Moving Workers

Historical Perspectives on Labour, Coercion and Im/Mobilities

Claudia Bernardi, Viola Franziska Müller, Biljana Stojić, Vilhelm Vilhelmsson, Claudia Bernardi, Viola Franziska Müller, Vilhelm Vilhelmsson, Biljana Stojić

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2023
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9783111137681
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

This book explores how workers moved and were moved, why they moved, and how they were kept from moving. Combining global labour history with mobility studies, it investigates moving workers through the lens of coercion.

The contributions in this book are based on extensive archival research and span Europe and North America over the past 500 years. They provide fresh historical perspectives on the various regimes of coercion, mobility, and immobility as constituent parts of the political economy of labour.

Moving Workers shows that all struggles relating to the mobility of workers or its restriction have the potential to reveal complex configurations of hierarchies, dependencies, and diverging conceptions of work and labour relations that continuously make and remake our world.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Moving Workers in History
• Chapter 1 Inveigled or Invited? The Migration of German Miners to the Medici Mines in Sixteenth-Century Tuscany
• Chapter 2 Escape and Reform in the Early-Modern Danish Prison System
• Chapter 3 Accounting Practices and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: The Business Prospectus of an Eighteenth-Century European Slave Trader
• Chapter 4 Passports, Permits, and Labour Im/Mobility in Iceland, 1780s‒1860s
• Chapter 5 Keeping Domestic Workers Dependent in Early Twentieth-Century Istanbul
• Chapter 6 Lives between Forced Labour Measures: The Case of Kulaks Deported from Estonia, 1940‒1960
• Chapter 7 Empalmado y Contratado: The Valorisation and Coexistence of Labour Mobility and Immobilisation in the Experience of Mexican ‘Braceros’, 1940s–1960s
• Chapter 8 From Peasants in Romania to the Global Care Class in Spain, 1949–2019
• Afterword: Coercion and Historical Patterns of Motion
• Index