Organisation : Yann Béliard

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Présentation :

As Pepijn Brandon and Aditya Sarkar underline in “Labour History and the Case against Colonialism” (International Review of Social History, 2019, pp. 1-37), labour historians are ideally placed to question the imperial revisionism and revivalism which at present seems so vivacious both in academia and in public debate. This was probably not so true, or so striking, half a century ago. Indeed it took the Global Turn of the 1990s, the rise of comparative and transnational approaches, and notably the efforts initiated in Amsterdam by the scholars in charge of the International Institute of Social History (IISH), for labour history to become less Eurocentric and consider the workers of all continents, whether “free” or unfree, as worthy of interest. Today the contribution labour history can make both to public discussions of imperialism and to a deeper, more sophisticated understanding of the past, is clear enough – and the panels we will present at the 3rd ELHN Congress will hopefully highlight that potential. Many new alleys have been explored over the past twenty years, but the way class worked in the Age of Empire – an age that did not end with World War One but culminated in the inter-war period and survived beyond long after 1945 – is still in need of further analysis. We know too little about the way cheap labour in the colonies and on the oceans was exploited and organised to serve metropolitan interests. We know too little about the plural mechanisms of class relations in the imperial world, relations that included subordination as well as accommodation and rebellion, relations that were defined and contested in a variety of official or militant languages.