This collection of seventeen essays takes its inspiration from the scholarly achievements of the Dutch historian Jan Lucassen. They reflect a central theme in his research: the history of labor. The essays deal with five major themes: the production of specific commodities or services (diamonds, indigo, cigarettes, mail delivery by road runners); occupational groups (informal street vendors, prostitutes, soldiers, white-collar workers in the Dutch East India Company, VOC); geographical and social mobility (career opportunities on non-Dutch officers in the VOC, immigration into early-modern Holland; the influence of migrants on labor productivity; income differentials as migration incentives); contexts of labor relations (late medieval labor laws, subsistence labor and female paid labor, Russian peasant-migrant laborers, diverging political trajectories of cane-sugar industries); and the origins of labor-history libraries and archives.

Contributions by: Marcel Linden, Leo Lucassen, Karin Hofmeester, Willem Schendel, Chitra Joshi, Ratna Saptari, Danielle Heuvel, Lex Heerma van Voss, Erik-Jan Zürcher, C.A. Davids, Jaap Bruijn, Femme Gaastra, Maarten Prak, Jelle Lottum, Richard W. Unger, Catharina Lis, Hugo Soly, Elise Nederveen Meerkerk, Gijs Kessler, Ulbe Bosma, Jaap Kloosterman