Workers of the World

Marcel van der Linden (1952) is Research Director of the International Institute of Social History and Professor of social movement history at the University of Amsterdam. He has published extensively on labor and working-class history and on the history of ideas.

• Acknowledgements1.IntroductionConceptualizations2. Who are the workers?3. Why `free’ wage labor?4. Why chattel slavery?Varieties of mutualism5. The mutualist universe6. Mutual insurance7. Consumer cooperatives8. Producer cooperativesForms of resistance9. Strikes10. Consumer protest11. Unions12. InternationalismInsights from adjacent disciplines13. World systems theory14. Entangled subsistence labor15. The Iatmul experience16. OutlookBibliographyIndex

"[The author] relies on a wealth of selective examples to lay out a rich set of frameworks for the undertaking of transnational, comparative, and/or global labor analyses - that means plans for future historical inquiries." Leon Fink, Department of History, University of Illinois at Chicago, reviewed for geschichte.transnational and H-Soz-u-Kult (09-07-2010) "Marcel van der Linden’s book ‘Workers of the World: Essays toward a Global Labor History’ is an encyclopaedic, thought provoking, tour de force on the field of labour relations that scholars from different disciplines should read (and possibly internalise)."Maurizio Atzeni, Review in History, (review no. 908)"winner of the René Kuczynski Prize for the best book on social and economic history of 2008: the award committee's reader Prof. John Womack (Harvard) described Marcel van den Linden in his recommendation as "the most important and most learned labor historian of his generation in the world." "a great book"Matthias Middell in International Review of Social History"a work of considerable theoretical depth and empirical novelty yet structured, presented and written with admirable clarity"Peter Waterman in Development and ChangeThis is a remarkably ambitious and useful study, a series of offerings from the author’s career-long musings on labour history and the possibilities of a global labour history. Thus, it reflects his extraordinary researchings into the nature of labour history, mainly as experienced in Europe and the United States but with considerable materials drawn from other regions as well. It is an introductory work, albeit a very complex one, based on secondary sources, and indeed should serve as a handbook for those concerned with labour and global labour issues.Donald Quataert in Journal of Global History 5:3