TY - JOUR
T1 - The art of link-making in global labour history
T2 - subaltern, feminist and Eastern European contributions
AU - Grama, Adrian
AU - Zimmermann, Susan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2018/1/2
Y1 - 2018/1/2
N2 - Benefiting from the ‘global’ and ‘trans-national’ turns in the larger historiography, labour historians in the past two decades have greatly expanded their geographical scope, developed new methodologies, refashioned categories of analysis and largely abandoned teleological assumptions. In this context, the history of labour in Eastern Europe still constitutes one of the least-globalized research topics in the field, even though the region attracted an array of excellent labour historians both before and after the collapse of state socialism in 1989/91. This introduction to the Dossier on labour history and Eastern Europe reflects on the reasons for the apparent mismatch between Eastern European labour history and the new global labour history. It does so by situating this large question within a discussion of some more or less successful examples of how scholarship on a particular theme in labour history has contributed or attempted to contribute to the conceptual and empirical enlargement of labour history in the past few decades. Focusing on particular aspects of the debates on class analysis, the peasant question, the history of gender, and the history of labour under state socialism, the authors address key questions in the international development of the history of labour. These questions, the authors argue, are at the core of the contributions on Eastern Europe assembled in the Dossier. Situating the four historiographical studies contained in the Dossier in this larger context, the introduction discusses the varied reception of scholarship on aspects of the history of labour emerging in and from different contexts and asks how this scholarship has contributed or might contribute to the development of a more inclusive global labour history.
AB - Benefiting from the ‘global’ and ‘trans-national’ turns in the larger historiography, labour historians in the past two decades have greatly expanded their geographical scope, developed new methodologies, refashioned categories of analysis and largely abandoned teleological assumptions. In this context, the history of labour in Eastern Europe still constitutes one of the least-globalized research topics in the field, even though the region attracted an array of excellent labour historians both before and after the collapse of state socialism in 1989/91. This introduction to the Dossier on labour history and Eastern Europe reflects on the reasons for the apparent mismatch between Eastern European labour history and the new global labour history. It does so by situating this large question within a discussion of some more or less successful examples of how scholarship on a particular theme in labour history has contributed or attempted to contribute to the conceptual and empirical enlargement of labour history in the past few decades. Focusing on particular aspects of the debates on class analysis, the peasant question, the history of gender, and the history of labour under state socialism, the authors address key questions in the international development of the history of labour. These questions, the authors argue, are at the core of the contributions on Eastern Europe assembled in the Dossier. Situating the four historiographical studies contained in the Dossier in this larger context, the introduction discusses the varied reception of scholarship on aspects of the history of labour emerging in and from different contexts and asks how this scholarship has contributed or might contribute to the development of a more inclusive global labour history.
KW - Eastern Europe
KW - Global labour history
KW - commodification of labour
KW - concepts
KW - unfree labour
KW - unpaid labour
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85038411662&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/13507486.2017.1374927
DO - 10.1080/13507486.2017.1374927
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85038411662
SN - 1350-7486
VL - 25
SP - 1
EP - 20
JO - European Review of History
JF - European Review of History
IS - 1
ER -