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This volume suggests a new way of doing global history. Instead of offering a sweeping and generalizing overview of the past, we propose a 'micro-spatial' approach, combining micro-history with the concept of space. A focus on primary sources and awareness of the historical discontinuities and unevennesses characterizes the global history that emerges here. We use labour as our lens in this volume. The resulting micro-spatial history of labour addresses the management and recruitment of labour, its voluntary and coerced spatial mobility, its political perception and representation and the workers' own agency and social networks. The individual chapters are written by contributors whose expertise covers the late medieval Eastern Mediterranean to present-day Sierra Leone, through early modern China and Italy, eighteenth-century Cuba and the Malvinas/Falklands, the journeys of a missionary between India and Brazil and those of Christian captives across the Ottoman empire and Spain. Theresult is a highly readable volume that addresses key theoretical and methodological questions in historiography.
Chapter 7 is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.
List of contents
Preface by Anne Gerritsen and Christian G. De Vito.- 1. Micro-Spatial Histories of Labour: Towards a New Global History by Christian G. De Vito and Anne Gerritsen.- 2. Moving Hands: Types and Scales of Labour Mobility in the Late Medieval Eastern Mediterranean, 1200-1500 CE by Ekaterini Mitsiou and Johannes Preiser-Kapeller.- 3. Catholic Missions and Native Subaltern Workers: Connected Micro-Histories of Labour from India and Brazil, 1545-1560 by Giuseppe Marcocci.- 4. Prisoners of War, Captives, or Slaves? The Return of the Christian Prisoners in Tunis and La Goleta in 1574 by Cecilia Tarruell.- 5. Making the Place Work: Managing Labour in Early Modern China by Anne Gerritsen.- 6. Woollen Manufacturing in Early Modern Italy, 1550-1630: Changing Labour Relations in a Commodity Chain by Andrea Caracausi.- 7. Connected Singularities: Convict Labour in Late Colonial Spanish America, 1760s-1800 by Christian G. De Vito.- 8. Keeping in Touch: Migrant Workers' Translocal Ties in Early ModernItaly by Eleonora Canepari.- 9. Spatiality and Mobility of Labour in Pre-Unification Italy by Laura Di Fiore and Nicoletta Rolla.- 10. The Pivotal Position of Persian Oil in the First World War and the Question of Transnational Labour Dependency by Touraj Atabaki.- 11. American Peonage during the New Deal: Connections, Categories, Scales, 1935-1952 by Nicola Pizzolato.- 12. From Traces to Carpets: Unravelling Labour Practices in the Mines of Sierra Leone by Lorenzo D'Angelo.
About the author
Christian G. De Vito is Research Associate at the University of Leicester, UK, and Lecturer at the Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He has published extensively on global labour history and has co-edited a volume on Global Convict Labour. His on-going research is on convict transportation in the Spanish empire.
Anne Gerritsen is Professor of History at the University of Warwick, UK, where she has directed the Global History and Culture Centre. She has published on global material culture, the history of design, and Chinese history, especially the history of porcelain manufactures, but also local religion and gender.
Summary
Explores the potential of combining micro-history and global history
Chapters include examples from the middle ages to the present day, across North America, South America, Asia, Africa and Europe
Questions macro-analytical approaches to global labour history, both addressing the issue of spatiality and prompting a re-evaluation of methodological and theoretical strategies
