Rethinking Global Labour, Energy, and Production History

Speaker: Matt Myers, Oxford
Series: Core Seminar in Economic and Social History
Note: Note different room: https://talks.cam.ac.uk/show/index/6694/

At the centre of many accounts of the modern world is the idea of a certain kind of transition in subjects of labour and forms of energy. What Eric Hobsbawm termed ’the rise of the wage-worker’ approximates to the decline of water-power and the rise of a carbon economy. With the crisis of energy in the 1970s, labour and its associated movements across the world begin their long decline. This talk questions several received ideas in the history of labour and energy using research findings from several European countries and their imperial domains. It concludes with possible directions for a global, comparative, and transnational labour history and invites discussion on the methodological and conceptual challenges of writing labour back into broader accounts of energy and production.