Colonial and postcolonial port cities in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions functioned as crucial hubs in the commodity flows that accompanied the emergence and expansion of global capitalism. They did so by bringing together laboring populations of many different backgrounds and statuses – legally free or semi-free wage laborers, soldiers, sailors, and the self-employed, indentured servants, convicts, and slaves. Focusing on the period from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, a crucial moment in the establishment of the world market, the transformation of colonial states, and the reorganization of labor and labor migration on a transoceanic scale, the contributions in this special issue address the consequences of the presence of these “motley crews” on and around the docks and the neighborhoods that stretched behind them. The introduction places the articles within the context of the development of the field of Global Labor History more generally. It argues that the dense daily interaction that took place in port cities makes them an ideal vantage point from which to investigate the consequences of the “simultaneity” of different labor relations for questions such as the organization of the work process under developing capitalism, the emergence of new forms of social control, the impact of forced and free migration on class formation, and the role of social diversity in shaping different forms of group and class solidarity. The introduction also discusses the significance of the articles presented in this special issue for three prevailing but problematic dichotomies in labor historiography: the sharp borders drawn between so-called free and unfree labor, between the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, and the pre-modern and modern eras.

Studies of indigenous workers’ resistance focus largely on rural workers. In contrast, this article examines indigenous workers’ dissent in an industrialized and largely urbanized setting – that of Māori meat processing workers in Aotearoa New Zealand. I argue that far from being passive victims of colonization and capitalism, Māori meatworkers played an often vital role in the generally extensive informal and formal labour unrest that occurred in the meat industry during the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. However, Māori meatworkers’ resistance and solidarity was not universal, but instead varied significantly, both spatially and temporally. The dissent and solidarity that occurred were often a product of the multi-ethnic informal work groups that existed in many slaughterhouses. These workplace-whānau, in which Māori played a pivotal role, functioned similar to extended family networks on the killing floor. Workplace-whānau represented a significant intertwining of indigeneity and class. Nevertheless, as they were often based on masculine bonds, they frequently excluded female workers (including Māori women).

In the spring of 1797, when French invasion appeared likely, the Spithead and Nore mutinies successively immobilized the two Royal Navy fleets responsible for home defence. The Spithead mutineers gained more pay and greater food rations for all Royal Navy sailors, and a general pardon for themselves. The Nore mutiny ended in collapse, courts martial, and the execution of approximately twenty-eight prominent mutineers. In their scale and potential danger, these fleet mutinies rank among the most serious manifestations of collective resistance in eighteenth-century Britain. In complexity, they far exceeded single-ship mutinies like the Bounty or Hermione. The mutineers deliberately subverted symbols of the legitimate rule of officers and deployed them in support of their own rival regime. “Counter-theatre” allowed the mutineer leaders to perpetuate their rule with minimal recourse to coercion by combining familiar symbols of naval order, new mutineer power structures, and sailors’ traditions of resistance. As such, the mutinies speak to wider literatures: to histories of the age of revolutions, to the revolutionary Atlantic, and to histories of popular protest and resistance.

Although a crucial element of imperial architecture, non-metropolitan penal colonies remain relatively understudied, compared with the richness of historical scholarship on modern prison systems in Western Europe and its offshoots. Complementing the perspective chosen in the recent International Review of Social History Special Issue 26, “Transportation, Deportation and Exile: Perspectives from the Colonies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”, the four articles in this Special Theme propose an additional angle of investigation of the role of convicts in the incorporation of new territories into colonial empires. The authors place sites of punishment, rather than flows of convicts, at the core of their reflection, and provide a close-up analysis of circulations of information and people across the borders of penal sites on various scales: local, trans-regional, and international. They problematize the notion of “border”, and consider it as a vantage point that leads to a new conceptualization of the penal colony as a system that expands in its surroundings and, in turn, assimilates external political, social, and economic stimuli. Relying on several distinct methodological approaches, the authors foreground the specificities of colonial punishment and demonstrate how punishment became part of the creation and maintenance of power inequalities between the colonies and the metropoles.

