Joan Planella Rodríguez, La niña obrera,
Oleo sobre lienzo, 1885
Chair: Schröder-Stapper, Teresa
teresa.schroeder.stapper@gmail.com
University of Düsseldorf
The body is a central category in labour history – as a “tool” and site of production, a target of discipline, a marker of social categorization, a carrier of prices, an agent of resistance, and a locus of knowledge, experience, and emotion. By foregrounding the physical, social, symbolic, and historical dimensions of the body, the panel explores how labour and embodied experiences of coercion were structured, represented, and contested in medieval and early modern societies.
Focusing on specific labour activities and labour market dynamics, the panel explores how working bodies were shaped by and negotiated within broader economic systems (family or household/plantation/ransom economies), employer logics of control and efficiency, and epistemologies of reproduction. By bringing these aspects together, the panel offers a cross-analysis of how labour exploitation and bodily violence intersected with multiple dimensions of reproduction: the reproduction of social order (Lehner), of market logics (Ressel), of (non-)kinship ties (Peres), and of the labour force itself (Vidal).
Exploring case studies from the Dutch colonies in the 18th century, the North African coast in the 18th and 17th centuries, and the Latin Mediterranean from the 13th to the 16h centuries, the session spans a range of urban and rural environments, colonial and enslaved labour systems, and private and institutional settings. Each paper investigates the intersections between the (re-)producing body (for someone and/or something), the controlled body (regulated by someone and/or something), and the resisting body (of someone under coercive circumstances).
Key questions guiding the panel are:
•How were labour, dependency, exploitation, and (coerced) intimacies constructed and negotiated through bodily practices?
•What is the relation between shared (medical) knowledge about and interventions to the working body and labour coercion?
•In what ways did workers engage in bodily self-fashioning, and how were these processes shaped by markets?
•How did labour exploitation and bodily violence shape and intersect with different layers of reproduction?
By centering the body in the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of labour relations, the panel seeks to deepen the dialogue between labour history, the history of medicine, kinship studies, gender history, and the history of emotions.
Chair: Rosa Kösters
rosa.kosters@iisg.nl
IISH
This panel focuses on how organised labour responded to precarious employment.
Chair: Luisa Muñoz
luisamaria.munoz@usc.es
Unversidade de Santiago de Compostela
Historically, being a businessman, entrepreneur, or trader was a role reserved for men. We know little about the
role played by women in this field. There is still a great deal of uncertainty and much to explore in the world of family businesses and workshops, both urban and rural (Martini and Bellavitis, 2014). We know that some women were able to carve out a niche for themselves as traders in activities not covered by trade monopolies (Solà, 2009:240). On the other hand, as retail trade became established, another type of intermediary grew in the sales process: dressmakers and haberdashers, or donators, capcers and merceres (in Catalonia) (Sarasúa, 1995:165; Solà, 2002:318). All of them were women entrepreneurs. The current proposal will study different populations in Catalonia, with the aim of highlighting women’s work related to textile manufacturing, with special emphasis on the activities of these women as entrepreneurs and businesswomen. In the constitution of commercial companies, we will analyse women’s activity as partners in business development and work activity; their own capital contributed to the commercial company; capital lent to their spouse, brother, etc.; we will observe the development of the business in the hands of women and their decision-making capacity regarding purchases, credit granted to customers, choice of collaborators, employees and apprentices (fadrí); multiple activities of the spouse or other partners versus the expansion of women’s roles; etc. To this end, multiple primary sources will be used: testimonies from contemporaries (Francisco de Zamora, Madoz, etc.), distribution of trade subsidies, industrial registrations, population registers, merchant guides, commercial almanacs, business sources, notarial protocols,
etc. The article will be structured as follows. After the introduction, there is a section on textile manufacturing in Catalonia. From here, we will focus on our first case study, the rural manufacture of lace and bobbin lace for 12 Catalan towns (18th-20th centuries). This section will follow the methodology developed by the Annales
School, which means that all the sources mentioned above and their possible under-recording will be analysed exhaustively. We wish to make an initial macro approach, in order to finally analyse specific trajectories in time and space. In the following section, we will focus on other textile manufacturers: hosiery factories (cotton and
silk), ribbons, bonnets, gloves, Indian fabrics, etc. This section will be approached with the aim of developing specific cases of women entrepreneurs, for which notarial sources (eras, wills, powers of attorney, post-mortem inventories) will be of great help.
Punishment has acted as an instrument of labour coercion, control and management throughout history. This panel addresses how practices of punishment and surveillance have facilitated, legitimised and interacted with practices of coercion in labour relations. Thereby, it offers a perspective on the variety of ways in which coercion in the realm of labour was connected to other modes of violence and control. The panel includes papers from different regions across the world – from sixteenth century Spanish to the nineteenth-century British empire and the late-twentieth century United States. It thus explores change and continuity in punishment and surveillance across time and space, and shows that most punitive practices were not tied to a specific labour regime, but instead could be mobilised in different contexts for similar purposes.
Chair: Eszter Varsa
varsae@ceu.edu
Central European University
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Chair: Natalia Jarska
njarska@ihpan.edu.pl
Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences
Join us for the launch of Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond (UCL Press, 2025) – a groundbreaking, open access, collectively-written monograph that traces women’s struggles for better working and living conditions across Eastern Europe, Austria, Turkey, and internationally, from the late 19th century to the late 20th century.
Co-authored by Selin Çağatay, Mátyás Erdélyi, Alexandra Ghiț, Olga Gnydiuk, Veronika Helfert, Ivelina Masheva, Zhanna Popova, Jelena Tešija, Eszter Varsa, and Susan Zimmermann, the volume is the outcome of the ERC-funded project ZARAH: Women’s labour activism in Eastern Europe and transnationally, from the age of empires to the late 20th century, based at Central European University.
With the participation of authors of Women’s Labour Activism, who will share their experience of challenges and advantages of co-authoring a truly collaborative monograph.
The working group aims to build an interdisciplinary network of scholars studying labour migration from a historical perspective. Although migration currently receives great attention in political and academic debates, it is often discussed as a humanitarian emergency, a social and a security problem, but very rarely as a labour (history) issue. Similarly, research sympathetic to the struggles of migrants tends to denounce the violation of human and civil rights experienced by migrants but very rarely refers to the ways in which migration management policies have historically contributed to the creation of unfree and precarious working conditions. Our network seeks to generate scholarly debate about the interconnectedness of labour and migration history and stresses the importance of labour to analyse change in migration patterns and policies across time and space. We are interested in both empirical and theoretical analysis, and in various types of labour migration, perspectives, chronological and regional foci.
We invite papers addressing labour migration history including (but not limited to) the following topics of interest:
Labour mobility in domestic, regional and transnational policies and patterns
Intra-bloc and East-South labour migration in the Cold War context
Labour migration beyond normative and methodological nationalism
Organised migration schemes (e.g. “Guestworkers”) in a comparative perspective
Labour precarity and coercion in historical perspective
Entanglements between forced and voluntary migration
Methodological considerations and innovations in labour migration history
Historical shifts in intersections of gender, race, and class in migrant labour flows
The impact of migration in sending societies: Remittances and the financialization of migrants
The mining sector occupied a central role in shaping the economic, political, and social history of many countries throughout the 20th century. As a strategic industry, mining was closely tied to national development agendas, regimes of labour control, environmental transformations, and the consolidation of state power.
This panel aims to explore the labour, social, political, and environmental dimensions of the mining sector under dictatorial regimes during the 20th century. While we are particularly interested in European cases, we also strongly encourage contributions that examine similar processes in other parts of the world—such as Latin America, but we could consider other cases in Africa or Asia—to foster comparative perspectives and transregional dialogues.
We invite paper proposals that address, among others, the following topics:
– Labour regimes and working conditions; state violence and labour discipline; occupational health and safety;
– Industrial relations and collective action: trade unionism, strikes, worker mobilization, and their repression or negotiation by authoritarian regimes;
– The role of mining in economic and political planning under dictatorships: including its ideological instrumentalization in fascist, communist, or military regimes;
– The responses of dictatorial regimes to the environmental impacts of mining and the narratives of progress or sacrifice that justified extractive policies.
– We are especially interested in interdisciplinary approaches that bridge labour history with environmental history, political economy, social history, or the history of science and technology. Contributions may be based on local case studies, national analyses, or comparative and transregional frameworks.
Chair: Sophia Friedel
Since at least the end of the 18th century, social reformers, labor leaders, organized workers, and political movements have promoted democratic control of the workplace, industry, and economic life as a crucial precondition not only for social justice and material security but also for political democracy more generally. In so doing, they have highlighted that when workers and employees lack effective voice at work and control over the labor process, their political participation and formal political equality is seriously curtailed more broadly. Indeed, many have argued that political democracy will fail to materialize or, where it existed, soon experience ‘backsliding’ should democratic rights over work, industry, and the economy be withheld or decline. Against this backdrop, intellectuals, political and trade union actors, and social movements proposed a wide range of theories as well as practical measures that underlined the participation of employees and labor in decision-making as a prerequisite for the sustainability of democratic rule. In light of the current attacks on democratic institutions, we believe that now is the time to re-think what role the improvement and expansion of employee participation in industrial and economic decision-making might play in the fight for the future of our democracies.
Today, growing fears of democratic erosion in the political sphere happen to follow on the heels of a general decline of economic democracy over the last decades. For this reason, we want to explore the role that ‘democracy’ has played in the thinking, organizing, and lived experiences of past and present-day individuals and movements pushing for greater control over individual workplaces, whole industries, and entire economies. Instead of concentrating on how workplace democracy has impacted economic performance, productivity, and employee satisfaction–the focus of much previous research–we want to go to the heart of our subject and ask: whether, how, and why democracy at work strengthens and improves democracy in a variety of other social spheres, from families and civic organizations to local communities, the nation state and the international arena? For this purpose, we are proposing a series of panels that go beyond the historical gaze of our working group’s previous activities.
