Labour Movements in Global Historical Perspective: Conceptual Eurocentrism and Its Problems

Abstract

For a long time labour historians have focussed on labour movements that emerged in the developed West during industrialization in the nineteenth century and, in their organizational and ideological concerns, homed in on the wage-earning industrial working class. The developed West also marked the space of the metropolitan centres of nineteenth-century capitalism and imperialism—with one exception, namely Japan, which formed its own ‘West’ in the East. The West, in the course of its imperial endeavours, exported all sorts of ideas and practices to the imperial margins, where they were rarely adopted or copied in a straightforward way. Instead they were adapted, changed and often re-exported into the metropoles, where they in turn influenced a range of developments.