Van der Linden, Marcel: Workers of the World. Essays toward a Global Labor History (= Studies in Global Social History 1). Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers 2008. ISBN 978-90-04-16683-7; 469 S.; EUR 129,00.
Rezensiert für geschichte.transnational und H-Soz-u-Kult von:
Leon Fink, Department of History, University of Illinois at Chicago
E-Mail: [mailto]leonfink@uic.edu[/mailto]
The sub-title of this sprawling but ultimately rewarding book - "essays toward a global labor history" - might well have italicized the word toward. In fact, there is not much "history" here, at least in the conventional forms of exposition of research or even synthetic narrative. Rather, the distinguished author, who has long served as director of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, relies on a wealth of selective examples to lay out a rich set of frameworks for the undertaking of transnational, comparative, and/or global labor analyses - that means plans for future historical inquiries. Indeed, if Marcel van der Linden were Immanuel Kant, he might have called the book "Prolegomena to any Future Global Labor History." (tho' I note that this reviewer is credited in the acknowledgments with coming up with the book's actual title!)
The book's sixteen chapters range widely in topic and time period. To be sure, despite the author's off-hand observation that "emphasis" in "the study of Global Labor History" is usually delimited by developments "that emerged with the expansion of the world market from the fourteenth century, (p. 7)" we are generally talking about the late 18th to the 20th century here. Still, he covers a huge canvas. Beginning with what he calls "conceptualizations," van der Linden's early chapters re-examine deep assumptions about work and the "working class" long buried in Marxist, neo-Marxist and anti-Marxist scholarship. Often beginning with old categories, he tries to open them up by way of both argument and example. Thus, to confound the classic view that the proletarian "only disposes of his (or her) own labor power," the author points to numerous examples of "intermediate forms between wage labor and self-employment." The latter include the 18th century Mexican silver "pickmen" who, in addition to wages, divided up an extra sum among porters and timber-men who helped them, late-19th century American factory workers who owned their own tools, and early 20th-century Chinese rickshaw pullers who daily rented their conveyances. In addition to moving from the more conceptually restricted category of the 'working class' to the more open-ended terminology of 'subalterns,' van der Linden re-visits milestone debates (especially among economists and other social scientists) on the boundaries and logic of "free" and "slave" labor. If at times his effort (borrowed from econometrics) to resort to algorithms as explanations - as in calculating the "stability of the slave population" (p. 73) - is likely to raise eyebrows among historians, he no doubt offers an informed account of once-energizing, inter-disciplinary academic discussions.
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