Jan Lucassen Boeken

The first truly global history of work, an upbeat assessment from the age of the hunter-gatherer to the present day

The book explores the dynamics of worker migration from economically disadvantaged regions of Europe to areas with labor shortages. It identifies and analyzes seven significant systems of migrant labor, offering insights into the factors driving this movement and its implications for both migrants and host countries. Through detailed examination, the author sheds light on the complexities of labor migration within Europe during the period.

The basic hypothesis of this volume is that currency patterns may tell us something about the spread of wage payments in specific societies in history. As far as wages are paid in currency, in particular in coin, specific patterns of denominations produced and used in space and time may provide insights into the importance of wage labour in those societies. In this book, a number of specialists discuss the relationship between wages and currency, with reference to different countries and regions in Europe, Asia, and South America over more than 2000 years. The main purpose of this volume is to look for new sources from the fields of monetary history and numismatics for the occurrence and importance of wage labour in general. More specifically, the contributions offer new perspectives on those periods and those parts of the world where alternative sources for labour history were hitherto lacking; or, where a fresh view on the occurrence and nature of wage labour would be worthwhile.

During the last decade studies have indicated that migration has been a normal, structural element of human societies throughout history. Progress in migration and settlement studies under this new paradigm has been so substantial that a new state of the art is needed. This book presents a reconsideration of current theoretical perspectives encompassing enlightened insights in diverging specialisms in the field of migration history, such as slavery studies, ethnic history, macro-economic migration studies, and gypsy studies. The seventeen essays in this volume, written by leading scholars in the field, collectively represent a pioneering effort in migration and settlement studies. They address the problems of ongoing specialization (and hence the need for synthesis) and the difficulties of integrating the consequences of this new paradigm into general histories.