ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on comparative and explorative approaches to global labor history and seeks to identify a connection between the history of work and globalization. Work is a crucial aspect of the human experience. The character of work and the conditions under which it is performed have a strong impact on people's lives, as well as on global historical developments on a larger scale. Rapid economic developments have not caused informal economic relations to fade away; indeed, it has even been argued that informality is at the core of the development of capitalism in the global South. The prominent Indian scholar Bhattacharya has referred to this as a "permanently transitional" situation, which calls for concepts other than the clear-cut ones of advanced metropolitan economies. He proposes using the concept of labouring poor', including non-wage and informal workers, in order to avoid the myopic concentration on the industrial wage-worker.
