Work

Andrea Komlosy has written an important book on the global history of work during the past 800 years ... she thinks about labour on a global scale, thus overcoming a deep Eurocentric bias in much of the labour history as it exists, and she brings feminist conversations on labour into an analysis of virtually all aspects of labour history. Her book is unique, I am not aware of any other such volume. Sven Beckert As Andrea Komlosy argues in Work: The Last 1,000 Years, our conception of what constitutes work has changed markedly over time. The professor of social history at the University of Vienna writes that our commonly accepted definitions are too narrow, too European, too male and too modern - John Thornhill, Financial Times Komlosy's analysis is a helpful reminder that our familiar understanding of work is narrow and historically exceptional. The hierarchy we have established in the industrialized West, placing permanent, full-time, legally contracted wage work at the top of a pyramid of social good, is deeply flawed-denigrating not only those millions who work outside its confines, but also devaluing and neglecting the kinds of nonwork activities that enrich and give meaning to human lives. By showing that `work' may exist without wages, a boss or a workplace outside the home, Komlosy's analysis allows us to think more broadly about what we value, and whether we want to continue to separate work and life. - Joanna Scutts, In These Times Teeming with insights, from the contempt for manual labour in ancient Greece to the historical tendency for all kinds of subsistence tasks to be `housewife-ized' into unpaid domestic labour. - Barbara Kiser, Nature