The struggle by women workers has largely been overlooked in the historiography of trade unions in South Africa during apartheid. This article analyses the strategies of the National Union of Textile Workers (NUTW) to end wage discrimination against women as part of the struggle against poverty wages in the South African textile industry during the last years of apartheid, c.1980 to 1987. The first South African equal pay legislation came into force in 1981, covering the minimum wages of just a small number of the workforce; it was not until 1984 that legislation set minimum wages for all workers. Before the legal reform, new domestic and foreign political opportunities helped the NUTW to create new mobilization structures and offered possibilities to connect levels of scale and make local action visible at home and abroad. Global framing of wage equality combined with a translocal repertoire was used in the cases of multinational companies to make relevant connections between levels of scale (international, transnational, national, and local) to add to the visibility of the violations. After the reform of labour legislation in South Africa, the union made reference to domestic legislation, but translocal activism remained important in bringing foreign companies to the local negotiating table. Drawing on these cases, the NUTW developed a national strategy to make wage setting more transparent across the entire industry, adding to the visibility of all forms of wage discrimination.

Early modern globalization depended on labour-intensive production and transport of global commodities. Throughout the Dutch Empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries labour was mobilized through a variety of different labour relations (especially casual, contract, slave, and corvée labour). The mobilization of these workers often entailed movements over short, but more often long, distances. Port cities were crucial nodal points connecting various sites of production and circuits of distribution. Furthermore, these ports were themselves also important working environments (ranging from transport and storage, to production and security). As a result, workers from various regional, social, and cultural backgrounds worked in the same environments and were confronted with each other – as well as with the legal and disciplining regimes of early modern urban and corporate authorities. This article studies the development of labour relations in the port work of the Dutch Asian empire, looking at the mobilization and control of labour for dock work (loading and unloading of ships) and transport in its urban surroundings. It will analyse and compare the development of the need for labour, the employment of different sets of labour relations, and the mechanisms of control that developed from it. As the largest trading company active in Asia (up to the 1750s), the case of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) is crucial in understanding the impact of early imperial and capitalist development in changing global social and labour relations.

The controversy around Bruce Gilley's article “The Case for Colonialism” has drawn global attention to a stream of revisionist claims and visions on the history of colonialism that has emerged in academia and in the media in recent years. Authors such as Nigel Biggar in the UK, Niall Ferguson in the USA, and Pieter Emmer in the Netherlands, have all published similarly revisionist claims about colonialism, arguing that postcolonial guilt and political correctness blind the majority of their colleagues to the positive side of the colonial project. Their argument chimes with wider societal trends, transforming the revisionist defenders of empire into heroes of a reinvigorated nationalist right within and beyond academia. The public influence attained by these approaches to colonialism requires historians to expose the deep methodological flaws, misreading of historical facts, and misrepresentations of prior scholarship that characterize the writings of this emerging revisionist trend. It is for this reason that the Editorial Committee of the International Review of Social History (IRSH) has decided to devote its first ever Virtual Special Issue to labour history's case against colonialism. This article, also an introduction to the Virtual Special Issue, sifts through the logical implications of the claims made by Gilley and like-minded scholars, providing both a contextualization and a rebuttal of their arguments. After assessing the long absence of colonial labour relations from the field of interest of labour historians and the pages of the IRSH itself, this article shows the centrality of a critique of colonialism to labour history's global turn in the 1990s. Using a selection of articles on colonial labour history from the IRSH's own archive, the article not only reconstructs “labour history's case against colonialism”, but also shows why labour history's critical insights into the nature of colonialism should be deepened and extended, not discarded.

The article explores the history of the Employees’ State Insurance Act of 1948 (ESI), a law enacted in the first year of Indian independence. Global trends in social policy had influenced debates on a social insurance for Indian workers since the 1920s. Transformations of Indian industry, World War II, the post-war crisis, and the emerging economic policy of the postcolonial State then created conditions for legislation. Just as the international welfare discourse, Indian contributions included, converged on social welfare as a universal citizen right, the regulatory content of the health insurance scheme devised for India diverged from this normative consensus: the ESI Act remained strictly employment-based, contributed to an emerging structure of graded entitlements, and to the hardening of boundaries between what would later be called “formal” and “informal” labour. Simultaneously, it also generated horizons of expectation that continue to inform labour struggles.

