Research Agenda Global Labour History

The IISH Global Labour History approach, first formulated in 1999 by Jan Lucassen and Marcel van der Linden, shifted the focus of our research agenda and that of many other labour historians. We changed our perspective from a predominantly national approach towards labour history to a transnational and transcontinental comparison. We no longer focused on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of white, male factory workers but began to examine all forms of work and all types of workers, globally and over the last five hundred years.

Social inequality manifests at different levels and can be measured and studied with the help of different indicators. Economists and economic historians prefer to focus on the dimension of income and wealth.  Scholars like Piketty and Branco Milanović look at the political consequences of social inequality, their analysis of social inequality is focused specifically on income and wealth indicators. However, there are more dimensions to social inequality.

We want to show how work and labour relations can have an impact on unequal access to resources and opportunities, and thus on societal inequality; how individual and collective action may have an impact on labour conditions, labour relations, and social inequality; and how durable inequality may reinforce and reproduce societal inequality.

To optimally develop our research perspectives, we created four thematic research clusters that group our present and future research projects. These clusters were developed partly for practical, pragmatic reasons and partly for strongly substantive reasons. The division into clusters helps us to organize our projects and promote interrelatedness within and between clusters. Together, these clusters form the building blocks of our Global Labour History programme.