{"title":"Beyond Labor History’s Comfort Zone? Labor Regimes in Northeast India, from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century","authors":"W. Schendel","doi":"10.1163/9789004386617_010","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"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”","PeriodicalId":410938,"journal":{"name":"The Lifework of a Labor Historian: Essays in Honor of Marcel van der Linden","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2018-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"The Lifework of a Labor Historian: Essays in Honor of Marcel van der Linden","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004386617_010","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
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”