Informal Work in Europe, ca. 1870–1970

Formalized wage labor is often presented as the focus, if not the very core, of modern European labor history. The current volume challenges this widespread narrative by focusing on multiple forms of informal work in all parts of Europe.

Formalized wage labor is often presented as the focus, if not the very core, of modern European labor history. The current volume challenges this widespread narrative by focusing on multiple forms of informal work in all parts of Europe. The chapters cover key fields of informal labor—agricultural, domestic, temporary, service, and sex work—during the period between 1870 and 1970, which is usually portrayed as an era of labor formalization. By demonstrating that informal work was neither a temporary nor a residual phenomenon, the contributors to this book render it visible as a constitutive factor of labor and labor politics in European history. In doing so, the volume aims to redraw the contours of labor history in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe while stimulating further thinking about a de-provincialized global history of work.