Panel 3: Workplace Democracy in Times of Crisis: War, Reconstruction & Economic Transition
Chair: Claude Roccati
claude.roccati@orange.fr
Centre d’histoire sociale des mondes contemporains, Paris I Sorbonne
This panel brings together three researchers which present various aspects of the relationship of European trade unions with the process of European integration since the 1950s to nowadays. All are based in monograph that the authors have completed on these topics.
Chair: Thomas van Gaalen
Organising worker resistance within empire, from the local to the transnational.
Chair: M.V. Shobhana Warrier
Maritime labor and precarity in colonial India.
Chair: Alexandros Touloumtzidis
altouloum@gmail.com
University of Patras
This panel explores the ways in which soldiers have collectively organised to influence their working conditions, reform the military from within, and drive broader social change. A key focus is on situating soldiers’ collective action within the broader framework of labour history. The session will explore how military service intersects with labour rights, industrial action, and workplace organising, highlighting the position of soldiers as both military workers and state agents. Through examples from Sweden, the European Council of Conscripts Organisations (ECCO), and Vietnam War veterans, we can deepen our understanding of how soldiers have navigated the tensions between discipline, duty, and labour activism to shape their conditions of service and contribute to wider struggles for workers’ rights and social justice.
Chair: Figueras, Jan
janfiguerasgibert@gmail.com
U. Barcelona
This session explores the condition and role of journeymen within artisanal cultures of pre-industrial guild systems. Particular attention is given to forms of collective association, the internal hierarchies between apprentices, journeymen, and masters, and the rituals that marked transitions between stages of the craft career. Journeymen emerge as key figures in shaping practices of solidarity, defending professional rights, and building collective identities—whether through legal and regulatory mechanisms or through symbolic rituals and representations. The analysis highlights how guilds functioned as instruments of social negotiation, spaces of spiritual and moral cohesion, and adaptable institutions responding to political, cultural, and economic transformations, with journeymen providing a privileged lens for understanding artisanal labor dynamics, collective organization, and the interplay between craft culture, political authority, and social change.
Chair: Nico Pizzolato
n.pizzolato@mdx.ac.uk
Middlesex University
This session brings together four papers that explore how labour, ecological systems, and political power are co-constituted through infrastructures and extractive landscapes across time and space. Spanning early modern mercury mining in Central Europe, colonial forestry regimes between Germany and India, water provision in modern Britain, and tin mining in southern Thailand, the papers foreground production as an ecological process sustained through labour, governance, and uneven social relations.
Across these cases, workplaces emerge not simply as sites of economic activity but as socio-ecological systems in which natural resources, technologies, and human labour are tightly entangled. The contributions show how ecological conditions—whether subterranean mining environments, forest ecosystems, hydraulic networks, or coastal extractive zones—shape labour regimes, constrain technological choices, and structure everyday experiences of work. At the same time, labour is revealed as a key mediator of ecological transformation, translating state policy, capital investment, and scientific knowledge into lived practice.
A shared focus lies on the politics of expertise, governance, and precarity. From miners trapped in ecological limits on capital investment, to forest workers navigating colonial hierarchies and unfamiliar environments, to water workers contesting state restructuring, and tin-mining communities grappling with industrial collapse, the papers trace how ecological change reconfigures labour relations, social reproduction, and forms of collective knowledge.
Together, the session advances an interdisciplinary perspective that treats ecological systems not as backdrops to production but as historically specific terrains of labour, power, and struggle. It contributes to debates in labour history, environmental history, and political economy by centring workers’ experiences in the making—and unmaking—of extractive and infrastructural worlds.
Chair: Martin Bernátek
martin.bernatek@upol.cz
Palacký University Olomouc, Czechia
In our panel, we aim to discuss methodological, heuristic, and curatorial aspects of the shift in labour histories—from a focus on working-class politics and, more generally, on labour as a key element of class or group constitution—towards an emphasis on the politics of cultural practices. We understand workers’ culture not as a fixed ideological expression, but as an array of lived and staged practices—such as choirs, sport activities, emotionally charged commemorative events, amateur theatre or political festivals—that shaped class consciousness through the body and the senses. We are particularly interested in histories that connect or highlight the aesthetics of working-class politics, and that explore art as a form of social practice.
Our focus is primarily on Central Europe and the Baltic States during the loosely defined interwar period, while also considering longer processes and key turning points. We are especially interested in corpo-emotional modes of practice involved in building workers’ communities: their self-awareness, collectively created dreams and visions.
In our double panel, we will focus on the following themes:
(1) Body and emotions in workers’ culture: How was the workers’ movement energized by specific emotional dispositifs? How were feelings such as hope or anger manifested, regulated, and interpreted within workers’ cultural practices?
(2) Cultural practices as sites of political struggle: How can workers’ culture be understood as an alternative public sphere beyond Habermas’s model? How did workers’ associations cooperate with other collectives, youth organizations, educational initiatives, co-operatives etc. in producing shared cultural space? How did avant-garde art circles relate to the working class? How did they collaborate in practice, and what aesthetic models emerged from these interactions? How was culture a sphere for building larger anti-fascist alliances? And how was workers’ culture in interwar central Europe and the Baltic states shaped by transnational and global connections?
(3) Visibility of working class histories today: How is historiography of workers’ culture shaped by the geopolitical positioning of research and how does the “canon of Western labour history” operate within it? What methodological challenges, stereotypical frameworks, or biases affect the study of labour in relation to art, emotions, and performance? How can the embodied and emotional dimensions of labour history be made visible today—in archives, exhibitions, performances, and education—and how will such efforts challenge existing curatorial conventions and political imaginaries?
Chair: Vasilaki, Kalliopi
kk.vasilaki@gmail.com
Università degli studi di Genova
This session explores how authority in maritime worlds was negotiated and contested from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It examines how different actors—merchant seafarers, enlisted sailors, ship captains, patrones, shipbuilders, and shipyard workers—confronted or defended hierarchies in diverse settings across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. The papers analyse maritime conflicts that arose aboard ships and ashore over discipline, hierarchy, and labour conditions, both in the merchant marine and in navy. By juxtaposing conflicts at sea with those in shipyards and dockyards, the session emphasises the multiple arenas in which maritime authority was contested. Some contributions highlight shipboard unrest—such as in the Dutch merchant fleet of the eighteenth century, in the Royal Navy at Invergordon in 1931, and in the Royal Indian Navy revolt of 1946—while others trace disputes in shipyards and professional contexts, from the conflicts between ship captains and patrones in Spain in the age of steam, to the authority struggles between naval intendants and shipbuilders in colonial Brazil, to labour struggles in Quebec’s shipyards. Together, these case studies show that maritime authority was constantly negotiated. They reveal that labour conflicts were at once local and global, rooted in specific contexts but also part of broader processes that reshaped relations of work, discipline, and power.
Chair: Loockx, Kristof
kristof.loockx@uantwerpen.be
Centre for Urban History, University of Antwerp
This session examines life, culture, and mutual support in maritime communities from the seventeenth to the twentieth century across Europe and the Atlantic world. It explores how maritime workers and their families forged solidarities and systems of care that sustained seafaring careers and helped communities navigate risk, mobility and separation. Such support took many forms, from kinship ties, mentorship and community networks to benevolent societies, systems of care and everyday practices of reproductive labour. At the same time, maritime life was subject to regulation, surveillance and contestation, whether through state authorities, unions, religious organisations or civic institutions. These interventions reflected broader concerns about order, respectability and identity, yet they also generated spaces of negotiation, conflict and accommodation. By examining the interplay of solidarity, regulation and everyday practice, the session highlights the diversity of maritime communities and the cultural, social and economic relations that sustained them. It shows that seafarers were closely connected to wider communities, that women and marginalised groups played central roles in maintaining maritime life, and that port cities were sites of both integration and tension. Overall, the contributions demonstrate how maritime communities were not peripheral but integral to understanding wider processes of social organisation, cultural identity and collective support in early modern and modern societies.
The DicoTrav project (Working Title) is a historical-critical, digital, and multilingual dictionarydevoted to the worlds of work in Europe from antiquity to the present day. Developed through a collaboration between the Association française d’histoire des mondes du travail (AFHMT) and the Società Italiana di Storia del Lavoro (SISLav), the project builds on a long-standing historiographical dialogue between French and Italian scholarly traditions and aims to create a shared research tool of broad scientific scope. However, it aims to encompass different European areas and create a common research tool with broad scientific scope.
The dictionary will be published exclusively in digital, open-access format and will be available in three languages (French, Italian, and English). Thanks to its digital architecture, DicoTrav will be continuously updatable and open to future geographical and thematic extensions, fostering the involvement of an expanding international network of scholars.
Addressed to a wide audience – from students and researchers to professionals interested in issues related to work – DicoTrav responds to the growing need for a historiographical synthesis capable of integrating recent developments in the field, such as global labour history, gender history of work relations, forced labour studies, the social history of labour law, and the history of deindustrialisation, among others. The project is structured around three main methodological pillars: a source-based approach, with particular attention to historical contexts and temporalities; a historiographical approach, emphasising scholarly debates and controversies; a linguistic approach, aimed at reconstructing the genealogy of labour-related terms, their semantic variations, and their circulation across different European contexts.
The presentation will outline the scientific objectives of the project, its digital architecture, and its future perspectives, highlighting the role of DicoTrav as a tool for research, synthesis, and dissemination in the history of the worlds of work.
