The articles in this collection illustrate some major ways that historians have responded to the challenge of developing a new global labor history. By global labor history we mean one that focuses on class formation as a global process with deep historical roots and broad geographical sweep and encourages both micro-historical and macro-historical comparisons. The global labor history we envisage defines labor to include the vast world of unfree labor, including apprentices, bonded laborers, soldiers, serfs, indentured labor, prison labor, and slaves, as well as the world of the underemployed and the part-time worker. Defining labor broadly gives global historians the tools to analyze the intricate interlacing of free and unfree labor so characteristic of mercantile capitalism in the early modern period.¹

In the deepest sense, labor history has always been global history. The great themes of labor history—the Industrial Revolution and the growth and spread of the labor movement—are intrinsically global phenomena. European labor historians' long concern with why European labor rallied to the flag in August 1914 essentially addresses the question of why the forces of nationalism proved stronger than those of internationalism.⁴

The six essays in this collection address important aspects of global labor history. They are typically rooted in newly reinvigorated subfields of history that offer especially promising possibilities for global labor history. Expanding interest in colonial, maritime, and migration histories have strengthened global labor currents within the historical profession. Further, the opening up of important sections of the archives of the Communist International in Russia promises a growing gold mine of information on an institution central to modern labor history.⁵

Our essays focus on key elements of a global history agenda for the modern period. Essays by Jan Lucassen and Jeffrey D. Glasco study the commercial agents, soldiers, and sailors that constituted the institutional framework for the global expansion of Western capitalism. Essays by Julie Greene and by Donna Gabaccia, Franca Iacovetta, and Fraser Ottanelli concentrate on workers who entered the international labor markets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They show how employers attempted to use migrants to promote stratification within the working classes and how workers responded to these efforts by trying to fashion their own identities. Finally, essays by Josie Fowler and Victor Silverman investigate the international organizations created by labor movements, responding in kind to the problems of international labor markets, and show how these organizations have shaped the development of the labor movement. Neglected by a labor history focused on states, the history of labor internationalism remains one of the most unexplored fields of labor history.

The Creation of an International Labor Market

By beginning their studies of the working class with the English enclosure movements or the era of the Industrial Revolution, labor historians and global labor historians may have been too modest in demarcating their field. Large-scale proletarianization processes can be traced back much further in time. Cases in point are the numerous free and unfree sailors working in her majesty's navy or in the ships of chartered companies in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, and the harbor workers and the many urban artisans who catered to the maritime trades. The linking of proletarianization to the expansion of world trade cannot come as a surprise to students of European urbanization, who have long noted the growing number of large cities and the great increase in the population of the very largest cities in Europe between 1500 and 1800. This rapid growth of large cities was partly a phenomenon of state expansion, as centralized states increased the size of their capitals, but it was also produced by the growth of large port cities which “with only a few exceptions, engaged in the Atlantic trades.”⁶

The global labor history that is the subject of this collection looks at the formation of international labor markets, at the market's role in matching work to groups of workers, and at the international efforts of labor to resist the classifications of international markets.⁷

Jan Lucassen's essay focuses on the emergence of an international labor market connecting Europe with southern Africa and south and southeast Asia. Lucassen shows the intertwining of commercialization and proletarianization in the institution that created and coordinated perhaps the most important international labor market connecting Europe to the Far East. By showing the importance of proletarianization to the extension of commerce, he helps to break down the traditional view of a long period of commercial transformation that preceded the formation of a true proletarian labor force.

