The Global History of Work: Critical Readings is a four-volume collection of sixty reprinted journal articles and chapters, edited by Marcel van der Linden. The first volume, Work and Workers in Context, contains a general introduction to the collection, which is reprinted and modified slightly at the beginning of each of the other three volumes. The general introduction begins with useful definitions of what is meant by “work” and “global history” before going on to examine who workers are. It correctly highlights the difficulties of transposing “classical” theories of wage earners and subordinate groups in the global South, where the economic roles of individuals have, since the arrival of capitalism, remained fluid. Traditionally the term “workers” was reserved for those who engaged in waged labor; however, this definition is too restrictive. Van der Linden eloquently makes the case “for a new conceptualization of workers and the working class which is based on inclusion rather than exclusion” (p. 1:xiii). The piece then moves on to discuss the nature of work and workers in context.

The selected readings included in volume 1 focus on the multiple natures of workers and their survival strategies. They clearly demonstrate the coexistence of “free” wage labor with alternative labor relations. The articles are grouped into three main sections: who is working; work and everyday life; and work and the family economy. There is a good geographical mix of case studies, covering periods ranging from the mid-seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth century. While the volume does include a short introduction to the selected articles by the editor, it would have benefited, as would the other volumes, from a concluding chapter to draw together developments in the field in terms of methodological and historiographical approaches. The oldest article reproduced in this volume was originally published in 1955, while the most recent came out in 2012. If you read this volume as a book, as opposed to selecting single articles, the contemporary style can be quite jarring—for example, “today this question is an international one” (p. 219), in a chapter first published in 1985. This issue remains a minor irritation for this reviewer across all four volumes.

In volume 2 attention is focused on work sites. The scholarship is grouped in subsections: locations; occupations; connections and hierarchies; and communities and networks. Again, the chapters reprinted cover a varied selection of geographical locations and periods. The volume covers both forced and free labor, with examples such as a seventeenth-century Jamaican sugar plantation; factory discipline in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France; Indian sailors in the nineteenth century; and anthracite miners in Pennsylvania. Articles in the section on communities and networks are particularly well chosen, shining light on informal networks in working-class communities: for example, economic, social, and criminal networks in the South African gold fields and working-class women's networks in the Middle East.

The focus of the work collated in volume 3 is labor markets. The volume is structured in five sections: migrations; unemployment; gender and ethnicity; management and discipline; and recent trends. The positive points I have pointed to in the previous volumes remain valid here. I was surprised, however, to find that the first section, on migrations, contains only two articles, one covering the period from 1840 to 1940 and the other from 1840 to 1908. Given both the historical and contemporary importance of labor migration to the global history of work I would have expected to see scholarship addressing developments in the post–World War II period.

The collection finishes with a fourth volume focused on collective action, organized in sections dealing with everyday resistance; flight; strikes, mutinies, and rebellions; and self-organization and unionization. This volume displays important work detailing multiple forms of resistance: for example, working “slow,” desertion, open rebellion, and sabotage. Also, plenty of space is given over to articles considering different aspects of collective action and unionization.

On its surface, The Global History of Work: Critical Readings brings together a well thought out collection of important readings on varying aspects of labor. Leaving aside whether reprinting a collection of predominately journal articles into a four-volume set with a list price of $890 is merely a cynical attempt to persuade university libraries to delve deeper into their budgets for material to which they likely already subscribe, the collection strikes this reviewer as somewhat of a lost opportunity in places. For instance, the first, and only, chapter in the historiography section in volume 1 is a reprint of an expanded version of a lecture delivered by the editor in 2004. It is a good piece of scholarship, but the collection would have benefited from a more up-to-date survey of the field. This would not have been difficult to do. More should have also been said explicitly about how and why the examples were selected. There is certainly plenty of outstanding work in this collection; however, I remain unconvinced that there is enough previously unpublished material to justify its list price.