GoingToMeet

This conference has two main aims: first, to contribute to the development of a transnational labour history, and, second, to explore the connections between, and social imaginations of, different types of workers, working class movements and types of work. Labour history has usually been written as a series of national histories, as the history of industrial workers, and as part of the history of the modern period. The transnational turn in labour history has led to a closer scrutiny of relations between labour in different regions of the globe, but also a broadening of our conceptions of labour history: a global perspective on labour history raises questions about such basic conceptions as ‘labour’, ‘work’ and ‘labour movements’. This conference aims to engage with the historiography of labour in ‘emerging countries’, and help develop a transnational labour historiography.

In taking ‘labour crossings’ as our theme, we are interested in a wide range of ‘crossings’: between time periods, between regions and continents, between types of work, between waged work and domestic work, between free and non-free work, between different imaginations and imagined worlds, between religion and labour, between unions, politics and other types of movements, between race and labour, between gender and class, between economies and environments, between work and leisure, between consumption and production, between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’, between industrial and pre-industrial capitalism, between the modern and the pre-modern worlds, and between intellectual disciplines and traditions.