The subject of Lucassen's study, the Dutch East India Company, the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC, was a truly remarkable institution. Commercial success, continued expansion into eastern markets, and the high mortality of its European workforce in Asia produced a voracious demand for labor that was satisfied by truly global labor recruitment. In both Europe and Asia, VOC needed a variety of workers. European workers were attracted to these jobs, even to the most dangerous ones, not by their high wages but by the threat of sustained unemployment. Earlier waves of commercialization had weakened agricultural workers' ties to the land and the repressive measures governments took against vagabonds, i.e. migrant workers, made their lives miserable. The measure of their desperation is revealed by the alacrity with which workers took such dangerous jobs.⁸

While it was one of the largest enterprises employing wage laborers of its time, Lucassen detects little trace of class consciousness and, pace Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, hardly a trace of occupational solidarity or militancy.¹⁰

Like Lucassen's sailors and agents, Glasco's sailors represent the creation of the working-class infrastructure for international markets. Glasco's examination of the British navy studies a key western military organization used, among other purposes, for the enforcement of the rules of internationally-directed British commerce. Whether on the silk road or over the internet, regulative power is needed to protect traders and to enforce trade agreements. If the British fleet had been dissolved by mutiny in 1797, as the Nore mutineers threatened, it would have meant a deathblow to British colonialism and the triumph of French republicanism on the continent, but it would also have seriously hindered the progress of the Industrial Revolution. British industrialization depended heavily on access to Caribbean markets for cotton cloth and this access was secured by the British navy.¹⁴

As in the history of colonialism, the growing interest in maritime history also offers real opportunities for global labor history. Glasco's study of the two British naval mutinies focuses on issues of gender in an entirely male profession in which manliness and seamanship interacted to create a hierarchy quite different from that recognized by the navy. While Glasco focuses on the relationship between conceptions of manliness and seamanship in the politics of naval mutineers, his study is located in a context of British maritime laws and customs that constituted a worldwide maritime code. Glasco makes the point that the ship was a workplace like any other and this drives home an important point. As Glasco shows, in the gathering crises of 1797, ordinary sailors refused to follow orders that came down from the strict hierarchy of the naval command. They listened instead to respected seamen whose authority came from their acknowledged skill. This authority of these respected seamen resembled nothing so much as the male hierarchy of a workshop. To a significant degree the mentality of naval seamen remained that of the working class.

While Glasco rightly emphasizes the similarities between workshop and shipboard environment, still the ship was unlike other workplaces in some important regards. Maritime work routinely brought sailors into contact with foreign workers and exposed them to a considerably wider variety of information about other countries than the average British worker. Moreover, the radicals' fundamental demand in 1797, to sail the fleet to a Dutch harbor, illustrated a tactic unavailable to land-based workers.

Because it transcends territorial borders, maritime history has long been a stronghold of global labor history in a historical profession preoccupied with national history. The close connection between port cities around the world and the creation of an international labor force tying them together has inspired transnational comparison and, to a degree, decentered the centralized state. In part, possibly as a result of this decentering, not only sailors but longshoremen and harbor workers have been the subject of important comparative studies.¹⁵

Both the Lucassen and Glasco essays remind us of the vast expansion of the labor force required by the growth of colonial empires and the needs of commercial expansion. They suggest that the time honored debate about the origins of capitalism may be exaggerated. In this debate one side had argued that capitalism came to the fore when states intervened to secure colonial markets and capitalists increased their power through commerce. Other scholars have argued that the birth of capitalism is linked to the appearance of a mass proletariat of wage laborers. The importance of the Lucassen and Glasco papers is in showing that military expansion and commercial growth entailed an important degree of proletarianization and that the two processes were mutually reinforced.

These two essays underline that imperial and commercial expansion in the early modern period involved proletarianization on a worldwide scale. They argue that global labor history is not coextensive with the modern period and the Industrial Revolution. They suggest that global labor history must take a longer perspective and a more inclusive approach.

