Dirk Hoerder, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, and Silke Neunsinger, eds.Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2015

Abstract

Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers is an ambitious book that sets out to write domestic and caregiving work into the global history of labor. The authors define the subject of their research as “[w]ork in the households of others[which] includes all tasks concerning household work such as cooking, washing,cleaning as well as care work such as taking care of children, elderly and sick persons”(p. 2, emphases in the original) thus encompassing a wide spectrum of arrangements,from domestic slavery to the wage labor of unionized workers.