Scientific Committee: Corine Maitte, Nicoletta Rolla, Xavier Vigna, Pietro Causarano, Federico, Del Giudice, Nicolo’ Mignemi, Anna Pellegrino, Ferruccio Ricciardi, Matthieu Scherman, Virginia Amorosi, Christel Freu, Vincent Demont.Book Presentation
This session focuses on histories of migrant women’s labour by exploring shifting boundaries between spaces of productive and reproductive labour in different parts of the Global North and the Global South. The session addresses interconnections between work happening in private and public spaces across the globe, and in spaces situated at the core and even beyond the margins of the world of work.
As a global process, deindustrialisation has profoundly transformed the social, cultural and economic frame of countless countries and regions around the world. There is abundant literature and solid research on this subject, offering a general framework of the deindustrialisation process, its causes, consequences and economic, social and cultural impact. The closure of industries and factories, once pillars of the economy, generators of strong work cultures and sources of identity, has left behind complex legacies, whose traces are particularly visible when we focus on local communities.
It is precisely with an interest in the local scale that we ask ourselves how communities have dealt with those processes of deindustrialisation. What have been the main changes experienced, and in this sense, what continuities and ruptures people perceive as meaningful? What responses have been articulated, what strategies for productive transformation have been implemented (or not), all from approaches that address both institutional responses and those that could be carried out ‘from below’ in terms of both reflection and action. All of this, ultimately, with the aim of going beyond a mere analysis of the deindustrialisation process to ask ourselves questions, investigate and reflect on the ‘aftermath’. Undoubtedly, as prolonged processes, both the confirmation of the end of a cycle and its perception often introduce enormous complexity which, precisely because of the ‘continuity in discontinuity’ they represent, open up interesting lines of research.
Chair: Jonas Söderqvist
jonas.soderqvist@arbark.se
Swedish Labour Movement Archives and Library
Workers’ education, organized by and for the working class, historically served multiple and overlapping purposes. It sought to compensate for the limited access to formal education available to many workers, offering a bridge to higher education and a pathway to social mobility. At the same time, it provided cultural empowerment, enabling the working class to create and preserve its own intellectual and cultural traditions. Just as importantly, workers’ education functioned as a foundation for political education, equipping participants with the skills to manage organizations, represent labor parties in parliaments, and engage with ideological debates. Across countries, these initiatives have taken diverse forms, including labor colleges, folk high schools, study circles, lectures, and correspondence courses.
Introducing a gender perspective deepens this picture. Gendered inequalities have historically shaped access to education and opportunities within the labour movement. Women workers often faced structural barriers, both in the workplace and in educational initiatives, limiting their participation and influence. At the same time, workers’ education provided crucial spaces where women could develop organisational skills, articulate feminist perspectives, and challenge patriarchal structures within both the labour movement and society at large. Considering gender perspectives highlights how educational practices not only advanced class-based empowerment but also intersected with struggles for gender equality.
Due to these varied aims, the sphere of workers’ education has often been characterised by conflict. Different branches of the labor movement have competed for control of institutions, while bourgeois forces sought to curtail or co-opt such efforts. Questions of funding and governance were frequent sources of tension. When examined through the lens of gender, these conflicts also reveal power struggles over whose voices and experiences were included or excluded from the educational agenda.
In this session, we aim to explore educational practices, teaching methods, and the cultural, political, and gendered significance of workers’ education. Contributions include case studies and comparative analyses that situate workers’ education in both national and transnational contexts, while also examining how gender relations shaped and were reshaped within these initiatives.
The working group aims to build an interdisciplinary network of scholars studying labour migration from a historical perspective. Although migration currently receives great attention in political and academic debates, it is often discussed as a humanitarian emergency, a social and a security problem, but very rarely as a labour (history) issue. Similarly, research sympathetic to the struggles of migrants tends to denounce the violation of human and civil rights experienced by migrants but very rarely refers to the ways in which migration management policies have historically contributed to the creation of unfree and precarious working conditions. Our network seeks to generate scholarly debate about the interconnectedness of labour and migration history and stresses the importance of labour to analyse change in migration patterns and policies across time and space. We are interested in both empirical and theoretical analysis, and in various types of labour migration, perspectives, chronological and regional foci.
We invite papers addressing labour migration history including (but not limited to) the following topics of interest:
Labour mobility in domestic, regional and transnational policies and patterns
Intra-bloc and East-South labour migration in the Cold War context
Labour migration beyond normative and methodological nationalism
Organised migration schemes (e.g. “Guestworkers”) in a comparative perspective
Labour precarity and coercion in historical perspective
Entanglements between forced and voluntary migration
Methodological considerations and innovations in labour migration history
Historical shifts in intersections of gender, race, and class in migrant labour flows
The impact of migration in sending societies: Remittances and the financialization of migrants
Chair: Silke Neunsinger
silke.neunsinger@arbark.se
Uppsala University
First Nations people have been faced with the military invasion of their lands and have contributed towards the military labour of those settler nations. In response to the former, they adapted their own military strategies to face a new type of enemy. In relation to the latter, Indigenous men and women have contributed to imperial wars, world wars, and cold wars and more. Despite doing so, they have continued to face discrimination within settler nations’ forces and in wider society. This panel examines Indigenous contributions to military labour, exemptions to Indigenous military labour, and the ways military labour intersects with Indigenous rights activism through three key examples: the Sámi and conscription in Sweden, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in occupied Japan and Korea, and Native Americans in the Civil War.
Chair: Stefania Barca
sbarca68@gmail.com
University of Santiago de Compostela
This session examines how contemporary regimes of production bind working bodies to degraded ecologies, generating forms of harm that are simultaneously environmental, corporeal, and political. Bringing together papers on shipbreaking in Turkey, construction in India, and garment manufacturing in Indonesia, the session foregrounds labouring bodies as critical sites where global inequalities, ecological transformation, and regulatory failure converge.
Across these diverse settings, the papers challenge the separation of workplaces from “the environment,” instead conceptualising work sites as ecological formations shaped by toxic materials, dust, heat, flooding, and shifting climatic rhythms. Workers are shown to bear the brunt of these conditions, absorbing exposure in order to sustain global production. Whether through hidden epidemics of occupational disease, the capacitation of bodies to endure dust and heat, or the labour required to reconcile factory schedules with climate disruption, exposure emerges as a central analytic and political process.
The session highlights how such exposures are rendered acceptable or invisible through greenwashing, uneven legal frameworks, narratives of endurance, and asymmetric power relations within global supply chains. At the same time, it attends to workers’ agency, tracing practices of organisation, advocacy, and everyday negotiation that seek to mitigate or contest ecological and bodily harm.
Overall, the session contributes to debates in labour studies, political ecology, and climate scholarship by insisting on a holistic understanding of work as embedded within broader socio-environmental landscapes, and by centring workers as key actors navigating and reshaping these conditions.
Chair: Irene Diaz
irenedzmz@gmail.com
University of Oviedo
As a global process, deindustrialisation has profoundly transformed the social, cultural and economic frame of countless countries and regions around the world. There is abundant literature and solid research on this subject, offering a general framework of the deindustrialisation process, its causes, consequences and economic, social and cultural impact. The closure of industries and factories, once pillars of the economy, generators of strong work cultures and sources of identity, has left behind complex legacies, whose traces are particularly visible when we focus on local communities.
It is precisely with an interest in the local scale that we ask ourselves how communities have dealt with those processes of deindustrialisation. What have been the main changes experienced, and in this sense, what continuities and ruptures people perceive as meaningful? What responses have been articulated, what strategies for productive transformation have been implemented (or not), all from approaches that address both institutional responses and those that could be carried out ‘from below’ in terms of both reflection and action. All of this, ultimately, with the aim of going beyond a mere analysis of the deindustrialisation process to ask ourselves questions, investigate and reflect on the ‘aftermath’. Undoubtedly, as prolonged processes, both the confirmation of the end of a cycle and its perception often introduce enormous complexity which, precisely because of the ‘continuity in discontinuity’ they represent, open up interesting lines of research.
.The session “Workshops, ‘small industries’, women’s work and diversity of industrialization in Mediterranean Europe, 19th-20th centuries” intends to further develop the link between the variety of industrialization patterns and their historical dynamics in relation to actors’ experiences. In doing so, it will explore in depth the gendered organization of work and division of labour, in workshops (and workshops at home) and small industries in regions characterized by very different levels of industrial growth in Mediterranean Europe (in Spain, Italy and Greece, with comparisons with other mediterranean and non-mediterranean regions).
Specific questions discussed by the researchers in their papers concern the diversity of women’s working careers in different production contexts, including women’s skilled and supervisory work, women’s role in the transfer and appropriation of technology, women’s work in the context of family economies and family strategies in formal and informal networks, and gender hierarchies in the workplace. The authors will address in their articles (one or more) more general questions related to the transformation of industrialization patterns such as: how was labour production organized in workshops and small industries and what was the gendered division of labour? Did women work in workshops and small industries as part of their family “duties” and “obligations” or as independent workers? Did the whole family work as a production unit or not? How was the work of family members organized in workshops and small industries? Did they work as subcontractors of larger firms? What were the main features of workers’ participation in production according to their age? At what age did women enter the workforce and when or why did they leave it? Was women’s work permanent or casual and seasonal and why? How did they reconcile care work and market work? How was work managed by the managers, team supervisors, and employers? Did the work management have specific gender characteristics?
