Enrique Martino. Touts. Recruiting Indentured Labor in the Gulf of Guinea. [Work in Global and Historical Perspective, vol. 14.] De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin [etc.] 2022. x, 271 pp. Ill. Maps. € 84.95. (E-book: € 84.95.)

Global labour history is a new historical discipline. This new field of research departs from three methodological stands: first, the abandonment of the working class as a guiding category of the labour movement; secondly, the construction of labour history as a process that does not have boundaries, especially national borders; and thirdly, the continuation with the anti-Eurocentric approach to history. The first methodological instrument in particular is quite crucial for it contrasts with the traditional or classical labour history, a discipline that became heavily conjugated with Marxian views of capitalism. Classical labour history was organic to a revolutionary path of social change and considers labour or the working class - the free wage workers or the proletariat - as the engine of social change. Inversely, global labour history considers the working class as principally or quintessentially "Western". The proletarian is the male factory worker; while the global workforce is gender neutral and exists also outside the manufacture sector. Global labour history assumes therefore that a narrow understanding of the working class is what determined the inability of the proletariat to produce any real or meaningful social change globally, including within the Soviet bloc. By doing so, perhaps invertedly, global labour history inaugurates a new trend in labour studies that is post-neoliberal in essence, for it acknowledges that there is no alternative to capitalism. The working-class history becomes the history of a multitude of subaltern workers that cannot be represented nor led by a minoritarian revolutionary vanguard. As a direct consequence of this, a marginalisation of the trade unions occurs within global labour history. There is almost an abandonment of formal workers' organisation as protagonists of historical research. The labour movement therefore becomes hard to define, uncapturable, amorphic and polycentric. After all, who is a worker? (Who is a capitalist?). Global labour history is destined to have a future because it is a discipline that deals with the defeated camp in the struggle of capital versus labour, starting from the acknowledgement of such defeat.

This paper aims to place the history of African trade unions within the broader subject of global labour history. Two assumptions were made. First, trade unions in Africa are formal and usually legal organizations which have historically represented only a minority of African workers, namely wage workers employed in the formal sector. Second, though African trade unions have acted as a progressive force of social change in the beginning of their history they gradually have become a conservative force in politics and society. Drawing from examples from around the continent, the arguments advanced in this paper gravitate around the hypothesis that inumerous labour historians have also made in other parts of the world: trade unions tend to follow the political history of the country in which they operate rather than setting the political agenda. This way, they act within society as mediators between political power and the people they represent. In general, though there have been some exceptions, they do not seek to change the socio-economic system but they do wish to improve it. They are not “revolutionary” forces, despite sometimes claiming to be so. The arguments advanced revolve around three key historical moments: the birth of trade unions, decolonisation and “mass” unionism, and independence and the political dilemmas of trade unions. Keywords: Trade unions, Labour history, Global Labour History, Wage Labour, Capitalism.

This edited collection is a global history of workers’ organisations since 1919, the year when the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the Comintern and the International Federation of Trade Unions were formed. This historical moment represents a caesura in labour history as it epitomises the beginning of what the editors and the contributors in this book call the internationalisation of the labour question. The case studies in this centenary volume analyse the relationship between global workers’ organisations and the new ideological confrontation between liberal capitalism, socialism and communism since the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Workers’ organisations, trade unions in particular, grew in importance and managed to organise internationally, forming alliances cemented by ideology and sustained by international institutional bodies or centrals. In the nascent capitalist versus communist struggle, trade unions thrived. Is it mere coincidence that today’s decline of unionism coincides with the end of ideological antagonism? This book emphasises important global labour issues such as gender as well as international workers’ histories from Latin America, Asia and Africa.