The article analyses the development of agricultural penal colonies in Italy, focusing on their margins and borders. The first section focuses on Italy's frontier with overseas territories that was assumed in discussion of the location of penal colonies following Italian unification. The article also highlights some of the factors behind the effective lack of deportation and transportation of Italians overseas. The second section explores Italy's largest agricultural penal colony, Castiadas, in Sardinia and, more generally, the borders between convicts and free citizens and between penal territory and free territory. My thesis is that penal colonies were partly designed to discipline populations in adjacent territories and that their economic and social organization served as a development model for rural Italy more widely.

This article considers how enslaved salvage divers cooperated and conspired with slaveholders and white employers to salvage shipwrecks and often smuggle recovered goods into homeports, permitting them to exchange their expertise for semi-independent lives of privileged exploitation. Knowing harsh treatment could preclude diving, white salvagers cultivated reciprocal relationships with divers, promoting arduousness by avoiding coercive discipline while nurturing a sense of mutual obligation arising from collective responsibilities and material rewards. Enslaved salvagers were, in several important ways, treated like free, wage-earning men. They were well fed, receiving daily allowances of fresh meat. Most resided in seaports, were hired out, and received equal shares of recovered goods, allowing many to purchase their freedom and that of family members. Divers produced spectacular amounts of wealth for their mother countries, owners, and colonial governments, especially in the maritime colonies of Bermuda, the Bahamas, and Cayman Islands. Their expertise was not confined to maritime colonies. Even as plantation slavery was taking root during the mid-seventeenth century, salvage divers provided an important source of income for planter-merchants.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the two convict-built European settler colonial projects in Oceania, French New Caledonia and British Australia, were geographically close yet ideologically distant. Observers in the Australian colonies regularly characterized French colonization as backward, inhumane, and uncivilized, often pointing to the penal colony in New Caledonia as evidence. Conversely, French commentators, while acknowledging that Britain's transportation of convicts to Australia had inspired their own penal colonial designs in the South Pacific, insisted that theirs was a significantly different venture, built on modern, carefully preconceived methods. Thus, both sides engaged in an active practice of denying comparability; a practice that historians, in neglecting the interconnections that existed between Australia and New Caledonia, have effectively perpetuated. This article draws attention to some of the strategies of spatial and temporal distance deployed by the Australian colonies in relation to the bagne in New Caledonia and examines the nation-building ends that these strategies served. It outlines the basic context and contours of the policy of convict transportation for the British and the French and analyses discursive attempts to emphasize the distinctions between Australia and New Caledonia. Particular focus is placed on the moral panic in Australian newspapers about the alleged dangerous proximity of New Caledonia to the east coast of Australia. I argue that this moral panic arose at a time when Britain's colonies in Australia, in the process of being granted autonomy and not yet unified as a federated nation, sought recognition as reputable settlements of morally virtuous populations. The panic simultaneously emphasized the New Caledonian penal colony's geographical closeness to and ideological distance from Australia, thereby enabling Australia's own penal history to be safely quarantined in the past.

This article examines the various experiences of slavery and freedom of female household workers in the Dutch and English East India Company (VOC and EIC, respectively) ports in Bengal in the early eighteenth century. Enslaved household workers in Bengal came from various Asian societies dotting the Indian Ocean littoral. Once manumitted, they entered the fold of the free Christian or Portuguese communities of the settlements. The most common, if not the only, occupation of the women of these communities was household or caregiving labour. The patriarchy of the settlements was defined by the labour and subjection of these women. Yet, domestic service to VOC/EIC officials only partially explains their subjectivity. This article identifies the agency of enslaved and women of free Christian or Portuguese communities in their efforts to resist or bypass the institution of the European household in the settlements. These efforts ranged from murdering their slave masters to creating independent businesses to the formation of sexual liaisons and parental/fraternal/sororal relationships disregarding the approval or needs of their settlement masters.

