From 23-25 September 2022, the authors and editors participating in the WORCK publication project “Labour and Coercion. Doing Social History after the Global Turn”, which will be published as a Past & Present Supplement, met in Urbino for a writers’ workshop. Hosted by Raffaella Sarti, the participants discussed their articles, covering labour in the household as well as on the labour market, in ancient and medieval as well as in modern societies, in global as well as in European contexts, as well as the conceptual and methodological framework connecting the individual contributions. In addition to rich discussions, the participants were invited to a guided tour of the Palazzo Ducale focusing on the socio-historical aspects of its history.
Tha planned publication aims to outpace the self-referential frame of global (labour) history and to stimulate a discussion on the way we do social history after the global turn. For this, it suggests a transversal mode of writing histories of work crisscrossing epochal and geographical borders in historiography. By focusing on situations and logics of coercion, it showcases the conceptual work developed in the context of the COST Action in a series of empirically grounded articles.
