds., Work and Social Change in Asia: Essays in Honour of Jan Breman (New Delhi, 2002)Google Scholar; Koh, Tommy and van der Linden, Marcel, eds., Labour Relations in Asia and Europe (Singapore, 2000)Google Scholar; van der Linden, Marcel and Thorpe, Wayne, eds., Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective (Aldershot, UK, 1990)Google Scholar; and van Holthoon, Frits and van der Linden, Marcel, Internationalism in the Labour Movement, 1830–1940 (Leiden and New York, 1988)Google Scholar. van der Linden's, Among monographs are Workers of the World, Essays Toward a Global Labor History (Leiden/Boston, 2008)Google Scholar; Transnational Labour History: Explorations (Aldershot, UK, 2003)Google Scholar; International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (Bern, 2000)Google Scholar; and Social Security Mutualism: The Comparative History of Mutual Benefit Societies (Bern, 1996)Google Scholar.

3. For a fuller treatment of many of these same issues, see van der Linden, Workers of the World.

4. Since the 1990s, a scholarly consensus has emerged on the need to go beyond “the nation” and “nationalist methodologies.” At the same time, historians continue to disagree on how to define “global” history and how to distinguish it from transnational, world, or comparative history. For an introduction to some of these debates, “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History: A Special Issue,” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999), especially 965–75Google Scholar; Mazlish, Bruce, “Comparing Global History to World History”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28 (Winter 1998): 385–95Google Scholar and “ AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111 (December 2006): 1440–64Google Scholar.

5. I agree with van der Linden that global history is concerned with “interconnections”. Yet so is transnational history with its focus on cross-border exchange, networks, and the circulation of ideas, peoples, and commodities. Thus, it is not clear how global labor history's attention to “interconnectivity” distinguishes it from transnational labor history.

6. From my own vantage point as a US historian trained in the 1980s, the “global turn” has been exhilarating. Like many of my generation, my parochialism ran deep. Yet inspired in part by the globalizing of gender studies at Rutgers in the 1990s and the work of historians such as Leila Rupp, Daniel Rodgers, Thomas Bender, and Akira Iriye, I, too, began to follow the internationalist threads of US labor and women's movements and to think about the US in a more global framework. My recent work along these lines includes “U.S. Labor Women's Internationalism in the World War I Era,” Special Issue on US Progressivism, Aubert, Didier, ed., Revue Francaise d'Etudes Americaines 122 (2009): 44–57 Google Scholar; “Friendship Beyond the Atlantic: Labour Feminist International Contacts After the Second World War,” Arbetarhistoria (Stockholm) 2009: 12–20 Google Scholar. Available in English online at http://www.arbark.se/2012/03/friendship-beyond-the-atlantic/; and “Labor Feminists and President Kennedy's Commission on Women”, in No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of US Feminism, ed. Hewitt, Nancy (New Brunswick, NJ, 2010), 144–67Google Scholar.

7. Rauchway, Eric, Blessed Among Nations: How The World Made America (New York, 2006)Google Scholar.

8. Rodgers, Daniel T., “American Exceptionalism Revisited,” Raritan Review 24 (2004): 21–37 Google Scholar; Bender, Thomas, A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History (New York, 2006)Google Scholar. Guarneri, Carl, America in the World: US History in Global Context (2007)Google Scholar.

9. See Newsletter, European Labor and Working-Class History, vols. 1–8 (1972–1975); International Labor and Working-Class History, vols. 9–36 (1976–1990). On Latin America, ILWCH 16 (1979): 29–40 Google Scholar; on Egyptian workers' history, ILWCH 18 (1980): 1–12 Google Scholar; on labor, Russian, ILWCH 22 (1982): 39–52 Google Scholar. For a fascinating scholarly controversy on the “new Latin American labor history,” ILWCH 36 (1989): 1–45 Google Scholar.

10. For scholarly controversies on industrialization, ILWCH 33 (1988): 3–38 Google Scholar; on religion and the working class, ILWCH 34 (1988): 3–69 Google Scholar; on Haymarket and its resonance around the world, ILWCH 29 (1986): 1–82 Google Scholar; on the working class during the Second World War, ILWCH 38 (1990): 3–62 Google Scholar.

11. Quotes from Montgomery, “Proletarian Globetrotters,” ILWCH 21 (1982)Google Scholar and Montgomery, “Editor's Remarks,” ILWCH 25 (1984)Google Scholar.