Movement within International Labor Markets

Having considered the creation of an international labor market and the conflicts attendant to its creation, we next examine workers entering the international labor market. We see how states and employers sought to shape class formation through laws and employment policies and how workers responded, often in complex ways. Essays by Greene and Gabaccia, Iacovetta, and Ottanelli look at the role of international migrants in class formation. The migrants studied in these two essays crossed international borders, Spaniards to the Canal Zone, Italians to many regions of the world. Where they settled, both groups struggled to create identities that they regarded as appropriate to their new circumstances and resisted efforts of authorities and employers to impose identities upon them. The transformations that occurred as working-class migrants crossed borders were far more extensive than the traditional dichotomy between natives and newcomers. They often found themselves assigned to unfamiliar racial and ethnic categories, categories that frequently carried connotations of inferiority.¹⁷

In the last decade historians have begun to reevaluate the relationship between struggles over ethnic, racial, and class identity among migrant populations. Partly this reevaluation has been based on a new appreciation of the role of the state. American historians long distinguished between the case of African slaves, brought to the US before the Civil War and the mass of migrants who came to the US voluntarily. Such distinctions ignored or treated as a minor factor the racial laws that barred first Asians and then all “non-Caucasians” from the US. Such acts not only crucially affected the demographic composition of the US labor force, but they affected attitudes towards Asian workers already installed in the US. And of course, as it was intended, such exclusionary politics had profound repercussions for the relationships between African Americans and the new migrant waves.¹⁸

Greene's article on Spanish migrants in the Canal Zone between 1904 and 1914 looks at a particularly interesting case of the construction of racial and ethnic identity in the process of class formation. She focuses on the efforts of US authorities to recreate US racial categories in an area of the world where different categories obtained. The position of the Spaniards, once masters of an empire, but lately the despised and defeated opponents of the US in the Spanish-American War, posed particular problems for the racial caste system that US authorities used to define jobs and status in the Canal Zone. Spanish migrants to work on the Canal were placed in a nearly unbearable situation by US policies that sometimes privileged them as “whites” but more often than not consigned them to the “non-white” category where they were poorly paid, poorly housed, and denied a wide-range of benefits given to white US workers. Protesting against their anomalous status, Spanish workers turned to anarchist doctrines but aimed much of their protest at the black Caribbean workers. As Greene shows, the militancy of Spanish workers originated in their ambiguous class and racial status; neither less skilled black workers from the Caribbean nor highly-skilled white workers from the US turned to strike militancy.

If Greene focuses on the application of racial and class categories to Spanish migrants to the Canal Zone, the essay by Gabaccia, Iacovetta, and Ottanelli emphasizes the class character of Italian migration, the combination of ethnic and class identities, and the agential role of migrants in using labor militancy to create positions themselves in different receiving locations. Indeed some of the Italian workers they describe responded to a new environment in much the same way as did Spaniards in the Canal Zone; they embraced anarchist and radical ideas.

Both the Greene and Gabaccia, Iacovetta, and Ottanelli essays in this collection draw on the literature of migration history and, indeed, this is a subfield of history, like those of colonialism and maritime history, that has contributed much to global labor history. Migration historians long ago discovered the central role of kinship and village networks in European migration and demonstrated how migrants adapted their skills to the specialized needs of growing urban economies. But much recent research had begun to reveal that European migrants had kin ties to several locations in the Americas, considered multiple destinations, and some moved back and forth among several nations. More important, migrants often retained significant links to homelands, and migrants used current events in both sending and receiving lands to define their actions and identities.

We are only beginning to learn about migration as an ongoing interactive process in which migrants forged new identities based on their continuing involvement in the politics of both “old” and “new” countries. Some of the best work in this field has been done by a constellation of historians of Italian migration described in the essay by Gabaccia, Iacovetta, and Ottanelli. Indeed our own authors are leading contributors to this collaborative effort.¹⁹

Their accomplishment in studying Italian migration as a class migration, mainly a migration of less-skilled workers, responding to historically-constitued international labor-market demands is striking and stands out in comparative perspective. For example, Irish-American history is surely one of the most studied areas of US ethnic history, but in a recent survey of the literature, Kevin Kenny notes that “The point that the Irish provided an international pool of cheap labor has been made often, but it has yet to be taken up in an sustained or transnational manner.”²⁰

A Response to International Labor Markets: International Labor Organization

Finally, our collection examines the international labor organizations that have so profoundly shaped the evolution of world labor movements. Fowler's essay looks at the activities of the Communist International in the Pacific during the interwar years, while Victor Silverman studies the recent evolution of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).²²

Fowler's essay is built on archival material only recently available to Western historians.²³

While efforts to organize seamen presented formidable challenges, the fierce repression of maritime labor in Chiang Kai-shek's China and the increasingly harsh treatment of trade unions in Japan made international labor organizing outside the ports of their own home country, the best site available to many Asian radicals. Although hardly welcoming of radicalism, the US west coast ports provided more available space for labor radicals than eastern ports.

