Call for papers: IRSH, Special Issue 22, 2014: Labour in Transport: Histories from the Global South (Africa, Asia, and Latin America)
Editors: Chitra Joshi, Jan-Georg Deutsch, and Stefano Bellucci
"The omnipresent porter has become almost invisible - part of the scenery. History has relegated him or her to the background - to the 'enormous condescension of posterity' - like E.P. Thompson's English croppers, hand-loom weavers, and artisans."[1]
The exchange of goods and the related movement of people constitute a fundamental part of economic and social history globally. Over the past five or six decades, a significant number of studies have been published on the history of transport and transport routes, but few on the history of labour in transport, and even fewer on the labour history of transport from a non-Eurocentric perspective.
In the historiography of labour in transport, the histories of dockworkers and railroad workers have been predominant. Next to the prototypical "working-class man", dockworkers and railroad workers figured prominently in the "classic" labour history of Europe and North America. Labour historians have been particularly interested in the histories of these workers, because they were often highly unionised and therefore a driving force for social change.[2] What are the relationships between the histories of these labourers and the history of labour in the so-called "global south", and vice versa?
Only recently has scholarly work on labour history started to focus increasingly on the non-Western world from non-Western perspectives. In writing about labour these studies emphasize the need to look at non-factory labour, questions of culture, family, and everyday life. This means that a new wave of labour history studies is in the process of breaking the boundaries of the "classical" approach to labour history - Eurocentric, or based on Marxist orthodoxies, and often both - opening up new areas, cutting across old divisions between formal and informal, and modern and pre-modern forms of labour.[3]
Transport exists everywhere; it has existed in every epoch of humanity, in the North as well as in the South. Historically, transport-related activities have been conducted in different forms (from porters to drivers, from railway labourers to seafarers, from water carriers to pipeline workers, etc.), but labour has always been a required factor of production in every aspect of transport. Furthermore, the transport sector trespasses on industrial and pre-industrial societies, and on modern and pre-modern modes of production; it can be highly technological or capital intensive as well as labour intensive. For all these reasons, looking at labour history in various transport sectors allows historians to examine labour history from a non-Eurocentric viewpoint and away from rigid traditional approaches. In other words, the transport sector is a particularly promising field for the production of challenging theoretical approaches to labour history from the "global south".
Novel trends in the study of labour history, from a non-Western perspective, and the fluidity and specificity of the transport sector itself offer the perfect combination for historical research in the field of global labour history.[4] Global labour history is inherently interdisciplinary and the kind of historical research that cries out for new, challenging theorizations in the history of labour and labour relations.[5] The social worlds of men and women engaged in transport and the construction of transport services, the systems of exploitation, recruitment, regulation, and control of labour, and the forms of solidarity and conflict among workers in transport can be studied in their "global" reach, that is to say away from and beyond the borders of nation-states, by looking at connections that exist between workers and systems of exploitation in different localities, or "translocally".[6]
Special Issue 22 of the International Review of Social History (IRSH) calls for research papers that seek to examine new frontiers in labour history in different transport sectors and societies in what one might loosely call the "global south" - that is Africa, Asia, and Latin America - in different historical periods. Innovative papers and contributions should be based on original archival and oral primary research material and shed light on the issues pertaining to the global history of transport labourers of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Deadline
The deadline for submitting proposals, including brief outlines of the articles, is 1 March 2013. Please send your proposal to irsh@iisg.nl, including your affiliation, and email and postal addresses.
Planning
1 March 2013: Deadline for proposals, including brief outlines of articles by authors
April 2013: Letters of acceptance (or rejection) of proposal
1 September 2013: Deadline for first draft of articles
November 2013: Letter from the editors to authors about any necessary revisions
1 January 2014: Second draft of articles
1 April 2014: Final version of manuscript
15 November 2014: Publication of Special Issue
For more information please contact the editorial staff of the IRSH at irsh@iisg.nl.
Notes
1. Stephen Rockel, Carriers of Culture: Labor on the Road in Nineteenth-Century East Africa (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2006), p. 5.
2. Sam Davies et al. (eds), Dock Workers: International Explorations in Comparative Labour History 1790-1970, 2 vols (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2000).
3. Rana P. Behal, Chitra Joshi, and Prabhu P. Mohapatra, "India", in Joan Allen, Alan Campbell, and John McIlroy (eds), Histories of Labour: National and International Perspectives (Pontypool: Merlin, 2009).
4. Jan Lucassen (ed.), Global Labour History: A State of the Art (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006).
5. Marcel van der Linden, "Labour History: The Old, the New, and the Global", African Studies, 66: 2-3 (2007), pp. 169-180.
6. Ulrike Freitag and Achim von Oppen (eds), Translocality: The Study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2010).