Work: A Global History

Catalog description

What is work and who is a worker? The industrial male wage worker stubbornly persists in historical and cultural imaginaries of what work under capitalism looks like. Yet we know that most work – and most people who work – have not fit into this narrow conception. This course examines the history of work and workers in a predominantly capitalist world economy from roughly the early nineteenth century until the late twentieth century. Taking a global perspective with a particular focus on geographies in the Global South, topics will include studies of enslavement, agrarian labor, coerced labor, informal labor, migrant labor, wage-work, labor under state socialism, reproductive labor, and the relationship between workers and political movements. We will begin with various theoretical considerations of work and labor under capitalism and then move into a roughly chronological narrative.