Adopting the new perspectives made possible by global labour history to compare a wide set of Mediterranean regions will allow us to escape the “anxiety” of divergent analysis from the Northern Euro-centric comparative perspective, as found in older studies (PAPASTEFANAKI & POTAMIANOS, 2022). Following recent trends in historical research, in order to highlight the specific features of Southern European and European Mediterranean case studies the special theme will cover both South-Western and South-Eastern European Mediterranean cases (Spain, Italy, France, Greece, Ottoman Empire/Turkey,) with a comparative and transnational approach. As such, the contributors should consider and discuss the related bibliography for other Mediterranean regions and try to find connections (of any kind) between their case studies and other productive contexts around the Mediterranean in order to highlight new analytical frames and avoid focusing only on comparisons with developing patterns in Northern Europe.
Chair: Colin J. David
cjdavis@uab.edu
University of Alabama at Birmingham
This double session examines the multiple forms of free, unfree, and coerced maritime labour that sustained European empires across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific worlds between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. It brings together case studies that trace how slavery and penal labour operated in maritime settings—aboard ships, in ports, and across colonial outposts. The first set of papers focuses on global slave trades and coercive labour systems. They analyse the role of African sailors in the nineteenth-century Spanish–Cuban slave trade, present the first results of the Exploring Slave Trade in Asia (ESTA) project, examine the prominence of maritime workers within systems of penal labour and resistance in Van Diemen’s Land, review changing slavery regimes in the Dutch Indian Ocean, and assess German participation in Atlantic slavery and its ties to capitalism.
The second set of papers turns to the Portuguese empire in Asia, c.1500–1750. Historiography on maritime labour in the context of the European Empires in Asia is not extremely vast, but there is a clear body of publications for the English and Dutch empires, while other European empires powers remain understudied. These papers aim to contribute to partially fill this gap in the existing scholarship by paying attention to maritime labour in the context of the Portuguese empire in Asia, circa 1500-1750. The three case studies examine in detail various forms of free and coerced labour, types of activities and working conditions in coastal outposts in various locations of the Portuguese Estado da India as well as on board vessels. By using an extensive body of source materials from Portuguese and Dutch archives, these studies aim not only to unveil the realities of maritime labour in Portuguese Asia, but also establish comparisons with the Dutch, the English, the French and the Spanish Empires in the region, whenever possible.
The session underscores that maritime labour was fundamental to the functioning of global empires and highlights the instability of the boundary between freedom and coercion, the importance of maritime workers to imperial economies, and the need to study these dynamics in both comparative and interconnected global perspective.
This panel stems from our desire to develop and submit the results of a seminar previously organised by the Free and Unfree Labour Working Group of SISLAV for international comparison. Entitled Sources and Positionality in Coercion, the seminar aimed to explore the use of the term “coercion” and to challenge perceptions of labour relations by examining primary sources, such as interviews and archival documents, from the perspectives of methodological choices and historical interpretation. Through examining the interactions between various social and institutional actors, we intend to move beyond the binary opposition of free and unfree labour. Furthermore, we recognise positionality as a pivotal concept in analysing the relationships and conflicts between actors, social and power hierarchies, ascribed statuses and, ultimately, the role of the historian.
We propose organising a panel that relates these substantial and methodological issues to the topics of material coercion, representation and the self-subjectivation processes of workers throughout time, space and different working relationships. The papers connect different temporalities and spatialities – from the examination of freedom’s lawsuits to enslaved mobility in the colonial and imperial spaces of the Caribbean, to the analysis of labour organization in nineteenth-century penal institutions and migrant work in the domestic sector in Italy in the 1970s-90s – with the aim of re-interrogating “uncomfortable” sources to put coercion to the test of historical research.
Chair: Sibylle Marti
sibylle.marti@unibe.ch
Universität Bern
This panel focuses on precarious labour and gender.
Chair: Nina Trige Andersen
nina.trige.andersen@gmail.com
Independent historian
In her seminal 1989 essay, Kimberle Crenshaw urged scholars to overcome their “tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive” by examining the intersecting axes of gender and racialisation. In the historiography of slavery, attention to the experiences of women has since grown, with scholars frequently focusing on sexual exploitation (e.g. Morgan 2004, Hartman 2021, Fuentes 2016). Within studies of the Early Modern African diaspora in Europe, however, women have remained on the margins, with those portrayed usually being exceptional figures (see e.g. Sensbach 2005, Gerzina 2020, Otele 2020). Female domestic labourers, by contrast, despite arguably forming the largest group of women of African descent in Early Modern Europe, have received little attention.
Building on historiographies of colonialism and sexuality (e.g. Stoler 2002; Haskins 2015), as well as life cycles, household labour, and coercion (e.g. Sarti 2005; Fauve- Chamoux 2004; Hoerder, van Meerkerk & Neunsinger 2015), this session seeks to address this lacuna. We aim to bring into dialogue quantitative and qualitative findings pertaining to different European territories and to develop a broader conceptual framework in studying domestic labour and Black female precarity in Early Modern Europe. Leading questions are: what types of domestic labour were Black women in Early Modern Europe engaged in? How did racialisation manifest in their everyday lives? What forms of coercion and precarity are evident, and what strategies of resistance did Black female labourers employ?
Structured around case studies of London, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Bordeaux and based on extensive archival research, the panellists outline national and transnational patterns of Black women’s labour in Early Modern Europe. Focal points are the role of care work, strategies of resistance, and the impact of racialisation. Beyond its value for the study of Black European history, this approach intervenes in the field of gender, labour, and precarity.
Chair: Pizzolato, Nico
N.Pizzolato@mdx.ac.uk
Middlesex University
This session explores the varied tools through which coercion has been enacted across different times and places. From runaway advertisements in early modern Europe to algorithmic management in post-apartheid South Africa, the papers demonstrate how coercion has been enforced through technologies of communication, legal and contractual mechanisms, state migration policies, and digital systems of workplace surveillance.
The contributions highlight the central role of institutions and intermediaries in sustaining coercive regimes. States used treaties, quotas, and administrative practices to channel and restrict mobility; employers relied on indebtedness, informal contracts, and control over housing and assistance to bind workers to them; and new technologies could extend the reach of coercive authority into everyday life.
At the same time, the session underscores that these tools were never uncontested. Workers and migrants resisted or adapted to them in diverse ways, for example through flight, workplace disruption or recourse to legal systems. Such responses reveal the fragility of coercive arrangements and the ongoing negotiation between those who imposed control and those subjected to it.
Taken together, the papers show how coercion was enacted through specific instruments wielded by states, employers, communities, and technologies. By tracing these mechanisms across centuries, the session highlights both the persistence and transformation of coercive labour management, and the central role legal, social and technological means in shaping coercive social relations.
Chair: Annina Gagyiova
gagyiova@hiu.cas.cz
Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciences
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The working group aims to build an interdisciplinary network of scholars studying labour migration from a historical perspective. Although migration currently receives great attention in political and academic debates, it is often discussed as a humanitarian emergency, a social and a security problem, but very rarely as a labour (history) issue. Similarly, research sympathetic to the struggles of migrants tends to denounce the violation of human and civil rights experienced by migrants but very rarely refers to the ways in which migration management policies have historically contributed to the creation of unfree and precarious working conditions. Our network seeks to generate scholarly debate about the interconnectedness of labour and migration history and stresses the importance of labour to analyse change in migration patterns and policies across time and space. We are interested in both empirical and theoretical analysis, and in various types of labour migration, perspectives, chronological and regional foci.
We invite papers addressing labour migration history including (but not limited to) the following topics of interest:
Labour mobility in domestic, regional and transnational policies and patterns
Intra-bloc and East-South labour migration in the Cold War context
Labour migration beyond normative and methodological nationalism
Organised migration schemes (e.g. “Guestworkers”) in a comparative perspective
Labour precarity and coercion in historical perspective
Entanglements between forced and voluntary migration
Methodological considerations and innovations in labour migration history
Historical shifts in intersections of gender, race, and class in migrant labour flows
The impact of migration in sending societies: Remittances and the financialization of migrants
Chair: Lorenzo Costaguta
lorenzo.costaguta@bristol.ac.uk
University of Bristol
How do micro-histories, the long duree, and macro-geographies refigure histories of labour and empire?
Chair: Jennifer Klein
jennifer.klein@yale.edu
Yale University
Since at least the end of the 18th century, social reformers, labor leaders, organized workers, and political movements have promoted democratic control of the workplace, industry, and economic life as a crucial precondition not only for social justice and material security but also for political democracy more generally. In so doing, they have highlighted that when workers and employees lack effective voice at work and control over the labor process, their political participation and formal political equality is seriously curtailed more broadly. Indeed, many have argued that political democracy will fail to materialize or, where it existed, soon experience ‘backsliding’ should democratic rights over work, industry, and the economy be withheld or decline. Against this backdrop, intellectuals, political and trade union actors, and social movements proposed a wide range of theories as well as practical measures that underlined the participation of employees and labor in decision-making as a prerequisite for the sustainability of democratic rule. In light of the current attacks on democratic institutions, we believe that now is the time to re-think what role the improvement and expansion of employee participation in industrial and economic decision-making might play in the fight for the future of our democracies.
Today, growing fears of democratic erosion in the political sphere happen to follow on the heels of a general decline of economic democracy over the last decades. For this reason, we want to explore the role that ‘democracy’ has played in the thinking, organizing, and lived experiences of past and present-day individuals and movements pushing for greater control over individual workplaces, whole industries, and entire economies. Instead of concentrating on how workplace democracy has impacted economic performance, productivity, and employee satisfaction–the focus of much previous research–we want to go to the heart of our subject and ask: whether, how, and why democracy at work strengthens and improves democracy in a variety of other social spheres, from families and civic organizations to local communities, the nation state and the international arena? For this purpose, we are proposing a series of panels that go beyond the historical gaze of our working group’s previous activities.
