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The first truly global history of work, an upbeat assessment from the age of the hunter-gatherer to the present day We work because we have to, but also because we like it: from hunting-gathering over 700,000 years ago to the present era of zoom meetings, humans have always worked to make the world around them serve their needs. Jan Lucassen provides an inclusive history of humanity's busy labor throughout the ages. Spanning China, India, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, Lucassen looks at the ways in which humanity organizes work: in the household, the tribe, the city, and the state. He examines how labor is split between men, women, and children; the watershed moment of the invention of money; the collective action of workers; and at the impact of migration, slavery, and the idea of leisure. From peasant farmers in the first agrarian societies to the precarious existence of today's gig workers, this surprising account of both cooperation and subordination at work throws essential light on the opportunities we face today.

These transfers of sovereignty resulted in extensive, unforeseen movements of citizens and subjects to their former countries. The phenomenon of postcolonial migration affected not only European nations, but also the United States, Japan and post-Soviet Russia. The political and societal reactions to the unexpected and often unwelcome migrants was significant to postcolonial migrants' identity politics and how these influenced metropolitan debates about citizenship, national identity and colonial history. The contributors explore the historical background and contemporary significance of these migrations and discuss the ethnic and class composition and the patterns of integration of the migrant population.

Globalizing Migration History presents a new universal method to quantify and qualify cross-cultural migrations, which makes it possible to detect regional trends and explain differences in migration patterns across the globe in the last half millennium.

Group IIIA metal chalcogenides are an auspicious material system due to their variability of properties and hence the multitude of application options, for example, in the fields of optoelectronic, thermoelectric, piezo‐, and ferroelectric devices. Indium and gallium selenide films are innovatively grown in a sequential PVD (physical vapor deposition) process starting from metal precursor layers of various thicknesses, which are then subject to chalcogenization in different selenium contents. The resulting thin films are investigated for structural and optical properties by Raman, XRD (X‐ray diffraction), and UV–Vis–NIR spectrometry, revealing that all the compounds In2Se3, InSe, In4Se3, Ga2Se3, and GaSe as well as different polytypes can be achieved depending on the metal/chalcogen ratio. Results from Raman and XRD spectroscopy are highly consistent, and also from the optical measurements changes in absorption characteristics can be correlated. The results indicate, that by fine‐tuning the selenium content, deliberately growing ultra‐thin layers of the different indium and gallium phases will be possible, thus opening up a promising route for 2D material fabrication. Given the scalability of the fabrication method, it is highly promising for large‐scale deployment of the materials. Indium and gallium selenide films are innovatively grown in a sequential physical vapor deposition process starting from metal precursor layers of various thicknesses, which are then subject to chalcogenization in different selenium contents. By Raman and XRD spectroscopy, all the compounds In2Se3, InSe, In4Se3, Ga2Se3, and GaSe as well as different polytypes are identified. Optical bandgaps range up to 2 eV.

During the eighteenth century the VOC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie) imported over a billion small copper coins (duiten) to Java, which is a remarkable operation for the world's largest enterprise at that time, since these coins were unfit to pay for the company's wholesale trade. This article argues that the VOC responded to Java's specific need for small coins, because people increasingly relied on the market for daily necessities and became less dependent on subsistence farming. The alternative explanations of population growth, substitution and inflation do not satisfactory explain the increased demand for these copper duiten. Therefore, this article proposes that Java's economy shifted away from subsistence farming and, particularly after 1750, probably grew. Reprinted by permission of the International Institute of Social History

As an aspect of economic (and later social) history, the study of work and labour relations - conveniently and mostly in hindsight termed 'Labour History' - has a long tradition in the Netherlands, where it has gone through several phases during more than a century. In the years before the Second World War, it started from a very broad basis, encompassing the entire period from the Middle Ages onwards. Dutch anthropologists also contributed to the history of work, especially with regard to the colonies. Similar to the position in other countries, this promising phase was followed by a more restricted concept of labour history, as the saga of male industrial breadwinners after the Industrial Revolution. The revival of the topic in the turbulent 1970s and 1980s brought an even narrower focus on the historical development of (leftist) collective action. In the latest phase, in the Netherlands since the 1990s all these elements have been combined in the new concept of Global Labour History, meaning the development of work at large, labour (wage and unfree) and labour relations worldwide. Reprinted by permission of the International Institute of Social History

The new dataset and web application ‘Coin Production in the Low Countries: fourteenth century to the present’ provides scholars with user-friendly access to mintmasters’ accounts going back to the Middle Ages. They give insight into the production of legal tender (within the Low Countries and occasionally elsewhere as well), and provide access to such variables as regional production figures and coin denominations. This data article provides an introduction to the sources as well as the dataset, and suggests how the latter might contribute to new research into long-run economic and social history.

Historians of migration have increasingly criticized the idea of a ‘mobility transition’, which assumed that pre-modern societies in Europe were geographically fairly immobile, and that people only started to move in unprecedented ways with the onset of modernization in the nineteenth century. In line with this critique, this article attempts to apply thorough quantitative tests to the available data. The focus is on ‘cross-community migration’, following Patrick Manning's argument that migrants moving over a cultural border are most likely to accelerate the rate of innovation. Six forms of migration are considered: emigration out of Europe, immigration from other continents, rural colonization of ‘empty spaces’, movements to large cities, seasonal migration, and the movement of sailors and soldiers. To illustrate regional variations, the examples of the Netherlands and Russia are contrasted. The reconstruction presented here is partial and preliminary, but it unequivocally shows that early modern Europe was much more mobile than modernization scholars allowed for. There was indeed a sharp increase in the level of migration after 1850, but it was due to improvements in transport rather than to modernization in a more general sense. This model has been elaborated for Europe but it can also be applied to other parts of the world and can hopefully contribute to the debate on the ‘Great Divergence’ between Europe and Asia.