Fowler shows that the foundations of Pacific maritime labor organization were laid by communist Asian seaman who took the initiative and established contacts with individual sailors. She also shows how these contacts could provide a widened scale for trade union organizing. Once an organizer had established a site for contacts with sympathetic seamen, the seaman's influence might be used in local struggles but also to enlarge the scale of trade union influence by building cross-Pacific networks that might lead to the recruitment of sympathizers in Shanghai or Hong Kong. In the case of seamen, a site was often difficult to find but once a suitable space had been obtained, it could be used to establish networks at a variety of geographic scales.

The period at the heart of Fowler's study is the so-called “leftwing turn” of the Communist International between 1928–1933. Generally this turn was an utter disaster—it helped put Hitler in power in Germany—but the stridency of this so-called “Third Period” might have provided the leverage or Asian or Asian-American communists to pursue policies that seemed peripheral to their white American comrades. Whatever its relationship to larger Comintern policies, Fowler allows us to get behind international rhetoric to look at international practice. The strength of Fowler's analysis is its concentration on the reports of labor activists who provide a local level perspective on international labor organizing. She also draws out attention to the remarkable international loyalties that the Communist International attracted in many places around the globe. Fowler's work confirms that global labor historians should use the unprecedented (and currently decreasing) archival opportunities to learn more about internationalist practice in this era.

The focus of Silverman's essay in this collection is almost the reverse of Fowler's, yet some common explanatory mechanisms—those of site and scale—can be found in both papers. Where Fowler focuses on the local level and pays little attention to the high level conclaves of the Communist International, Silverman looks at the changing attitudes towards environmentalism of the leaders of the ICFTU between 1970 and the present. Crucial to the ICFTU's change of position was the emergence of a site that could consider the issues in a different context than as a straight wage issue. This site was the ICFTU's housing commission. This commission had a community orientation that opened it up to ecological concerns.

The housing committee helped to introduce the labor movement to the concept of “sustainability,” an idea already current among environmentalists. “Sustainability” insisted that economic growth must not involve the destruction of irreplaceable resources, pollution or the use of new technologies without considering their environmental costs. Far from being incompatible with the labor movement's commitment to a higher standard of living, sustainability was depicted as necessary for long-term economic improvement. Sustainability helped the labor movement distinguish itself from those ecologists who opposed economic growth while creating a bridge to green movements and alliances with environmentalists.

Armed with the idea of sustainability, a political program developed by a handful of trade-union leaders operating through personal contacts and small meetings began to spread widely on a much greater scale. The ICFTU used its influence to win such organizations as the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the United Nations to its position. In the process, ICFTU were able to spread the idea among many national labor movements and the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). Still, the efforts of the ICFTU and the ETUC to adopt a strong environmental orientation were somewhat troubled by the groups' refusal to take a stand on the issue of nuclear power, one that divided national labor movements. The case of the ICFTU shows that international labor organizations are not dead and can still have important influence on international organizations and on the broad labor movement.

Conclusion

In sum, the six essays deal with some of the most important elements of a new global labor history, with the creation of international labor markets, with the movement of workers within such markets, and with the efforts of international labor organizations to limit, restrict, or abolish international labor markets. In so doing, they expand our understanding of the deep roots of global labor history, its importance in the molding of ethnicity, gender and racial identities, its importance in shaping the labor movement's past, and its centrality to major themes of all labor history. An orientation towards global history equips historians to deal not only with the international labor movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but with the global organization of proletarian labor from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. We hope the essays in this collection will inspire labor historians to join with us in this exciting historical enterprise.