Panel 4: Social Movements and Struggles for Workplace Democracy: Feminism, trade unionism, and civil rights
Chair: Loockx, Kristof
kristof.loockx@uantwerpen.be
Centre for Urban History, University of Antwerp
This session examines life, culture, and mutual support in maritime communities from the seventeenth to the twentieth century across Europe and the Atlantic world. It explores how maritime workers and their families forged solidarities and systems of care that sustained seafaring careers and helped communities navigate risk, mobility and separation. Such support took many forms, from kinship ties, mentorship and community networks to benevolent societies, systems of care and everyday practices of reproductive labour. At the same time, maritime life was subject to regulation, surveillance and contestation, whether through state authorities, unions, religious organisations or civic institutions. These interventions reflected broader concerns about order, respectability and identity, yet they also generated spaces of negotiation, conflict and accommodation. By examining the interplay of solidarity, regulation and everyday practice, the session highlights the diversity of maritime communities and the cultural, social and economic relations that sustained them. It shows that seafarers were closely connected to wider communities, that women and marginalised groups played central roles in maintaining maritime life, and that port cities were sites of both integration and tension. Overall, the contributions demonstrate how maritime communities were not peripheral but integral to understanding wider processes of social organisation, cultural identity and collective support in early modern and modern societies.
Chair: Vasilaki, Kalliopi
kk.vasilaki@gmail.com
Università degli studi di Genova
This session explores how authority in maritime worlds was negotiated and contested from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It examines how different actors—merchant seafarers, enlisted sailors, ship captains, patrones, shipbuilders, and shipyard workers—confronted or defended hierarchies in diverse settings across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. The papers analyse maritime conflicts that arose aboard ships and ashore over discipline, hierarchy, and labour conditions, both in the merchant marine and in navy. By juxtaposing conflicts at sea with those in shipyards and dockyards, the session emphasises the multiple arenas in which maritime authority was contested. Some contributions highlight shipboard unrest—such as in the Dutch merchant fleet of the eighteenth century, in the Royal Navy at Invergordon in 1931, and in the Royal Indian Navy revolt of 1946—while others trace disputes in shipyards and professional contexts, from the conflicts between ship captains and patrones in Spain in the age of steam, to the authority struggles between naval intendants and shipbuilders in colonial Brazil, to labour struggles in Quebec’s shipyards. Together, these case studies show that maritime authority was constantly negotiated. They reveal that labour conflicts were at once local and global, rooted in specific contexts but also part of broader processes that reshaped relations of work, discipline, and power.
Chair: Justine Cousin
cousinhg@gmail.com
Constructing and negotiating precarity in African colonial labour regimes.
Chair: Antonio Moreno Juste
amjuste@ghis.ucm.es
Complutense University Madrid
This session brings together members of a Spanish research project studying the role of Spanish civil society organisations, and in particular trade unions and employers, in the process of European integration. The papers presented in this section will deal with different key Spanish actors of this relationship and will be followed by a round-table of protagonists and actors involved, confronting memory and history of Spanish and European trade unionism in a critical manner.
Chair: Olli Siitonen
olli.siitonen@helsinki.fi
University of Helsinki
Military workers, including soldiers, have often engaged in strategies of resistance – to conscription, to combat operations, to inactivity. This resistance may be organised in groups, or enacted as individuals. Resistance in this context has usually been framed in terms of the objectives and needs of military command and control rather than through the language of the worker. Strikes become mutinies, leaving becomes desertion and betrayal. These situations are often entangled with other asymmetrical contexts like colonialism and imperialism. How are we to best interpret acts of resistance by military labourers? This panel explores this issue through specific examples from British India and Alaska and through a broader historical view across time.
Chair: Hernández, Mar
intheukmar@gmail.com
U. Sheffield
This session investigates forms of work, organization, and commerce that developed outside or beyond traditional guild structures. It explores how skilled laborers and artisans adapted in contexts where guilds were absent, dissolved, or in decline, and how new forms of association and regulation emerged in their place. Attention is given to alternative mechanisms of labor control, the persistence of hierarchies and apprenticeship models, and the ways in which workers sought to defend their skills and professional identities. The discussion also highlights how markets and urban spaces were shaped by practices not fully governed by guilds, including informal arrangements, mutual aid societies, and self-regulated communities of labor. By examining these trajectories, the session sheds light on the diversity of strategies through which artisans and merchants navigated shifting economic, social, and institutional landscapes in the early modern and modern periods.
Chair: Martin Bernátek
martin.bernatek@upol.cz
Palacký University Olomouc, Czechia
In our panel, we aim to discuss methodological, heuristic, and curatorial aspects of the shift in labour histories—from a focus on working-class politics and, more generally, on labour as a key element of class or group constitution—towards an emphasis on the politics of cultural practices. We understand workers’ culture not as a fixed ideological expression, but as an array of lived and staged practices—such as choirs, sport activities, emotionally charged commemorative events, amateur theatre or political festivals—that shaped class consciousness through the body and the senses. We are particularly interested in histories that connect or highlight the aesthetics of working-class politics, and that explore art as a form of social practice.
Our focus is primarily on Central Europe and the Baltic States during the loosely defined interwar period, while also considering longer processes and key turning points. We are especially interested in corpo-emotional modes of practice involved in building workers’ communities: their self-awareness, collectively created dreams and visions.
In our double panel, we will focus on the following themes:
(1) Body and emotions in workers’ culture: How was the workers’ movement energized by specific emotional dispositifs? How were feelings such as hope or anger manifested, regulated, and interpreted within workers’ cultural practices?
(2) Cultural practices as sites of political struggle: How can workers’ culture be understood as an alternative public sphere beyond Habermas’s model? How did workers’ associations cooperate with other collectives, youth organizations, educational initiatives, co-operatives etc. in producing shared cultural space? How did avant-garde art circles relate to the working class? How did they collaborate in practice, and what aesthetic models emerged from these interactions? How was culture a sphere for building larger anti-fascist alliances? And how was workers’ culture in interwar central Europe and the Baltic states shaped by transnational and global connections?
(3) Visibility of working class histories today: How is historiography of workers’ culture shaped by the geopolitical positioning of research and how does the “canon of Western labour history” operate within it? What methodological challenges, stereotypical frameworks, or biases affect the study of labour in relation to art, emotions, and performance? How can the embodied and emotional dimensions of labour history be made visible today—in archives, exhibitions, performances, and education—and how will such efforts challenge existing curatorial conventions and political imaginaries?
Chair: Stefania Barca
sbarca68@gmail.com
University of Santiago de Compostela
In this session, in dialogue with the author, Stefania Barca, we will discuss, Workers of the Earth a book that uncovers the environmental history and political ecology of labour to shed new light on the potentiality of workers as ecological subjects. Taking an ecofeminist approach, this ground-breaking book makes a unique contribution to the emerging field of environmental labour studies, expanding the category of labour to include waged and unwaged, industrial and meta-industrial workers.
Going beyond conventional categories of ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’ as separate spheres of human experience, Barca offers a fresh perspective on the place of labour in today’s global climate struggle, reminding us that the fight against climate change is a fight against capitalism.
Chair: Tibor Valuch
valuch63@gmail.com
Eszterházy Károly Catholic University
The idea behind the planned session grew out of a decade-long cooperation between the two organizers and our common interest in re-connecting with both the East-Central European “native” traditions of labour anthropology and the new, global perspectives on labour history.
It is common knowledge today that even though working-class studies enjoyed a privileged status in state socialist Eastern Europe and received distinguished attention and institutional funding from the Communist regimes, the discipline also stood under strict ideological control, which impacted on the actual academic production and the local academic communities. While in the aftermath of “actually existing socialism”, for understandable reasons, the stress has been put on the question of academic control, resistance or collaboration with the Communist regimes, there has also emerged a need to re-read the old ethnographies through a new lens and a new attention to the actual ethnographic work rather than the question of the scale of compliance to the ideological narrative that the “client” state wanted to hear. Labor anthropology had a particularly strong school for instance in Poland, but sociological and ethnographic studies also flourished in countries such as Hungary, where the re-established sociology enjoyed a very high social and academic prestige.
In the 1990s, academic interest in Central and Eastern European labour radically shrank, as the working class was often uncritically associated with the Communist past that both the public and academic communities sought to leave behind. With the transformation of Communist industries, the main losers of the regime changes belonged to the postsocialist working class, who en mass lost their jobs and temporarily or in most cases permanently fell out of the labour market, suffering all the predictable consequences (material and social insecurity, impoverishment, the decline and eventual ghettoization of their living habitats, the disintegration of the old communities and often even the families, the loss of the dignity of work, and the pressing need to redefine their social, gender and personal identities). This nourished a sense of socialist nostalgia, which had an uncanny resonance with the Communist past, rendering labour studies even less attractive for the new, democratically elected governments in East-Central Europe. Unsurprisingly, much of the postsocialist labour anthropology has been written by Western scholars, who brought with themselves not only their academic interest and moral commitment but also novel perspectives and new academic methods.
By now, a new generation of scholars grew up, who were born after the regime changes or only have distant childhood memories of the late socialist period. The old political-ideological fights and Cold War divisions that determined the lives of the older generations are – optimistically – foreby. The kind of global ethnography that Michael Burawoy advocated seems to be a “natural” choice for many researchers, who can cross – or are even pushed to cross – borders.
It is also common knowledge that the globalization of labour has many negative aspects – Western scholars already in the 1990s spoke of the colonization of Eastern European labour. It can be, however, also argued that this colonization has also become global as dire consequences such as the informalization of employment, the weakening of trade unions, gendered poverty, growing material and social insecurity are no longer postsocialist specificities.
