Micro-Spatial Histories of Global Labour

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.

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.