What is the day-to-day reality for workers in various parts of the world, and how was it in the past? How do they work today, and how did they work in the past? Did workers ever protest? If so, how? These and many other questions comprise the field of the global history of work - a young discipline that is introduced with this handbook.
Want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness: first recognized together in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, these are the focus of the Social Question. In 1942 William Beveridge called them the “giant evils” while diagnosing the crises produced by the emergence of industrial society. More recently, during the final quarter of the twentieth century, the global spread of neoliberal policies …