Abstract
Marcel van der Linden Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press 2000) LABOUR HISTORIANS STUDY the class to examine its development, composition, conditions, lifestyle, culture, and many other aspects. But what exactly do we mean when we use the term working class? Over the past half-century, the answer to this seemingly simple question changed continuously. In the 1950s and 1960s it usually denoted male breadwinners who earned a living in agriculture, industry, mining, or transport. In the 1970s and 1980s objections from feminists instigated a fundamental revision that broadened the focus beyond the male head of die household to include the wife and children. Occupational groups that tended to be overlooked in the past, such domestic servants and prostitutes, started to receive serious consideration. The chronological and geographic scope of the research expanded well. historians became interested in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and took a closer look at pre-industrial wage earners. Our overall perspective on the class undergone a paradigmatic revolution. The signs indicate that this first transitio n is merely a harbinger of a second one. However broadly labour historians have interpreted their discipline thus far, their main interest always been free workers and their families. They perceived such a wage earner in the Marxian sense the worker who as a free individual can dispose of his labour-power his own and has no other commodity Marcel van der Linden, Labour History the History of Multitudes, Labour/Le Travail, 52 (Fall 2003), 235-43.
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