The essays in this volume aim to explain the evolution and persistence of various practices of indirect labour recruitment. Labour intermediation is understood as a global phenomenon, present for many centuries in most countries of the world and taking on a wide range of forms: varying from outright trafficking to job placement in the context of national employment policies. The contributions cover a broad geographical scope, including case studies from Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and Europe. By focusing on the actual practices of different types of labour mediators in various...

In Migration and Membership Regimes editors Ulbe Bosma, Gijs Kessler and Leo Lucassen bring together ten essays in an analytical framework which looks beyond the Transatlantic migration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a deliberate attempt to incorporate the experience of earlier periods and other continents into historical migration studies. The focus of analysis is on the mechanisms of interaction between polities, from city-states and emerging statehoods to empires, and migrants joining or taking over these polities, by force, choice or co-optation. It reconceptualises...

European markets almost exclusively relied on Caribbean sugar produced by slave labor until abolitionist campaigns began around 1800. Thereafter, importing Asian sugar and transferring plantation production to Asia became a serious option for the Western world. In this book, Ulbe Bosma details how the British and Dutch introduced the sugar plantation model in Asia and refashioned it over time. Although initial attempts by British planters in India failed, the Dutch colonial administration was far more successful in Java, where it introduced in 1830 a system of forced cultivation that tied...

The Life Work of a Labor Historian: Essays in Honor of Marcel van der Linden (eds. Ulbe Bosma and Karin Hofmeester), presents the latest developments in the history of labor and capitalism. As part of Global Labor History, Jan Lucassen, Magaly Rodrígues García, Sidney Chalhoub, and Willem van Schendel discuss new concepts of work and workers, including sex workers, slaves in Brazil, and voluntary communal laborers in North-East India, while Andreas Eckert shows the relevance of area studies. Jürgen Kocka presents a history of capitalism and its critics to date, Pepijn Brandon analyzes...