Europe's scholars of labor history gathered in The Netherlands in February 1997 to discuss nothing less than the state of their profession. The meeting opened at the Rotterdam Maritime Museum, a location that offered a fine historical exposition on Rotterdam dockworkers during the first day's lunch break. The second day of the conference was hosted by the organ izers of the conference at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam. The Institute's director, Marcel van der Linden, opened the conference with remarks about its goals and themes. Since national histories are doomed to become marginal as capital and labor become global, contrasting and comparing become all the more crucial, he proclaimed. The conference would feature such work, and take the inau gural steps to found a network of labor historians in Europe?Labnet? which, besides encouraging transnational historical work, would respond to shifts in research funding from the national to the united European level. The additional theme of papers presented during the conference was the strengths and weaknesses of present writing in European labor history. What has been successful? What substantial issues are most fruitful for future collaborative work? These questions were introduced in general terms by J?rgen Kocka (Free University, Berlin), who investigated trends in labor history's programmatic statements as well as its research results. Programmatic articles published over the last few years evoke a sense of crisis and a highly fragmented search for solutions, he noted, all of them discrediting traditional class formation analyses. An inventory of articles published in International Labor and Working-Class History and The Inter national Review of Social History in the last decade did not indicate much evidence of a paradigm shift, however. The turbulent situation diagnosed at the theoretical level, Kocka asserted, is becalmed when one looks at the actual output of labor history. Kocka called for the discipline to take on the new challenges posed by changes in the political and intellectual background against which labor history has been written in the last fifteen years or so. Referring to a wide range of work, from the history of civil society to gender history, Kocka's conclusions were, roughly summarized, threefold: Get politics back in; give the history of work new prominence; and make comparisons outside the western world. This last point provoked discussant Simonetti Soldani {Pas sato e Presente) to express the hopes that comparisons would eventually go beyond the same old English, French, German, and US cases and that Labnet would contribute to greater awareness of the variety of European