Significant industrial centres in the Polish lands were not established until the end of the 19th century. The history of Łódź, Bialystok or Tomaszów is usually told in Polish historiography as a local story: here traditional agriculture was replaced by industry and this was the change. If we focus only on the passage ‘from agri-culture to factory’ a very important thing disappears: raw materials, the sources. This is often overlooked in literature, journalistic texts and the public imagination. In my talk, I would like to focus on the issue of cotton as a resource of emancipation (cheap textiles available to the lower classes) and ambivalence (the economic emancipation of the working classes in Central Europe was made possible by the real restitution of slavery in the USA after the Civil War). I will demonstrate the multidimensionality of this process on the basis of literary texts (W.S. Reymont, The Promised Land, W. Kosiakiewicz, Cotton, I.J. Singer, The Ashkenazy Brothers) and texts of journalism and popular culture written in the Polish lands in the last decades of the 19th century.

The objective of this paper is to explore the intersection of nationalism, internationalism, and anti-imperialism within the Irish labour movement during the decades preceding the Island’s partial independence from the British Empire. This paper has implications for the field of global history that are much broader than the confines of its case study. For by centring Ireland’s working-class institutions alongside the island’s unusual colonial history, this paper engages with the myriad and often contradictory ways in which decolonial movements engaged with the world outside of their contested borders. The example of Irish labour presented in this paper will contribute to a larger, global story of how various forms of nationalism and internationalism can manifest within the specific demand and realisation of a nation-state. From this, a globally minded image of Ireland’s labour movement emerges that offers a window through which we can look anew at the debate regarding why and how empires gave way to nation-states during the twentieth century. Broader conclusions will also be offered regarding post-imperial nation-state formation, the causal relationship between nationalism and post-colonial independence, and the role of labour within the rise of nationalist and anti-imperial movements during the contested ‘Wilsonian moment’ following The First World War. In alignment with the overriding theme of this conference, this paper poses critical questions to the field of global history regarding the position of organised labour and working-class institutions within global accounts of nationalism, internationalism and state formation during the first decades of the twentieth century.

This paper explains the development of skills and its connection with welfare outcomes, by using the dataset of construction workers, in western India during the late precolonial and colonial eras. It qualifies the extant narrative of a precolonial shortage of skilled workforce, the importance of colonial globalisation in releasing this constraint, and artisans' adaptability. It shows that skill premium and returns to artisanal human capital were substantial, and were as significant as returns on [primary] education of rural teachers and postmen vis-a-vis sweat labourers’ earnings. However, artisans' welfare gains were less substantial than their skill premium. The appearance of substantial skill premiums was arguably undergirded by the ‘depressed wages’ paid to sweat labourers, that is, at the latter’s cost. It did not indicate a shortage of skilled workers, particularly in the late precolonial era. Concomitantly, building artisans modestly improved their subsistence level, and sweat labourers marginally succeeded in it over time. It could result from improved marginal productivity and economic expansion, barring the nineteenth century’s second quarter. These triple developments – substantial skill premium, depressed earnings of sweat labourers and their constrained bargaining capacity, and modest welfare gains – were attributable to a narrow window of enskilling available to general workers and a shift in construction techniques. Policy design, however, moved at a lumbering-pace to foster the skills-cum-labour-intensive path of development and growth in welfare

The rise of the logistics industry - which began in the 1950s and peaked in the 1980s –fundamentally reshaped global supply chains by organizing the movement of goods through a range of radically transformative methods and concepts. This revolution has not only increased the speed and volume of goods flows but also qualitatively changed the ability to change the speed, location, origin, and destination of products to meet fluctuating market conditions. One of the most radical shifts in logistic theory and practice was just-in-time (JIT), whose roots lie in two influential technological-intellectual currents, the Japanese Toyotism and Anglo-American cybernetics. It was initially associated with the production system of Japanese car manufacturers in the early 1970s. JIT was adapted to eliminate standing inventory and “idling” people, machines, materials, and capital and to discipline Japanese workers. This production philosophy was oriented around the concept of a continuous flow in which everything that is not in motion is a form of waste and a drag on profits. With its transnational adaptation in the early 1980s, it has been developed along with Anglo-American cybernetics. Cybernetics allowed new calculations of the geographies of the distribution of goods. After WW2, Cybernetics were created as a “software” which, when merged with logistics in the 1960s, allowed the scheduling of new “geographies of calculation” and thus planned production and distribution on a qualitatively new level. My paper examines this historical juncture and gives suggestions why a critical engagement helps us to not only understand the globalizing effects of the logistics revolution but also how a very specific understanding of the ‘global’ was enforced. Tracing JIT from a concept in Japanese domestic manufacturing to the dominant paradigm of global trade, it elaborates on its totalizing effects in regard to the exploitation of global labor and sharpening of existing patterns of inequalities.