Key Publications

We work because we have to, but also because we like it: from hunting-gathering more than 700,000 years ago to the present era of zoom meetings, humans have always worked to make the world around them serve their needs.

In this book, Ulbe Bosma details how the British and Dutch introduced the Caribbean sugar plantation model in Asia and refashioned it over time. 

This book offers a view of shifts in labor relations in various parts of the world over a breathtaking span, from 1500 to 2000, with a particular emphasis on colonial institutions. 

This publication explains why it is important to include the history of labor and labor relations in Africa in Global Labor History. It suggests that the approach of the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations 1500–2000 is a feasible method for applying this approach to the historiography on labor history in Africa.

We can safely assume that from 1500 to 1650 much of the world’s population worked to earn their living. Though we know roughly what kind of tasks people performed, we know surprisingly little about their perception of work.

The book – which was originally published in German - comprises twenty essays by authors from heterodox leftist analytical traditions who explore to what extent Marx’s analysis of global capitalism may still be of use for a critical theory of the capitalist world system and its recent crisis. 

On Coerced Labor focuses on those forms of labor relations that have been overshadowed by the “extreme” categories (wage labor and chattel slavery) in the historiography.

Globalising Migration History is a major step forward in comparative global migration history. Looking at the period 1500-2000 it presents a new universal method to quantify and qualify cross-cultural migrations, which makes it possible to detect regional trends and explain differences in migration patterns across the globe in the last half millennium.

This article  pleads for a less state-centered definition of migration that allows us to understand better the relationship between cross-cultural migrations and social change and social development in the long run. By developing a method that enables us to systematically compare Cross-Cultural Migrations perCapita through time and space, issues of state policies and citizenship are put in a much broader social context.

Early modern globalization was built on a highly labour intensive infrastructure. This book looks at the millions of workers who were needed to operate the ships, ports, store houses, forts and factories crucial to local and global exchange. 

Dutch research into the slave trade and its importance to the Dutch economy has often limited itself to investigating the financial success of slave trading companies, calculating the success of slaving by its profit rates. The central argument made in this article is that gross margin is a better indicator for the importance of the slave trade to the Dutch Republic.

This book examines the development of market performance from Antiquity until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.This is the first study to examine market performance as a whole, over such a large time period. 

The OECD and Clio Infra worked together to present state of the art estimates on the development of various indicators of well-being from 1820 onwards. The volume represents an important contribution to the discussion about broadening the concept of welfare used to understand socio-economic development (generally GDP per capita) and thereby illustrates the importance of measuring well-being ‘beyond GDP’.