International Labour and the Third World : The Making of a New Working Class

Originally published in 1987, this book focusses on the debate around the international role of the working class and other dominated classes such as the rural and urban poor. The contributions discuss whether Marx’s original version of the revolutionary role of workers can still be sustained. They examine the response of workers to the globalisation of production, to structural unemployment in the industrialized world and to the changing composition of the workforce in the industrialising periphery. The volume questions the historic starting points in the theorization of international labour.

Robin Cohen is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at the University of Oxford. For the first decade of his academic career, he worked on comparative labour issues. His books included Labour and Politics in Nigeria (1974) and the co-edited collections The development of an African working class (1975), International Labour and the Third World (1987), African Labor History (1978) and the current title, Peasants and Proletarians. He subsequently wrote on the themes of migration, globalization and diasporas. His best-known work is Global diasporas: An introduction (3rd edition, 2022).

Peter Gutkind was a distinguished social anthropologist (and a noted pioneer in the field of urban anthropology) who was associated with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Warwick from 1986 until his death in 2001. He was Professor of Anthropology at McGill University for the majority of his career and President of the African Studies Association in the USA.

Rosalind Boyd is an independent researcher, writer and lecturer based in Montreal and affiliated with McGill University since 1968. She was formerly (the only woman) Director of McGill’s Centre for Developing-Area Studies (CDAS), Director/principal investigator of the CDAS program on Gender and Human Security, Special Advisor on International Research to McGill’s Vice-Principal (Research and International Relations) and founding Editor of the journal Labour, Capital and Society. Her research and publications focus primarily on conflict situations and also on gender, labour, globalization, human rights, migration, refugees, democracy and environmental health.