This series will trace at the example of work the historical connections between regions and critically engage with the idea of the North Atlantic World as normal and the rest as exceptional. The aim is to publish studies that change focus back and forth from the intimacy and complexity of relationships in specific places and their connections to distant places and long-term processes of change thereby looking beyond locality and region.

All work is free work – or is it?

Rooted in the historical and theoretical debates over the status of labor, this volume analyzes the relationship between free and forced work, migration, and the role that states play in producing un-freedom. With contributions among others from Stephen Castles, Cindy Hahamovitch, Vincent Houben and William G. Martin, the book explores constrained labor forms across the world from the mid-19^th century to today.

This book series is interested in tracing at the example of work the historical connections between regions and in critically engaging with the idea of the North Atlantic World as “normal” and the rest as “exceptional” and “in need of explanation.” Books to be published in the series should address the history of commodified labor and investigate one or more of its many forms on a global scale: wage labor, but also serfdom and slavery, self-employed, domestic and “reproductive” labor and the various forms of subsistence and cooperative labor - paid and unpaid work beyond wage labor that constantly has been made invisible. These various labor forms need to be studied both in their specifities and as elements in a linked history of labor. The history and current situation of Africa offer rich examples for. If one of the virtues of labor history in recent decades has been its microhistorical focus on workers and work in relation to the range of social processes in a particular milieu, this series mainly attempts to look beyond both locality and region toward wider spatial relationships. The aim is to publish studies that change focus back and forth from the intimacy and complexity of relationships in specific places and their connections to distant places and long-term processes of change.

If you are interested in submitting your manuscript to the editors, please write to: rabea.rittgerodt@degruyter.com

Editors:

Andreas Eckert, Humboldt University Berlin

Sidney Chalhoub, Harvard University

Mahua Sarkar, Binghamton University

Dmitri van den Bersselaar, Leipzig University

Christian G. De Vito, Bonn University