This volume suggests a new way of doing global history. Instead of offering a sweeping and
generalizing overview of the past we propose a 'micro-spatial' approach combining
micro-history with the concept of space. A focus on primary sources and awareness of the
historical discontinuities and unevennesses characterizes the global history that emerges here.
We use labour as our lens in this volume. The resulting micro-spatial history of labour
addresses the management and recruitment of labour its voluntary and coerced spatial mobility
its political perception and representation and the workers' own agency and social networks.
The individual chapters are written by contributors whose expertise covers the late medieval
Eastern Mediterranean to present-day Sierra Leone through early modern China and Italy
eighteenth-century Cuba and the Malvinas Falklands the journeys of a missionary between India
and Brazil and those of Christian captives across the Ottoman empire and Spain. The result is a
highly readable volume that addresses key theoretical and methodological questions in
historiography.Chapter 7 is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.
