Micro-Spatial Histories of Global Labour

Description

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. The result is a highly readable volume that addresses key theoretical and methodological questions in historiography. Front Matter ....Pages i-xxiii Micro-Spatial Histories of Labour: Towards a New Global History (Christian G. De Vito, Anne Gerritsen)....Pages 1-28 Moving Hands: Types and Scales of Labour Mobility in the Late Medieval Eastern Mediterranean (1200–1500 CE) (Ekaterini Mitsiou, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller)....Pages 29-67 Catholic Missions and Native Subaltern Workers: Connected Micro-Histories of Labour from India and Brazil, ca. 1545–1560 (Giuseppe Marcocci)....Pages 69-93 Prisoners of War, Captives or Slaves? The Christian Prisoners of Tunis and La Goleta in 1574 (Cecilia Tarruell)....Pages 95-122 Making the Place Work: Managing Labour in Early Modern China (Anne Gerritsen)....Pages 123-145 Woollen Manufacturing in the Early Modern Mediterranean (1550–1630): Changing Labour Relations in a Commodity Chain (Andrea Caracausi)....Pages 147-169 Connected Singularities: Convict Labour in Late Colonial Spanish America (1760s–1800) (Christian G. De Vito)....Pages 171-202 Keeping in Touch: Migrant Workers’ Trans-Local Ties in Early Modern Italy (Eleonora Canepari)....Pages 203-227 Spatiality and the Mobility of Labour in Pre-Unification Italy (Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries) (Laura Di Fiore, Nicoletta Rolla)....Pages 229-260 Oil and Labour: The Pivotal Position of Persian Oil in the First World War and the Question of Transnational Labour Dependency (Touraj Atabaki)....Pages 261-289 ‘On the Unwary and the Weak’: Fighting Peonage in Wartime United States: Connections, Categories, Scales (Nicola Pizzolato)....Pages 291-312 From Traces to Carpets: Unravelling Labour Practices in the Mines of Sierra Leone (Lorenzo D’Angelo)....Pages 313-342 Back Matter ....Pages 343-357