12. Charles Tilly, “Globalization Threatens Labor's Rights”; Immanuel Wallerstein, “Response: Declining States, Declining Rights?”; Aristide R. Zolberg, “Response: Working-Class Dissolution”; E.J. Hobsbawm, “Response: Guessing About Global Change”; Beneria, Lourdes, “Response: The Dynamics of Globalization”; all in ILWCH 47 (1995): 1–55 Google Scholar.

13. Hanagan, Michael and Field, Geoffrey, “Interview with David Montgomery,” ILWCH 82 (2012)Google Scholar.

14. Some scholars, like Ida Blom, reject the term “global history” precisely because it neglects the local, national, and regional contexts and ends up describing a “world without cultures.” Michael Adas, however, the editor of the American Historical Association's essay series on Global and Comparative History, argues that “the best recent works on global history” rely heavily on national and comparative studies. Blom, Ida, “Gender and Nation in International Comparison,” in Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Blom, Ida, Hagemann, Karen, and Hall, Catherine (New York, 2000): 3–26 Google Scholar; Michael Adas, “Foreword”; Moya, Jose C. and McKeown, Adam, World Migration in the Long Twentieth Century (Washington, DC, 2011): viiGoogle Scholar.

15. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (Norton, 1965)Google Scholar; Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1967)Google Scholar.

16. Gutman's essays began to appear in the late 1950s. His best-known books came later and include Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-class and Social History (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; and Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class, ed. Berlin, Ira (New York, 1987)Google Scholar.

17. American Social History Project, Who Built America?: Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture & Society vol. 1 (New York, 1989; Boston, 2007, Third edition)Google Scholar; and American Social History Project, Who Built America?: Working People and the Nation's History vol. 2 (Boston, 2008, Third edition)Google Scholar.

18. Among others, Wilentz, Sean, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; Fink, Leon, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana, IL, 1983)Google Scholar; Levine, Susan, Labor's True Woman: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization, and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age (Philadelphia, 1986)Google Scholar.

19. For example, Dublin, Tom, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Prude, Jonathan, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860 (New York, 1983)Google Scholar. For an excellent recent study, Rockman, Seth, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, 2009)Google Scholar. See also Stansell, Christine, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York, 1987)Google Scholar and Keyssar, Alexander, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (New York, 1986)Google Scholar.

20. Rediker, Marcus, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; Benson, Susan Porter, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana, IL, 1986)Google Scholar; Cobble, Dorothy Sue, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana, IL, 1991)Google Scholar; Fink, Leon and Greenberg, Brian, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: 1199/SEIU and the Politics of Healthcare Unionism (Urbana, IL, 1989)Google Scholar; Kirkby, Diane, Barmaids: A History of Women Workers in Pubs (Cambridge, 1997)Google Scholar; Way, Peter, Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of the North American Canals, 1780–1860 (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Reid, Donald, Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations (Boston, 1993)Google Scholar; Freeman, Josh, In Transit: The Transportation Workers Union in New York City, 1933–1966 (Philadelphia, 1988)Google Scholar.

21. It appears that labor history as a field is at an interesting juncture theoretically. With the “linguistic turn” no longer in fashion, and gender, race, and other theories often reduced to identity politics, some labor historians are celebrating the triumph of class as the primary category of analysis. “Theories of gender and language constituted an innovation of tremendous creative significance,” Labor History Review editors pronounced in their 2010 fiftieth-anniversary anthology, Histories of Labour, but overall “the evidence confirmed that class was the principal, although not the exclusive, instrument structuring experience in capitalist society.” They continue: “Class was the primary, but not the singular, prism through which most men and women in history had grasped the limits and possibilities of their lives.” McIlroy, John, Campbell, Alan, and Allen, Joan, “Introduction,” Histories of Labour: National and International Perspectives, eds. Allen, Joan, Campbell, Alan, and McIlroy, John (Pontypool, Wales, 2010); 11–12 Google Scholar.

22. Eckert, Andreas, “What is Global Labor History Good For?” in Work in a Modern Society: The German Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective, ed. Kocka, Jurgen (Oxford, 2010)Google Scholar; Cooper, Frederick, “What is the Concept of Global Good For? An African Historian's Perspective,” African Affairs 100 (2001): 189–213 Google Scholar.