The International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) was a radical trans-Atlantic network for the propagation of black proletarian internationalism, established by the Red International of Labour Unions in 1928. Its key mastermind was James W. Ford, an African American communist labour union activist who was in charge of the organization and its operations until the autumn of 1931. This article critically highlights Ford's ambitions as well as the early phase of the organization. Both in terms of its agenda and objective as well as in its outreach among black workers in the Black Atlantic, the ITUCNW and its main propagators stressed the “class-before-race” argument of the Comintern rather than the pan-Africanist “race-before-class” approach. This is not surprising as the ITUCNW was one of the organizations that had been established when the Comintern and the RILU had started to apply the “class-against-class” doctrine, which left no room for cooperation between communists and radical pan-Africanists.

Global history seems to be the history for our times. Huge syntheses such as the seven-volume Cambridge World History or the six-volume A History of the World suggest the field has come to fruition. Robert Moore, in his contribution to the book under review, The Prospect of Global History, is quite confident in this respect: if there is a single reason for “the rise of world history”, it is “the collapse of every alternative paradigm” (pp. 84–85). As early as 2012, the journal Itinerario published an interview with David Armitage with the title “Are We All Global Historians Now?” That may have been provocative but Armitage obliged by claiming “the hegemony of national historiography is over”.

Peer Vries's eloquent review essay “The Prospects of Global History: Personal Reflections of an Old Believer” sees the chance to review The Prospect of Global History as an opportunity to champion Global History as a discipline and voice his concerns regarding what, in his view, have become possible abuses or deviancies in the practice of the discipline. His long-standing status as one of the founding fathers of the discipline and of its consecrated Journal of Global History places him in a position of undisputable authority as an old believer, while his far-reaching knowledge of current debates in Global and World History and his poignant views, reflected in the review essay, are trademarks of his work.

Starting from an incident in the colonial port city of Paramaribo in the autumn of 1750 in which, according to the Dutch governor Mauricius, many of the proper barriers separating rich and poor, men and women, adults and children, white citizens and black slaves were crossed, this article traces some of the complexities of everyday social control in colonial Suriname. As gateways for the trade in commodities and the movement of people, meeting points for free and unfree labourers, and administrative centres for emerging colonial settlements, early modern port cities became focal points for policing interaction across racial and social boundaries. Much of the literature on the relationship between slavery and race focuses on the plantation as “race-making institution” and the planter class as the immediate progenitors of “racial capitalism”. Studies of urban slavery, on the other hand, have emphasized the greater possibilities of social contact between blacks, mestizos, and whites of various social status in the bustling port cities of the Atlantic. This article attempts to understand practices of racialization and control in the port city of Paramaribo not by contrasting the city with its plantation environment, but by underlining the connections between the two social settings that together shaped colonial geography. The article focuses on everyday activities in Paramaribo (dancing, working, drinking, arguing) that reveal the extent of contact between slaves and non-slaves. The imposition of racialized forms of repression that set one group against the other, frequently understood primarily as a means to justify the apparent stasis of the plantation system with its rigid internal divisions, in practice often functioned precisely to fight the pernicious effects of mobility in mixed social contexts.

Revolutions need people. How do these people connect with each other, and how can the revolutionary message pass from one person to another? This article aims to answer these questions by examining the revolutionaries who participated in the Finnish Civil War on the rebellious Red side in 1918. We have chosen Red women from a particular district in Finland in order to analyse their connections and the networks created by membership of the labour movement, place of residence, and kinship. In order to see the layers of those connections, we utilize historical social network analysis rooted in digital history. This allows us to observe the significance and impact of regional, social networks and improves our understanding of structural factors affecting the intra-group dynamics among these revolutionary women. Our results support the claim that historical network analysis is a suitable tool for exploring interaction patterns and social structures in the past, and to gain new insights into historical phenomena.

In the late 1930s, three mobile penal camps were established in the French colony of Senegal in order to assemble convicts with long sentences and compel them to work outside the prison. Senegalese penal camps were thus a place both of confinement and of circulation for convicts who constantly moved out of the prison to work on the roads. This article argues that the penal camps were spaces of multiple and antagonistic forms of mobility that blurred the divide between the “inside” and the “outside” world. The mobility of penal camps played a key role in the hazardous living and working conditions that penal labourers experienced. However, convict labourers were not unresponsive and a range of protests emerged, from breakout to self-mutilation. These individual and intentional forms of mobility and immobility threw a spanner in the works of the day-to-day functioning of Senegalese penal camps and, more broadly, in the colonial project of mise en valeur.