The year 1919 is a pivotal one for African labour history. The purpose of this chapter is to present the ways in which African labour organisations became involved in the internationalisation of the labour question between 1919 and 1960, the symbolic ‘Year of Africa’, when most African colonies attained national independence. Indeed, African workers’ organisations took part in what in this book is describing as the internationalisation of the labour question, which in Africa coincided with fundamental social and economic transformations: the emergence and expansion of so-called free wage labour. The widespread introduction of wage labour in colonial Africa led to the formation of reformist as well as, but to a lesser extent, communist trade union centrals. A workers’ consciousness and the introduction of labour rights were the main features linked to the internationalisation of the labour question. Finally, this chapter seeks to analyse which, if any, challenges the internationalisation of the labour question has posed in Africa, north and south of the Sahara, since the creation of the International Labour Organization.

The studies published in this special issue were presented and discussed at the international workshop Wage Labour, Capital and Precarity in African and Global History, which took place at the Inte...

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This paper seeks to explain the development of capitalism in Eritrea and Kenya from a labour history perspective. Indeed, the assumption in this research is that capitalism can only be explained by taking into consideration free wage labour as one of the sine qua non conditions for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. Therefore, the article looks at the paradigmatic socio-economic shifts: from unfree to free labour, from free to precarious labour and from unfree to precarious labour. These are the result of the complicated relationship that exists between capital and labour. The point of departure of the analysis is the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis on the structural origins of slavery, which despite severe criticism, it has been largely remained unchallenged until the present. In Eritrea, colonised by Italy, and Kenya, colonised by England, free wage labour fully developed between the nineteenth and twentieth century. This could be considered the era of the advent of capitalism, with the advent, for a fraction of the working population, of labour relations based on wages. The precarisation of life of free wage workers is also partially analysed in this article.

Research Article| April 01 2016 The 1974 Ethiopian Revolution at 40: Social, Economic, and Political Legacies Stefano Bellucci Stefano Bellucci International Institute of Social History and Leiden University Stefano Bellucci is senior researcher at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam where he is involved in collecting data from Africa on labor and economic history. He is also senior lecturer in African History and Economics at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Northeast African Studies (2016) 16 (1): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.14321/nortafristud.16.1.0001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Stefano Bellucci; The 1974 Ethiopian Revolution at 40: Social, Economic, and Political Legacies. Northeast African Studies 1 April 2016; 16 (1): 1–14. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/nortafristud.16.1.0001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressNortheast African Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 Michigan State University Press2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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AbstractThis introduction highlights the main subjects and research questions addressed in the articles making up this Special Issue on the labour histories of transport in the Global South. Although historiographical interest in the history of transport labour is growing, scientific knowledge on the subject is still very limited. This is especially true for histories from outside Europe and North America. Important topics and research problems covered here are: (1) transport labour as facilitating the exchange and mobility of goods but also of peoples and ideas – as such transport constitutes a noteworthy element of social history; (2) transport labour as a factor of production which is relevant for industrial and agrarian societies, as well as for market-driven and socialist economies; (3) the extent to which the processes of globalization, imperial expansion, and the emergence of global capitalism owe a debt to transport labour of the global south and its micro-histories.

Mobility and wage labor are two key variables that help to explain some of the complexities of the labor history of colonial Eritrea. Focusing on the initial period of Italian colonization, between the 1880s and 1920s, this article analyzes the relationship between the two above-mentioned variables. Based on previously unexplored archival sources and documents, the authors conclude that wage labor did contribute to the mobility of workers throughout the region (and not vice versa). In the period under consideration, Eritrea did not become a settler colony, despite Italy's initial efforts to import a national labor force. Instead, through a mix of capital investments in construction and transport, and increasing military recruitment, the Italian regime contributed significantly to an increase in free wage labor in the region. Within a year of Italy's 1911 invasion of Libya, it needed to reinforce its colonial army. From 1912 onward, in return for wages, tens of thousands of Eritreans entered the Italian colonial army to fight on the Libyan front. This military employment left voids in the local labor market, which were filled by people from neighboring countries, particularly Ethiopians and Yemenis. A relationship thus developed and continued between mobility and wage labor.