Despite all odds, we believe that there is a continuing need to “connect” our ethnographies – both socialist and postsocialist, and the Eastern and Western perspectives. We therefore invite papers which are engaged with working-class ethnographies in Central and Eastern Europe from the end of the Second World War till the present day. We welcome both contemporary case studies or comparative papers and papers, which are engaged with the history of socialist ethnographies. We also welcome studies that examine the everyday life of workers, their life, adaptation, and work strategies, the system of work, workplace and private relationships, and networks from a complex ethnographic, anthropological, and social history perspective.
Studying different regions, scholars from the new generation of global labour historians such as Görkem Akgöz or Leda Papastefanaki proposed to re-focus on the workplace, and they published ground-breaking studies embedded in the factory. A contemporary scholar in East-Central Europe would only see enviously the voluminous literature inside the socialist factory – commissioned by the Communist state. Much has been rightfully said about the Communist misuse of the “working class”. It is, however, also important to re-discover what kind of mirror the contemporary scholars held to the “client” state.
Since the 1970s, economic historians have placed great emphasis on the ‘ruralization’ of manufacturing activities in the early modern period, in the context of proto-industrialization and on the role of small towns in this process. This approach remains partial and does not take into account the possibilities that the urban environment could offer. We propose to refocus the analysis on women’s economic activities in cities with complex economies and which constitute the destination of important migratory flows, particularly in periods of crisis. Cities were sources of support and work for women and women were a necessary resource to adapt urban economies in the context of the first globalisation.
Research on artisan families has highlighted the important economic function of the dowry as a contribution at the time of marriage that could be invested in the family workshop, thus directly entering into the construction of a common patrimony between spouses who often worked together to the point of overcoming, in fact, the separation of property, a characteristic of Roman law. Moreover, in the artisan classes, the obligation for the bride to bring a dowry to the wedding could only constitute an incentive to invest in a work activity, in the absence of a family inheritance. Far from being a disincentive on paid work, the dowry was a source of investment and a resource at key moments in the family history. By reconstructing the economic activities of women, we wish to see how paid work could be a form of accumulation for some of them with a view to building up their dowries. During marriage, we wish to examine the economic uses they could make of their dowries, for example to start up or invest in family activities, or to carry out loan operations.
How women’s work made it possible to cope with crises both in the family and in the urban economy? What consequences did the relative marginalisation of the Italian economy during the early modern age have on female employment? What activities were abandoned and what new possibilities arose? Our hypothesis is that, contrary to what has sometimes been assumed, women are not expelled from economic activities or relegated to unpaid domestic tasks, but on the contrary constitute essential elements in helping the economies of their families and cities to overcome crises. Data collected on women’s activities, agency and wages in the Italian towns will constitute new elements of criticism against the model of the ‘Little divergence’ between Northern and Southern Europe. We wish to provide the material necessary to rethink the whole economic and social history of early modern Europe, one that gives due value to the role of women and highlights the complexity of gender relations at work.
Chair: Maria Papathanassiou
mpapath@arch.uoa.gr
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
The (double) session aims at bringing forward and discussing the extent and the ways in which labour history / the history of work bridge migration and family history. The papers deal with labour migration and family economy in western, central and southeastern European regions from the 17th to the 20th centuries. They address the ways in which household and kinship structures and dynamics interacted with long-distance as well as short-distance labour migration, they examine migration within rural as well as urban household contexts, address the significance of gender and age, as well as labour migration’s impact on family relations. Topics regard migration from rural to urban spaces, as well as labour mobility within the rural countryside, migration within the European continent, as well as between Europe and other continents, transatlantic migration, women, child, male and female youth migrants, the importance of remittances and epistolary communication for the functioning of coherent family economies over long distances, the value of autobiographical sources for studying labor migration in relation to the family economy. By examining the history of labour migration within the context of the family economy, the connection and interaction between the latter, and relationships between family members, behaviors, and emotions is highlighted.
The mining sector occupied a central role in shaping the economic, political, and social history of many countries throughout the 20th century. As a strategic industry, mining was closely tied to national development agendas, regimes of labour control, environmental transformations, and the consolidation of state power.
This panel aims to explore the labour, social, political, and environmental dimensions of the mining sector under dictatorial regimes during the 20th century. While we are particularly interested in European cases, we also strongly encourage contributions that examine similar processes in other parts of the world—such as Latin America, but we could consider other cases in Africa or Asia—to foster comparative perspectives and transregional dialogues.
We invite paper proposals that address, among others, the following topics:
– Labour regimes and working conditions; state violence and labour discipline; occupational health and safety;
– Industrial relations and collective action: trade unionism, strikes, worker mobilization, and their repression or negotiation by authoritarian regimes;
– The role of mining in economic and political planning under dictatorships: including its ideological instrumentalization in fascist, communist, or military regimes;
– The responses of dictatorial regimes to the environmental impacts of mining and the narratives of progress or sacrifice that justified extractive policies.
– We are especially interested in interdisciplinary approaches that bridge labour history with environmental history, political economy, social history, or the history of science and technology. Contributions may be based on local case studies, national analyses, or comparative and transregional frameworks.
Chair: Bart Vanhercke
bvanhercke@etui.org
Director of research, ETUI
This first session includes three separate papers dealing with the trajectory of Emilio Gabaglio (1937-2024) as trade union leader. For half a century, Emilio Gabaglio has been a key witness and actor of the transformations of European and International trade unionism. As former International Secretary of the Italian Confederation of Trade Unions (CISL) and later secretary general of the European Trade Union Confederation, his action and thought have marked the existing structures of European and International trade unions in a very specific way. The European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) is encouraging historical research about his trajectory and the papers presented in this section will serve to touch upon different aspects of his trajectory as Italian, European and international trade unionist.
.The session “Workshops, ‘small industries’, women’s work and diversity of industrialization in Mediterranean Europe, 19th-20th centuries” intends to further develop the link between the variety of industrialization patterns and their historical dynamics in relation to actors’ experiences. In doing so, it will explore in depth the gendered organization of work and division of labour, in workshops (and workshops at home) and small industries in regions characterized by very different levels of industrial growth in Mediterranean Europe (in Spain, Italy and Greece, with comparisons with other mediterranean and non-mediterranean regions).
Specific questions discussed by the researchers in their papers concern the diversity of women’s working careers in different production contexts, including women’s skilled and supervisory work, women’s role in the transfer and appropriation of technology, women’s work in the context of family economies and family strategies in formal and informal networks, and gender hierarchies in the workplace. The authors will address in their articles (one or more) more general questions related to the transformation of industrialization patterns such as: how was labour production organized in workshops and small industries and what was the gendered division of labour? Did women work in workshops and small industries as part of their family “duties” and “obligations” or as independent workers? Did the whole family work as a production unit or not? How was the work of family members organized in workshops and small industries? Did they work as subcontractors of larger firms? What were the main features of workers’ participation in production according to their age? At what age did women enter the workforce and when or why did they leave it? Was women’s work permanent or casual and seasonal and why? How did they reconcile care work and market work? How was work managed by the managers, team supervisors, and employers? Did the work management have specific gender characteristics?
Adopting the new perspectives made possible by global labour history to compare a wide set of Mediterranean regions will allow us to escape the “anxiety” of divergent analysis from the Northern Euro-centric comparative perspective, as found in older studies (PAPASTEFANAKI & POTAMIANOS, 2022). Following recent trends in historical research, in order to highlight the specific features of Southern European and European Mediterranean case studies the special theme will cover both South-Western and South-Eastern European Mediterranean cases (Spain, Italy, France, Greece, Ottoman Empire/Turkey,) with a comparative and transnational approach. As such, the contributors should consider and discuss the related bibliography for other Mediterranean regions and try to find connections (of any kind) between their case studies and other productive contexts around the Mediterranean in order to highlight new analytical frames and avoid focusing only on comparisons with developing patterns in Northern Europe.
The working group aims to build an interdisciplinary network of scholars studying labour migration from a historical perspective. Although migration currently receives great attention in political and academic debates, it is often discussed as a humanitarian emergency, a social and a security problem, but very rarely as a labour (history) issue. Similarly, research sympathetic to the struggles of migrants tends to denounce the violation of human and civil rights experienced by migrants but very rarely refers to the ways in which migration management policies have historically contributed to the creation of unfree and precarious working conditions. Our network seeks to generate scholarly debate about the interconnectedness of labour and migration history and stresses the importance of labour to analyse change in migration patterns and policies across time and space. We are interested in both empirical and theoretical analysis, and in various types of labour migration, perspectives, chronological and regional foci.
We invite papers addressing labour migration history including (but not limited to) the following topics of interest:
Labour mobility in domestic, regional and transnational policies and patterns
Intra-bloc and East-South labour migration in the Cold War context
Labour migration beyond normative and methodological nationalism
Organised migration schemes (e.g. “Guestworkers”) in a comparative perspective
Labour precarity and coercion in historical perspective
Entanglements between forced and voluntary migration
Methodological considerations and innovations in labour migration history
Historical shifts in intersections of gender, race, and class in migrant labour flows
The impact of migration in sending societies: Remittances and the financialization of migrants
Chair: Hakoniemi, Elina
elina.hakoniemi@helsinki.fi
Demos Heslinki/University of Helsinki
Workers’ education was never confined to national borders. While it compensated for limited access to formal schooling and offered cultural and political empowerment, its significance extended beyond local contexts. Educational models, such as labour colleges, folk high schools, and study circles, circulated internationally, adapting to diverse settings yet linked by shared ideals of solidarity, participation, and democratic learning.
