Suggested Reading

Abstract

This chapter gives a glimpse into past and present historiographies of labour in East Central Europe, South-eastern Europe, and Eastern Europe including the post-Soviet territories. The focus is on writings on the history of labour in Eastern Europe, or the region so defined, between the early modern period and 1989–1991. I have considered here only what has been published since the 1960s, and the emphasis is on labour from the nineteenth century onwards. My aim has been to explore how that historiography has contributed to the development of an inclusive type of global labour history – or contains the potential to do so. I therefore present here a selective and somewhat generous reading1 of the scholarship discussed, foregrounding two interconnected aspects. I shall explore to what extent and in what ways the literature has been attentive to some of those groups of workers, and to some of those forms of work and labour, and labour conditions and relations that have often been rendered marginal in classical labour history. In addition, I shall discuss how the literature has invoked trans-local, transnational, comparative, or universal horizons, and in particular how it has characterized and explained local or regional characteristics of the history of labour with reference to such broader horizons. Foregrounding those two themes might suggest an undue lack of emphasis on the inherent value – indeed the indispensability – to any project intended to advance global labour history of regional historiography on its own account. However, this chapter will demonstrate that the chosen focus, at least in the case of Eastern Europe, allows a re-evaluation of important traditions and trajectories of such regional historiography from a global perspective. The related argument evolves from my interest in a third thing that has guided me through this essay – the question of whether and how the new global labour history has been affected by or partaken in increasingly globalized and often asymmetric circuits of knowledge. I wonder what the effect has been of the corresponding adulation or even fetishization of some scholarship on the one hand, and the devaluation of much Eastern European scholarship and its producers on the other. In this essay I shall seek to counteract such harmful possibilities. After an introductory section on the relevant waves of labour historiography, I shall discuss how the literature has addressed „special“ groups of workers and „special“ forms of labour. I have paid attention to concepts and horizons, with the particular aim of including comparative studies, and I read the literature produced during both waves as situated knowledge production.