Cloth: 978-90-485-7370-7

eISBN: 978-90-485-7495-7 (ePub)

eISBN: 978-90-485-7494-0 (PDF)

Formalized wage labor is often presented as the focus, if not the very core, of modern European labor history. The current volume challenges this widespread narrative by focusing on multiple forms of informal work in all parts of Europe. The chapters cover key fields of informal labor—agricultural, domestic, temporary, service, and sex work—during the period between 1870 and 1970, which is usually portrayed as an era of labor formalization. By demonstrating that informal work was neither a temporary nor a residual phenomenon, the contributors to this book render it visible as a constitutive factor of labor and labor politics in European history. In doing so, the volume aims to redraw the contours of labor history in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe while stimulating further thinking about a de-provincialized global history of work.

Sibylle Marti is a SNSF Assistant Professor at the University of Bern. Her research is situated at the intersection of the global history of work, the history of knowledge, and the history of capitalism. She is currently working on her second book about the history of informal work since 1970.Christof Dejung is a Professor in Modern History at the University of Bern. He is the coeditor of The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire (2019) and the author of The Primitive Within: The Entanglements Between Anthropology and Folklore Studies in Germany, 1850s–1930s (forthcoming).

Work and Labor – Transdisciplinary Studies for the 21st Century , Modern, Europe, Political Science, History

License: OA CC BY-NC-ND