Transnational exchanges of pedagogies, cultural practices, and organisational strategies created a common framework for workers’ education while also reflecting national variations. Activists travelled, studied abroad, and engaged in international networks, fostering mutual learning and debate across the labour movement. These cross-border connections reveal workers’ education as both a tool of class formation within nation-states and part of a wider global struggle for emancipation.
The papers in this session highlight workers’ education as a transnational phenomenon, examining how ideas, practices, and institutions travelled across borders and how global solidarities and tensions shaped the educational agendas of the labour movement.
Chair: Colin J. David
cjdavis@uab.edu
University of Alabama at Birmingham
This double session examines the multiple forms of free, unfree, and coerced maritime labour that sustained European empires across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific worlds between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. It brings together case studies that trace how slavery and penal labour operated in maritime settings—aboard ships, in ports, and across colonial outposts. The first set of papers focuses on global slave trades and coercive labour systems. They analyse the role of African sailors in the nineteenth-century Spanish–Cuban slave trade, present the first results of the Exploring Slave Trade in Asia (ESTA) project, examine the prominence of maritime workers within systems of penal labour and resistance in Van Diemen’s Land, review changing slavery regimes in the Dutch Indian Ocean, and assess German participation in Atlantic slavery and its ties to capitalism.
The second set of papers turns to the Portuguese empire in Asia, c.1500–1750. Historiography on maritime labour in the context of the European Empires in Asia is not extremely vast, but there is a clear body of publications for the English and Dutch empires, while other European empires powers remain understudied. These papers aim to contribute to partially fill this gap in the existing scholarship by paying attention to maritime labour in the context of the Portuguese empire in Asia, circa 1500-1750. The three case studies examine in detail various forms of free and coerced labour, types of activities and working conditions in coastal outposts in various locations of the Portuguese Estado da India as well as on board vessels. By using an extensive body of source materials from Portuguese and Dutch archives, these studies aim not only to unveil the realities of maritime labour in Portuguese Asia, but also establish comparisons with the Dutch, the English, the French and the Spanish Empires in the region, whenever possible.
The session underscores that maritime labour was fundamental to the functioning of global empires and highlights the instability of the boundary between freedom and coercion, the importance of maritime workers to imperial economies, and the need to study these dynamics in both comparative and interconnected global perspective.
Chair: Irene Diaz
irenedzmz@gmail.com
University of Oviedo
As a global process, deindustrialisation has profoundly transformed the social, cultural and economic frame of countless countries and regions around the world. There is abundant literature and solid research on this subject, offering a general framework of the deindustrialisation process, its causes, consequences and economic, social and cultural impact. The closure of industries and factories, once pillars of the economy, generators of strong work cultures and sources of identity, has left behind complex legacies, whose traces are particularly visible when we focus on local communities.
It is precisely with an interest in the local scale that we ask ourselves how communities have dealt with those processes of deindustrialisation. What have been the main changes experienced, and in this sense, what continuities and ruptures people perceive as meaningful? What responses have been articulated, what strategies for productive transformation have been implemented (or not), all from approaches that address both institutional responses and those that could be carried out ‘from below’ in terms of both reflection and action. All of this, ultimately, with the aim of going beyond a mere analysis of the deindustrialisation process to ask ourselves questions, investigate and reflect on the ‘aftermath’. Undoubtedly, as prolonged processes, both the confirmation of the end of a cycle and its perception often introduce enormous complexity which, precisely because of the ‘continuity in discontinuity’ they represent, open up interesting lines of research.
Chair: Pratyay Nath
pratyay.nath@ashoka.edu.in
Ashoka University
This roundtable asks how labour historians might define “military labour”. We consider the full range of work that enables armed forces in war and peace—logistics and maintenance, combat and non-combat, intelligence and surveillance, domestic and community support, contracting and supply, paid and unpaid, coerced and recruited, and more—alongside interspecies labour (by, for example, horses, dogs, and pigeons). Panellists will probe shifting lines, and discuss how these distinctions shape value, status, and visibility. We will also reflect on methods and sources across periods and geographies. The aim is to map a shared research agenda for the Working Group while keeping categories open to critique and revision.
Chair: Aslı Odman
asli.odman@msgsu.edu.tr
Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University
This session brings together four papers that rethink workplaces as historically layered, materially complex ecologies shaped by industrialization, technological change, and more-than-human relations. Spanning early twentieth-century Istanbul, postwar Netherlands, mid-century American auto plants, and the industrial geography of modern Turkey, the papers challenge narrow, site-bound understandings of work by situating workplaces within broader spatial, technological, and ecological formations.
A shared concern is how large-scale processes—state-led industrialization, technological rationalization, rural–industrial transition, and urban regulation—reconfigure the environments in which labour unfolds. The contributions show that workplaces are not neutral containers of production but contested terrains where spatial design, sensory conditions, temporal discipline, and ecological relations shape labour relations, subjectivities, and possibilities for agency. From “inherited” and “constructed” industrial landscapes in Turkey, to the factory as a technological environment in U.S. auto manufacturing, to Dutch factories experienced as enclosed and ecologically alien spaces by former agricultural workers, the papers foreground how environmental conditions actively mediate adaptation, dissatisfaction, and resistance.
Extending the notion of workplace ecology beyond human-centered analysis, the session also incorporates more-than-human perspectives. The study of Istanbul’s market gardens highlights transspecies labour relations among humans, animals, plants, soil, and water, complicating ideas of agency, responsibility, and productivity within urban workspaces.
Together, these papers offer conceptual and methodological tools for reading workplaces as ecological archives, where histories of labour, environment, technology, and power are co-produced across scales. The session contributes to labour history, environmental history, and political ecology by insisting that understanding work requires attention to its material, spatial, and multispecies conditions.
Chair: Peláez Domínguez, Teresa
teresa.pelaez@uv.es
University of Valencia
In recent years, the military has been firmly established as a site of labour, and military labour history thus claimed its place within labour history. However, even though work related to war and the military is widely known to have included a significant amount of coercion, the interplay between work, coercion and punishment when it comes to the military and its actors has limited systematic research. This panel therefore aims to bring together research highlighting the connection between these dynamics – that is, how coercion was practiced, experienced and resisted when it came to the military throughout history.
The contributions in this panel focus on the material practices of coercion shaped by the logics of both war and economic exploitation, ideological justifications for coercion, workers’ own understandings of their coercion and their strategies in fighting it. Spanning across the period from the 16th to the 20th century and geographical regions from the Mediterranean and Northern Africa across Greece and the Austrian part of the Habsburg monarchy to (Imperial) Japan, the panel allows for a comparative perspective on these dynamics beyond traditional binaries.
The papers in this panel reflect a broad conceptualisation of military labour – they focus not on soldiers themselves, but on different sites of labour where military, state and civil society came together, and coercion was produced through their specific interaction. From this perspective, factory workers, convicts, sex workers, shipbuilders and soldiers’ wives and children all become part of military labour regimes. The fact that they might not have been understood as military workers, or even workers at all, at the time becomes a crucial part of understanding the specific coercive practices they were subjected to. This panel thus presents an important contribution both to the conceptualisation of coercion as an analytical lens and to military labour history and a step towards unmaking the boundaries that have traditionally shaped discussions in these fields.
Chair: María Fernanda Arellanes
maria.fernanda.arellanes@gmail.com
Independent scholar
This panel focuses on migrant workers and precarious labour.
Chair: Nina Trige Andersen
nina.trige.andersen@gmail.com
Independent historian
The focus of this panel is precarious labour in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Since the 1970s, economic historians have placed great emphasis on the ‘ruralization’ of manufacturing activities in the early modern period, in the context of proto-industrialization and on the role of small towns in this process. This approach remains partial and does not take into account the possibilities that the urban environment could offer. We propose to refocus the analysis on women’s economic activities in cities with complex economies and which constitute the destination of important migratory flows, particularly in periods of crisis. Cities were sources of support and work for women and women were a necessary resource to adapt urban economies in the context of the first globalisation.
Research on artisan families has highlighted the important economic function of the dowry as a contribution at the time of marriage that could be invested in the family workshop, thus directly entering into the construction of a common patrimony between spouses who often worked together to the point of overcoming, in fact, the separation of property, a characteristic of Roman law. Moreover, in the artisan classes, the obligation for the bride to bring a dowry to the wedding could only constitute an incentive to invest in a work activity, in the absence of a family inheritance. Far from being a disincentive on paid work, the dowry was a source of investment and a resource at key moments in the family history. By reconstructing the economic activities of women, we wish to see how paid work could be a form of accumulation for some of them with a view to building up their dowries. During marriage, we wish to examine the economic uses they could make of their dowries, for example to start up or invest in family activities, or to carry out loan operations.
How women’s work made it possible to cope with crises both in the family and in the urban economy? What consequences did the relative marginalisation of the Italian economy during the early modern age have on female employment? What activities were abandoned and what new possibilities arose? Our hypothesis is that, contrary to what has sometimes been assumed, women are not expelled from economic activities or relegated to unpaid domestic tasks, but on the contrary constitute essential elements in helping the economies of their families and cities to overcome crises. Data collected on women’s activities, agency and wages in the Italian towns will constitute new elements of criticism against the model of the ‘Little divergence’ between Northern and Southern Europe. We wish to provide the material necessary to rethink the whole economic and social history of early modern Europe, one that gives due value to the role of women and highlights the complexity of gender relations at work.
