Moving Workers

This book deconstructs the polarisation between mobility and immobilisation in labour history. It rearticulates their relation by studying the complex interactions between the political economy of coerced labour, and the mobility and immobility of the work force. The chapters engage with a broad range of workers' experiences of control and resistance to understand the historically intertwined trajectories of labour im/mobility and labour coercion. Situating their work at the crossroad of global labour history and mobility studies, the authors integrate the concept of coercion to explore labour coercion. This is a novel approach to the multiple forms of labour im/mobilities across time and space. The contributions engage with many actors at play who have been involved in different forms of im/mobilisations: employers, recruiters, workers, workers' families, institutions, entrepreneurs, control agencies and officials, and trade unions. Based on extensive archival research, this book thus provides fresh perspectives on the various regimes of coercion and im/mobility as constituent parts of the political economy of labour in history.