22 November: Jan Lucassen - Global history of work
The International Institute of Social History (IISH) is the world's largest documentation
and research centre in the field of social history. Since its foundation in 1935, the institute
has dedicated itself to the collection, preservation and availability of sources for social
and economic history during the last centuries worldwide. The research department of the
institute focuses on the history of work and of labour relations and organizes international
projects in this field. The collection (archives, library and audio-visual materials) takes up
well over 30 miles of shelf room. The IISH holds over 3,000 archival collections, some 1
million printed volumes and about as many audio-visual items. The IISH is also home to
a number of other documentary institutions, most notably the Netherlands Economic
History Archive (NEHA). Its material is included in the IISH catalogue. The IISH carries
out and stimulates scholarly research. The International Review of Social History is
published for the Institute by Cambridge University Press and appears three times a year,
plus one supplement.
The history of work is much wider than that of the traditional male worker in a large scale
factory and workers defend their positions in many more ways than through formal
collective actions like strikes. In order to understand workers worldwide, men and
women, children and adults, workers in agriculture, industry, and the services it is
worthwhile to investigate daily practices. This leads to fundamental questions like: who
in real life works with whom, who has a break with whom, who obeys whom, who orders
whom, who pays whom and how regulary, in kind of in money, in which particular
currencies? In short, how is work organized among workers at the lowest level. During
this day research possibilities for the history of daily work processes since the early
modern period in different parts of the world will be investigated using the holdings of
the IISH. Fields of expertise and interest (thematic, temporal, regional and gender) of the
participants will be investigated beforehand.
23 November: Marcel van der Linden - Collective action worldwide
Not only the concept of work has been broadened over the last decades, also the concept
of collective action. Traditionally labour historians have spent most of their time to
organised movements, especially trade unions and their strikes, and to leftist political
parties. This type of research is certainly useful, but at the same time from a global
perspective it is only part of the story. By taking on board experiences of non-western
societies and earlier periods we have learnt that the repertoire of action of workers is
much wider. The holdings of the IISH offer ample opportunities to set up comparisons of
different collective actions, their logic, and their success or failure worldwide. Fields of
expertise and interest (thematic, temporal, regional and gender) of the participants will be
investigated beforehand.
24 November: Erik Jan Zurcher - Comparisons between contintents, case study: Turkey
and the Middle East
The literature of military history is huge, but, apart from the descriptions of battles and
campaigns that makes up the bulk of the works in the field, the majority of the other
studies that have appeared in the past century (and primarily since World War I)
concentrates on the development and application of military technologies, both in the
sense of "hardware" (weapons, fortifications, ships) and in that of "software" (military
drill, tactics and strategies). Historical sociologists like Charles Tilly have discussed
warfare and military development in the context of the emergence of the modern state.
The social history of war, which has emerged since the Nineteen Seventies (with the
seminal work of John Terraine and Martin Middlebrook) concentrates on the experience
of war as seen through the eyes of the common soldier rather than through those of the
commanders, who moved the pieces on the chessboard. Curiously, with the exception of
Peter Way's recent work, very little has been written on military service as a form of
labour. There seems to be a lack of recognition that fighting and killing is in many cases a
form of labour. The only group to explore this theme, focusing on the way serving on the
front was for many people an extension of peace time labour experiences, is that of the
Australian labour historians Bruce Scates and Nathan Wise, but theirs is not a
comparative approach, focusing exclusively on the Australian soldiers of World War I.
The lack of attention paid to soldiers by labour historians is surprising because military
employment seems to offer excellent opportunities for international comparison. Where
many forms of human activity are restricted by the conditions of nature or the stage of
development of a given society, organized violence is ubiquitous. Soldiers, in one form or
another, are always part of the picture, in any period and in every region. What makes
diachronic and global comparison of forms of military labour especially enticing is the
fact that they offer such a rich variety of types of labour relations, which for comparative
purposes can all be arranged along the two axes of commodified versus uncommodified
labour and free versus unfree labour (with many shades in between). Since 2009 an
international research group based at the IISH has started work on a project, which aims
to answer the question why certain forms of military recruitment and employment
dominate in certain areas and periods and are then dropped in favour of others.
In my contribution to the masterclass I should like to introduce the students to the
conceptual framework used in the comparative study of military labour and support this
with a number of case studies drawn from the work of the research group. The students
will then be introduced to the unique collection of anti-militarist archives in the IISH and
be given an assignment to collect information on recruitment and working conditions in
the different armies of World Wars I and II.
25 November: Karin Hofmeester, Kees Mandemakers, Jan Kok - Digital sources and data
bases
The IISH collects not only paper sources, but also digital sources such as databases.
Moreover, IISH researchers often actively create these digital sources. They enable us to
do global, comparative research on topics such as work, social inequality, migration and
family formation. To enable researchers world-wide to share their data and develop
international research groups, the IISH develops data hubs and collaboratories.
In this master class we will explain why and how we make hubs, collaboratories and
databases. By presenting a number of projects we will show how research questions are
being formulated and translated into research projects based on digital sources. After
these project presentations, accompanied by hand outs, participants will be challenged to
formulate their own research questions based on the digital sources that have been
presented. To be able to do so, they will form subgroups. Finally, all research questions
will be presented to the whole group and evaluated.
Jan Kok
The IISH Hubs can be seen as online archives of digital data collections, which represent
the state-of-the-art in global historical knowledge on specific subjects. This knowledge is
brought together by researchers working together, and distributed across the world.
Although they meet and have face to face discussions at regular intervals, a low of the
work is done with modern communication tools. Such virtual research teams are called
collaboratories. IISH has created a special web environment in which each team can store
documents, share jointly created databases, have forum discussions etcetera.
The notion of hubs and collaboratories forms an integral part of the large infrastructural
project CLIO-INFRA, which was recently granted by the Dutch National Science
Foundation. In this project, we expand existing and develop new hubs with national
indicators of long-term economic, social and demographic developments. Together, these
hubs will help us finding the answer to the question how global inequality in resources
and opportunities has come into being, and how inequality patterns have shifted over
time.
The Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, - Karin Hofmeester
In this presentation we will show how research questions on the occurrence of different
types of labour relations worldwide in the period from 1500 to 2000 had led us to develop
a collaboratory. In cooperation with a large group on scholars from different parts of the
world we make an inventory of all types of labour relations, varying from slavery,
indentured labour and share cropping, to free wage labour and self-employment, in all
parts of the world during five cross-sections in time, i.e. 1500, 1650, 1800, 1900 and
2000. The data is being entered and shared in a large database. Eventually the combined
data will form the starting point of an international research proposal aimed at explaining
the rise and decline of types of labour relations worldwide from 1500 to 2000. During the
presentation the database will shown to the participants of the master class. Afterwards
they will be invited to develop research questions that could be part of this research
proposal.
Linking world wide micro datasets for global research - Kees Mandemakers
For almost half a century, population historians have created datasets on life courses from
archival sources such as parish records, tax records, censuses and population registers.
Their time span ranges from medieval times to the present day. These datasets are
essential to understand how economic, social and cultural changes impacted on the lives
of ordinary persons and how these persons, in turn, shaped their surroundings and their
destinies by strategies of survival and improvement. Recent developments in ICT
facilities and methodologies have increased the scale and the analytic power of these
individual level datasets significantly. Thus, in several countries large regional or even
national datasets have been made available for research.
I will introduce some important databases, their content, scope and research and will
present The European Historical Population Samples Network (EHPS-Net). This network
of databases and researchers is build around a common format, the so-called Intermediate
Data Structure (IDS) which forms an integrated and joint interface between many
European databases.