Moving workers: Historical perspectives on labour, coercion and im/mobilities

Abstract

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.