Author Description

Transport labour has been a fundamental feature in every economic system and in every epoch of humanity worldwide. This volume considers the history of labour in transport from 1750 to 1950, in the context of globalisation and the evolution of capitalism. The nine articles presented in this collective work span these two centuries and address a largely neglected aspect of labour history in transport: the stories from the Global South (Africa, Asia and Latin America). The transport sectors touched upon in these studies are wide-ranging, encompassing a variety of workers, from porters to boatmen in India, from Mongolian caravanners to Filipino rickshaw drivers, from truck drivers to postal runners in west Africa, from wage-earning slave porters to immigrant railway workers in the cities of Brazil. These histories from the South are a constitutive part of the global history of labour.