Beyond Labor History’s Comfort Zone? Labor Regimes in Northeast India, from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century

W. Schendel
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Abstract

What is global labor history about? The turn toward a world-historical understanding of labor relations has upset the traditional toolbox of labor historians. Conventional concepts turn out to be insufficient to grasp the dizzying array and transmutations of labor relations beyond the North Atlantic region and the industrial world. Attempts to force these historical complexities into a conceptual straitjacket based on methodological nationalism and Eurocentric schemas typically fail.1 A truly “global” labor history needs to feel its way toward new perspectives and concepts. In his Workers of the World (2008), Marcel van der Linden provides us with an excellent account of the theoretical and methodological challenges ahead. He makes it very clear that labor historians need to leave their comfort zone. The task at hand is not to retreat into a further tightening of the theoretical rigging: “we should resist the temptation of an ‘empirically empty Grand Theory’ (to borrow C. Wright Mills’s expression); instead, we need to derive more accurate typologies from careful empirical study of labor relations.”2 This requires us to place “all historical processes in a larger context, no matter how geographically ‘small’ these processes are.”3 This chapter seeks to contribute to a more globalized labor history by considering such “small” labor processes in a mountainous region of Asia. My aim is to show how these processes challenge us to explore beyond the comfort zone of “labor history,” and perhaps even beyond that of “global labor history”
超越劳工史的舒适区?十九至二十一世纪印度东北部的劳工制度
全球劳工史是关于什么的?从世界历史的角度来理解劳动关系,已经颠覆了劳动历史学家的传统工具箱。事实证明,传统的概念不足以理解北大西洋地区和工业世界以外令人眼花缭乱的劳资关系的变化。将这些历史复杂性强加于基于方法论民族主义和欧洲中心模式的概念束缚的尝试通常会失败一部真正的“全球”劳工史需要寻找新的视角和概念。在他的《世界工人》(2008)一书中,马塞尔·范德林登为我们提供了对未来理论和方法挑战的出色描述。他说得很清楚,劳工历史学家需要离开他们的舒适区。当前的任务不是退回到进一步收紧理论的束缚中:“我们应该抵制‘经验空洞的大理论’(借用c·赖特·米尔斯的说法)的诱惑;相反,我们需要从仔细的劳资关系实证研究中得出更准确的类型学。这就要求我们把所有的历史进程放在一个更大的背景下,不管这些进程在地理上多么“小”。3本章试图通过考虑亚洲山区的这种“小”劳动过程,为更加全球化的劳动历史做出贡献。我的目的是展示这些过程如何挑战我们探索“劳动史”的舒适区,甚至可能超越“全球劳动史”的舒适区。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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