Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction / Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen -- Working for Diamonds from the 16th to the 20th Century / Karin Hofmeester -- Green Plants into Blue Cakes: Working for Wages in Colonial Bengal’s Indigo Industry / Willem van Schendel -- Dak Roads, Dak Runners and the Re-ordering of Communication Networks / Chitra Joshi -- Production Systems and Forms of Labor Control in the Javanese Cigarette Industry; 1920s–1930s / Ratna Saptari -- Selling in the Shadows: Peddlers and Hawkers in Early Modern Europe / Danielle van den Heuvel -- The Worst Class of Workers: Migration, Labor Relations and Living Strategies of Prostitutes around 1900 / Lex Heerma van Voss -- Fighting for a Living in Europe and Asia / Erik-Jan Zürcher -- White Collar Workers of the VOC in Amsterdam, 1602–1795 / Karel Davids -- The Career Ladder to the Top of the Dutch East India Company: Could Foreigners also Become Commanders and Junior Merchants? / Jaap R. Bruijn and Femme S. Gaastra -- Demographic Change and Migration Flows in Holland between 1500 and 1800 / Jan Luiten van Zanden and Maarten Prak -- The Economic Contribution of Labor Migrants in the European Maritime Labor Market of the Long Eighteenth Century / Jelle van Lottum -- Income Differentials, Institutions, and Religion: Working in the Rhineland or Pennsylvania in the Eighteenth Century / Richard W. Unger -- Labor Laws in Western Europe, 13th–16th Centuries: Patterns of Political and Socio-economic Rationality / Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly -- The First “Male Breadwinner Economy”? Dutch Married Women’s and Children’s Paid and Unpaid Work in Western Europe Perspective, c. 1600–1900 / Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk -- Wage Labor and the Household Economy: A Russian Perspective, 1600–2000 / Gijs Kessler -- Cane Sugar and Unlimited Supplies of Labor in the 1930s: New Thinking and the Origin of Development Economics / Ulbe Bosma -- Unwritten Autobiography: Labor History Libraries before World War 1 / Jaap Kloosterman -- Notes on Contributors -- Tabula Gratulatoria -- Index.

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This collection of seventeen essays takes its inspiration from the scholarly achievements of the Dutch historian Jan Lucassen. They reflect a central theme in his research: the history of labor. The essays deal with five major themes: the production of specific commodities or services (diamonds, indigo, cigarettes, mail delivery by road runners); occupational groups (informal street vendors, prostitutes, soldiers, white-collar workers in the Dutch East India Company, VOC); geographical and social mobility (career opportunities on non-Dutch officers in the VOC, immigration into early-modern Holland; the influence of migrants on labor productivity; income differentials as migration incentives); contexts of labor relations (late medieval labor laws, subsistence labor and female paid labor, Russian peasant-migrant laborers, diverging political trajectories of cane-sugar industries); and the origins of labor-history libraries and archives.

Description based on print version record.