The Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations
The first main goal of the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations is to provide statistical insights into the global distribution of all types of labour relations (systematically including women's and child labour) in five historical cross-sections: 1500, 1650, 1800, 1900, [Africa: 1950], and 2000. The second main goal will be the explanation of signalled shifts in labour relations world wide.
During the first phase of the project (2007-2012), made possible by generous funding from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung in Düsseldorf, and additional funding from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the IISH, a large group of international scholars met during workshops, worked together online and developed a large number of datasets containing data on the occurrence of all types of labour relations in all parts of the world during five cross-sections in time, thereby also developing a new taxonomy (update October 2015) of labour relations based on a shared set of definitions. A handy visualisation tool, the treemap helps you to interpret the data quickly. Without the enthusiasm and not to mention the many hours of production of our collaborators who are the beating heart of this collaboratory, the project would not have been possible.
A generous grant from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung enabled the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour to continue its major project. In the second phase of the project (2013-2019) we hope to analyse major shifts in labour relations worldwide on the basis of a number explanatory factors:
- Political change
- Economic institutional change
- Changes in family and household patterns
- Mechanisms of shifts in and out of self-employment
For more information, please see the abbreviated version of the project description.
Update taxonomy:
- Taxonomy v.2015
- Taxonomy in Chinese; definitions in Chinese.
- Karin Hofmeester, Jan Lucassen, Leo Lucassen, Rombert Stapel and Richard Zijdeman, "The Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, 1500-2000: Background, Set-Up, Taxonomy, and Applications" (2015). This document also includes the changes and new definitions of the taxonomy.
- Updated Codebook and Manual
- Blank databases: Excel 2007+; Excel 2003; Access 2003. These databases were designed to maximize the uniformity and interoperability and to minimalize the chance of errors when entering the data. Users of the Excel files get direct feedback on the validity of their data entry.
- Guideline for methodological paper (not updated; version 2011)
Workshops:
- On 25 and 26 June 2018 a workshop on labour relations in China in the 20th century was held at the IISH in Amsterdam. See the program.
- On 15-16 December 2016 a workshop on shifts in and out of self-employment was organised at the IISH in Amsterdam. See the program.
- On 25-26 June 2016 a workshop introducing the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations and Recent Research on Industrial Relations in 20th-century China was organized at the East China Normal University in Shanghai. See the program.
- On 24-25 June 2015 a workshop on Labour Relations in Portugal and the Lusophone World was organized in Lisbon, Portugal. For the program: click here.
- On 12-13 December 2014 we organised our third thematic workshop "Changes in family and demography". See the program.
- On 26-27 September 2014 we organised our second thematic workshop "Economic institutional change". See the program.
- On 7 and 8 February 2014 the first of a new set of workshops was held in Amsterdam: "Political Change as a Determinant of Shifting Labour Relations". A preliminary program can be found here.
- On 24 and 25 June 2013 a thematic workshop was held in Estoril on how archeology and historical linguistics, geography and anthropology can help us gain insights in labour relations in sub-Saharan Africa, see the program.
- On 22 June 2013 the fourth workshop of the Lusophone workgroup of the Collaboratory was held in Lisbon, see the program.
Sources:
Recently the IISH acquired a considerable amount of book volumes containing census data from 139 countries in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Oceania, Africa and Latin America from 1880 until 1980. For more information see the IISH website an Excel sheet listing all volumes can be found in the IISH Catalogue.
Selection of recent publications:
- Karin Hofmeester and Pim de Zwart) (eds), Colonialism, Institutional Change and Shifts in Global Labour Relations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2018, Open Access)
- Marcelo Badaró Mattos, Paulo Terra, Raquel Varela (eds), História das relações de trabalho: Brasil e Portugal em perspectiva global (Rio de Janairo: Consequência Editora, 2017).
- Karin Hofmeester and with Marcel van der Linden (eds), Handbook Global History of Work (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018).
- Karin Hofmeester: ‘Types of Labour Relations: Introductory Remarks’, in Ibid, pp. 329-340
- Karin Hofmeester and Elise van Nederveen-Meerkerk) (eds), Family, Demography and Labour Relations , Special Section of The History of The Family, vol 22, no 1, March 2017.
- Karin Hofmeester and Christine Moll-Murata, 'Big Questions and Big Data: A Reply from the Global Collaboratory', in: International Review of Social History, vol. 61, no 1, April 2017, pp. 123-128.
- Karin Hofmeester, Gijs Kessler and Christine Moll-Murata) (eds), Conquerors, Employers and Arbiters: States and Shifts in Labour Relations, 1500-2000 (externe link) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) International Review of Social History, Special Issue 24.
- Christian de Vito and Alex Lichtenstein, ‘Writing a Global History of Convict Labour’, in: idem (eds). Global Convict Labour (Leiden & Boston 2015), pp. vii-xviii.
- Marcelo Badaró Mattos et al (eds), Relações Laborais em Portugal e no Mundo Lusófono. Historia e Demografia. Lisbon: Edições Colibri 2014.
- History in Africa with a special section on Labour Relations on Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Karin Hofmeester, Jan Lucasssen and Filipa Ribeiro-da Silva (2014).
- Jan Lucassen and Rombert Stapel, Labour relations in India 1500 now Paper for Staff lunch seminar social & economic history, Utrecht 27 February 2014.
- Richard Zijdeman and Rombert Stapel, Describing and explaining shifts in labour relations using a micro-macro approach DH Benelux presentation, The Hague 2014.
- Diálogos with a special section on Labour Relations in the Lusophone world (2013).
- Publications and Projects on Labour Relations from our Collaboratory Colleague Dmitry Khitrov (2013).
- Jan Lucassen, Outlines of a History of Labour. Largely based on the results of the Collaboratory (2013).
- Erik-Jan Zürcher (ed.), Fighting for A Living. A Comparative History of Military Labour 1500-2000 (Amsterdam, 2013).
- Gijs Kessler, “Wage Labor and the Household Economy: a Russian Perspective, 1600-2000”, in Marcel Van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (eds), Working on Labor. Essays in Honor of Jan Lucassen, Studies in Global Social History, 9 (Leiden & Boston, 2012), pp. 353-369.
- Women's Work in Early Modern Europe 23-24 September 2010, Jesus College, Cambridge Proceedings.
Spin off projects:
- The Gerda Henkel Stiftung will fund a project to collect data from the Royal Inspection of 1683 in Bolivia. The data will be analysed, in line with the taxonomy of the Collaboratory, and entered into a database. The project is coordinated by Raquel Gil Montero, other participants are Paula Zagalsky and Lía Guillermina Oliveto from Argentina.
- The Lusophone subgroup received funding from the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology for a project entitled ‘Labour relations in Portugal and the Lusophone world 1800-2000: continuity and change’, based on the Collaboratory, but adding more cross-sections in time.
- Erdem Kabadayı received funding for a project entitled ‘An introduction to the occupational history of Turkey 1840-1940’, using the taxonomy as analytical tool.