Chair: Maria Papathanassiou
mpapath@arch.uoa.gr
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
The (double) session aims at bringing forward and discussing the extent and the ways in which labour history / the history of work bridge migration and family history. The papers deal with labour migration and family economy in western, central and southeastern European regions from the 17th to the 20th centuries. They address the ways in which household and kinship structures and dynamics interacted with long-distance as well as short-distance labour migration, they examine migration within rural as well as urban household contexts, address the significance of gender and age, as well as labour migration’s impact on family relations. Topics regard migration from rural to urban spaces, as well as labour mobility within the rural countryside, migration within the European continent, as well as between Europe and other continents, transatlantic migration, women, child, male and female youth migrants, the importance of remittances and epistolary communication for the functioning of coherent family economies over long distances, the value of autobiographical sources for studying labor migration in relation to the family economy. By examining the history of labour migration within the context of the family economy, the connection and interaction between the latter, and relationships between family members, behaviors, and emotions is highlighted.
Chair: Petrik, Teresa
teresa.petrik@univie.ac.at
Vienna University of Economics and Business
Forms of labor coercion called “indentured labor” have been an integral part of labor regimes in various parts of the world. However, we lack a thoroughgoing account of indentured labor across its long, geographically dispersed history. In fact, the scholarship is notably fractured, focusing either on indentures for apprenticeships in Europe (which are said to be empowering, through the provision of training and skill as well as social networks) or on Asian indentured labor within modern European and U.S. empires (which is said to be fundamentally exploitative and akin to African chattel slavery). This panel initiates a conversation on indenture across time and space focused on the ways in which coercion operated. The papers collated here span indenture contracts in seventeenth-century England (Tycko), pre-abolition nineteenth-century Chinese labor in the Caribbean (Peters), post-abolition Indian migration (Mongia) and ‘coolie’ labour in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India (Sundar) to reveal the conceptual and legal tools through which diverse actors—ranging from private masters to legislators—coerced laborers under the aegis of indentures, and how laborers lived with and reshaped their conditions. In so doing, the panel seeks to understand the continuities and ruptures in the geographically dispersed and longer history of indentured labor. A particular focus of each paper will be on pointed moments in history when people reformulated, adapted, and investigated these labor contracts. All panelists will attend to their subjects’ evaluation of the nature of coercion which co-existed with and even constituted consent in contract formation. Their grappling with coercion and contractual consent resulted in their articulation of valuable sources which we will analyze here. We ultimately contribute to a cutting-edge development in scholarship on labor, by tracing histories in the freedom of contract, its promises and failures, and how this keystone liberal concept has misdirected energies for reform and challenges to power.
The working group aims to build an interdisciplinary network of scholars studying labour migration from a historical perspective. Although migration currently receives great attention in political and academic debates, it is often discussed as a humanitarian emergency, a social and a security problem, but very rarely as a labour (history) issue. Similarly, research sympathetic to the struggles of migrants tends to denounce the violation of human and civil rights experienced by migrants but very rarely refers to the ways in which migration management policies have historically contributed to the creation of unfree and precarious working conditions. Our network seeks to generate scholarly debate about the interconnectedness of labour and migration history and stresses the importance of labour to analyse change in migration patterns and policies across time and space. We are interested in both empirical and theoretical analysis, and in various types of labour migration, perspectives, chronological and regional foci.
We invite papers addressing labour migration history including (but not limited to) the following topics of interest:
Labour mobility in domestic, regional and transnational policies and patterns
Intra-bloc and East-South labour migration in the Cold War context
Labour migration beyond normative and methodological nationalism
Organised migration schemes (e.g. “Guestworkers”) in a comparative perspective
Labour precarity and coercion in historical perspective
Entanglements between forced and voluntary migration
Methodological considerations and innovations in labour migration history
Historical shifts in intersections of gender, race, and class in migrant labour flows
The impact of migration in sending societies: Remittances and the financialization of migrants
Chair: Philipp Reick
Since at least the end of the 18th century, social reformers, labor leaders, organized workers, and political movements have promoted democratic control of the workplace, industry, and economic life as a crucial precondition not only for social justice and material security but also for political democracy more generally. In so doing, they have highlighted that when workers and employees lack effective voice at work and control over the labor process, their political participation and formal political equality is seriously curtailed more broadly. Indeed, many have argued that political democracy will fail to materialize or, where it existed, soon experience ‘backsliding’ should democratic rights over work, industry, and the economy be withheld or decline. Against this backdrop, intellectuals, political and trade union actors, and social movements proposed a wide range of theories as well as practical measures that underlined the participation of employees and labor in decision-making as a prerequisite for the sustainability of democratic rule. In light of the current attacks on democratic institutions, we believe that now is the time to re-think what role the improvement and expansion of employee participation in industrial and economic decision-making might play in the fight for the future of our democracies.
Today, growing fears of democratic erosion in the political sphere happen to follow on the heels of a general decline of economic democracy over the last decades. For this reason, we want to explore the role that ‘democracy’ has played in the thinking, organizing, and lived experiences of past and present-day individuals and movements pushing for greater control over individual workplaces, whole industries, and entire economies. Instead of concentrating on how workplace democracy has impacted economic performance, productivity, and employee satisfaction–the focus of much previous research–we want to go to the heart of our subject and ask: whether, how, and why democracy at work strengthens and improves democracy in a variety of other social spheres, from families and civic organizations to local communities, the nation state and the international arena?
Panel 1: Workers as Decision-Makers: Syndicalism, Trade Unionism & Guild Socialism
Chair: Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk
Transitions to free labour and the continuities of coercion in empire.
Chair: Aurélie Andry
Since at least the end of the 18th century, social reformers, labor leaders, organized workers, and political movements have promoted democratic control of the workplace, industry, and economic life as a crucial precondition not only for social justice and material security but also for political democracy more generally. In so doing, they have highlighted that when workers and employees lack effective voice at work and control over the labor process, their political participation and formal political equality is seriously curtailed more broadly. Indeed, many have argued that political democracy will fail to materialize or, where it existed, soon experience ‘backsliding’ should democratic rights over work, industry, and the economy be withheld or decline. Against this backdrop, intellectuals, political and trade union actors, and social movements proposed a wide range of theories as well as practical measures that underlined the participation of employees and labor in decision-making as a prerequisite for the sustainability of democratic rule. In light of the current attacks on democratic institutions, we believe that now is the time to re-think what role the improvement and expansion of employee participation in industrial and economic decision-making might play in the fight for the future of our democracies.
Today, growing fears of democratic erosion in the political sphere happen to follow on the heels of a general decline of economic democracy over the last decades. For this reason, we want to explore the role that ‘democracy’ has played in the thinking, organizing, and lived experiences of past and present-day individuals and movements pushing for greater control over individual workplaces, whole industries, and entire economies. Instead of concentrating on how workplace democracy has impacted economic performance, productivity, and employee satisfaction–the focus of much previous research–we want to go to the heart of our subject and ask: whether, how, and why democracy at work strengthens and improves democracy in a variety of other social spheres, from families and civic organizations to local communities, the nation state and the international arena? For this purpose, we are proposing a series of panels that go beyond the historical gaze of our working group’s previous activities.
Panel 5: From Self-Management to the Managed Self: Autonomy and Ideology in Late-20th-Century France, Yugoslavia & California
Chair: Page Campos, Eduard
eduardpage@ub.edu
Universitat de Barcelona
This session examines maritime labour through the unifying concept of risk, understood as a fundamental dimension that has shaped the lives of sailors and coastal workers over the centuries. Exposure to danger defined maritime occupations and encouraged the existence of constant mobilities that structured both individual professional careers and labouring communities. The ways in which these risks were managed, negotiated, and institutionalized lie at the core of the session, which brings together case studies on ordinary sailors, fishermen, shipbuilders, whalers, and pilots.
The session explores different individual trajectories, collective pathways, and long-term structural transformations, both in Atlantic and Mediterranean Europe. Maritime labour unfolded at the intersection between precariousness and opportunity: careers were deeply conditioned by exposure to risk and the search for protection, but also by the possibilities of advancement, specialization, and recognition within changing hierarchies of maritime service. The session also emphasizes concrete labour processes and the organizational forms that structured them. Systems of remuneration, contractual arrangements, and professional training functioned not only as economic or technical devices, but also as mechanisms to distribute risk, manage uncertainty, and structure social relations. The transformation of these processes—whether through changes in fishing techniques, the shift from sail to steam, or the advent of containerization—reveals how maritime work was repeatedly reconfigured.
Adopting a long-term perspective makes it possible to observe both continuities and ruptures. Issues such as labour precariousness, juridical particularities, or relationships with different national navies appear as persistent features of maritime work. At the same time, profound changes in organization and technology transformed labour conditions, professional identities, and collective solidarities, while also reshaping the very language used to describe and regulate maritime activities. The session invites reflection on how human communities have sought to manage the intrinsic uncertainty of the maritime world.
Chair: Stryker, Julia Connell
j.connellstryker@gmail.com
Memorial University of Newfoundland
This session examines the intersections of maritime labour, medicine, material culture, and the emotional lives of seafarers, passengers, and migrants in the age of sail and steam. Drawing on the underexplored records of the British merchant marine—particularly logbooks and death inventories—it foregrounds the ways in which health, illness, and mortality were experienced, treated, and documented at sea. These sources, produced within the rigid bureaucratic frameworks of nineteenth- and twentieth-century maritime law, nonetheless preserve fragments of lived experience: of physical suffering, precarious remedies, personal belongings, and the emotions they evoked.
The panel consider the spectrum of care, neglect, and improvisation that defined maritime medicine, as well as the affective weight of death, loss, and remembrance at sea. By linking histories of medicine with material culture and the emotional dimensions of maritime work, the panel underscores how seafaring was not only a technical and economic enterprise but also a profoundly human experience marked by risk, resilience, and the fragile traces of ordinary lives. In doing so, it situates the maritime archive as a uniquely rich site for reconstructing the health, cultures, and emotions of labourers who operated within—and often on the margins of—the global economy.
