Fraser Raeburn

Between Thompson and the Global: Reflections on Labour History Today We invite papers for a workshop entitled “Between Thompson and the Global: Rethinking Labour History Today”, to be held at the University of Warwick on 26-27 June 2026. This workshop will seek to bring together historians of labour to collectively reflect on a large historiographical shift that has taken place over the last two decades, from the social history of labour (in national contexts) to global and trans-national labour history. The social history of labour “from below” is a tradition initiated by E.P Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963), and extended over several decades by a robust tradition of politically engaged left-wing historical studies of the working classes: a tradition most powerfully entrenched in British historiography (but with many imprints elsewhere, ranging from the United States to Brazil to South Africa to India). The global history of labour, which revised and questioned many of the features of “Thompsonian” history-writing, has sought to overcome “methodological nationalism” in the writing of labour history, to investigate specific labour histories within a global frame, and to enable trans-national histories of workers and work. It has emerged as an increasingly dominant frame of reference for contemporary studies of labour around the world. This workshop seeks to place these two historiographical traditions in conversation with each other, to examine the stakes of the passage from the older, “Thompsonian” tradition to the “global turn”, and to think about the changed meanings of “doing labour history” today. Participants are urged to explicitly reflect on the methodological and conceptual issues at stake in the practice of labour history.

We would like to invite submissions that address (but are not necessarily limited to) the following themes: 1. To what extent has the global labour history tradition that has flourished over the last 20 years drawn upon or rejected the methodological and conceptual approaches of Thompsonian social/labour history? What other methodologies and concepts have been deployed and proven fruitful? 2. How do we address the burgeoning critique of Thompsonian social/labour history as parochial and Anglocentric (Bressey, 2015; Satia, 2020), and how have historians responded to this challenge and reshaped British labour history accordingly? What can historians of British labour learn from broader global trajectories of workforce formation and labour movements? 3. How might integrating histories of consumption, environment, and reproduction enrich our understanding of labour and its global entanglements? 4. In what ways can collaboration between historians of Britain and the global south generate new analytical frameworks or unsettle established narratives of class, race, and empire? 5. What kinds of politically-engaged global social and labour history can best respond to the contemporary challenges of rising global inequality and the appropriation of class politics by some sections of the populist right? 6. The legitimacy of 'radical' forms of labour-history writing initially arose from politics, from the apparently established centrality of the industrial working class both in society and in projects of social emancipation. That centrality has now been in precipitous decline for a long time. In this context, how might we think about what the ‘politics of doing labour history’ actually implies today? 7. What has been gained and what has been lost in the shift from a labour history dominated by “history from below” to one dominated by global history? Please send abstracts to globalhistory@warwick.ac.uk

#CfP Call for Papers

Organised by Global History and Culture Centre, University of Warwick:

Between Thompson and the Global: Reflections on Labour History Today

Workshop: 26-27 June 2026, University of Warwick

Deadline for abstracts: 30 January 2026

Submit to globalhistory@warwick.ac.uk

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Ok so obviously you never have to hand it to Franco, but he at least demonstrated the ability to win a civil war before tanking the economy through an interlinked combination of tariffs, corruption and inflation.

YouTube video by Sauanime "Peleliu: Guernica of Paradise" Anime Movie | Official Trailer

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This title is like referring to the sinking of the Bismark as 'Germany's Lusitania', a framing that bundles the experiences of perpatrators, combatants and civilians into an artificially flattened category of 'victim of war'.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dchX...

At least get their country of allegiance correct ffs

I'm assuming here that we'll have an enforced gap in scholarly research while fighting in the climate wars.

Some old white men in the audience will nod sagely and the chair won't call on the ECR who's had their hand up the entire Q&A and is the only person in the room who worked at the archives of Twitter Remembrance and Reparations Institute.

It'll be some backwards logic like "lowering living standards and consumption was the only solution to climate change" and "we need to not take the ritualised public performance of political pantomime as literal"

The worst thing about the current historical moment is that in 200 years some smug revisionist historian is going to give a conference paper on how the politics of the 2020s really were entirely rational and a sensible response to material conditions at the time.

This is utter, abject cowardice.

Clues by Sam A daily logic puzzle where you deduce who is a criminal!

A niche intellectual achievement but one I'm inordinately pleased with.

I solved the daily Clues by Sam, Nov 30th 2025 (Evil), in less than 14 minutes
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An ad telling people to "schreib dein buch"

Potsdam locals putting up hate speech towards visiting historians

Ancient aliens meme, with "triangles" as the answer to everything

My @sochistorywar.bsky.social conference paper, 2025, colourised

A temporary, spartan mess hall in a tent, with a very large number of pretzels.

A conference catered by the Bundeswehr may not offer luxury, but at least they have some priorities in order

At least I wasn't arriving!!

Just passing through Wannsee en route to a conference

Cannot believe that I spent a week being angry that my favourite dumpling place in Sydney was closing only to find that it is actually the less good place with an almost identical name a few doors down that's closing.

"In her research into everything related to the cosmos, Iris van Herpen shows her talent for synthesis"

21st century history PhD: sorry, my specialty is mid-19th century mustaches, you'll need to ask someone else about 1890s beards

19th century German:

CFP: www.northampton.ac.uk/research-blo... Nostalgia and Radical Politics, Past and Present, a 2 day workshop (15-16 June 2026) 🗃️Please share - and submit an abstract!

Empire in the Soil: Superphosphate and the British and French Imperial Manufacture, 1914-1937 « History# « Cambridge Core Blog The history of European imperial agriculture has often been told through the lens of technological innovation, such as the development of the agricultural automotive industry or the application of adv...

📣 New Voices continues with a blog from Rosie Charles, @uni-of-warwick.bsky.social.

Rosie's blog explores superphosphate manufacturing by the British and French empires, charting the impact of fertiliser production on imperial expansion and agricultural practices.

www.cambridge.org/core/blog/20...

Today's NYT connections, where the top row spells Only Connect Olive Branch

Genuine peace offering or court-mandated statement?

Sounds familiar - researching the 1930s drove this observation as much as anything else. A lot of faceless decisions made that these records didn't matter...

Would that it were the last tool of Nazism that people conviinced the British government to use.

Another interesting question - when do embedded film/photogrpahy units become more about managing contemporary news/journalism, and less about the historical gaze?

Fair points!

Yes, this was foremost in my mind for the "among other reasons" caveat! But I don't think it's the whole picture, especially for non-state institutions.

Drake meme, rejecting studying the history of war because it's cool, embracing studying the history of war because they kept the interesting documents

Probably just rehashing archive theory 101 here, but I wonder whether archival holdings for 1914-18 or 1939-45 are uniquely rich, because (among other reasons) the people selecting documents for preservation at the time were aware of the historic nature of the events at hand.

Two stills from Father Ted episode where he visits a WW2 memorabilia collector's house. "You don't have any tattoos from the Allied side?" "No, that sort of thing wouldn't interest me at all"

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