Formalized wage labor is often presented as the focus, if not the very core, of modern European labor history. The current volume challenges this widespread narrative by focusing on multiple forms of informal work in all parts of Europe. The chapters cover key fields of informal labor—agricultural, domestic, temporary, service, and sex work—during the period between 1870 and 1970, which is usually portrayed as an era of labor formalization. By demonstrating that informal work was neither a temporary nor a residual phenomenon, the contributors to this book render it visible as a constitutive factor of labor and labor politics in European history. In doing so, the volume aims to redraw the contours of labor history in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe while stimulating further thinking about a de-provincialized global history of work.

Sibylle Marti is a SNSF Assistant Professor at the University of Bern. Her research is situated at the intersection of the global history of work, the history of knowledge, and the history of capitalism. She is currently working on her second book about the history of informal work since 1970.Christof Dejung is a Professor in Modern History at the University of Bern. He is the coeditor of The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire (2019) and the author of The Primitive Within: The Entanglements Between Anthropology and Folklore Studies in Germany, 1850s–1930s (forthcoming).

Informal Work in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe - Sibylle Marti and Christof Dejung
NINETEENTH CENTURY TO THE FIRST WORLD WAR: INFORMAL WORK AT THE BEGINNING OF LABOR FORMALIZATION
When the State Arrived in the Rural Workshop: Laws and Taxes for Home Industries in Austrian Galicia, 1859–1914 - Corinne Geering
Ambivalences of (In)Formality: Prospects, Problems, and Pitfalls of Investigating “Informal Work” in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries - Sigrid Wadauer
The Political Economy of Informal Crafting Commerce in Helsinki at the Turn of the Twentieth Century - Leena Enbom
THE INTERWAR YEARS: INFORMAL WORK IN TIMES OF CRISES
Moving Between Formal and Informal Labor in Greek Cities, ca. 1890–1940 - Leda Papastefanaki
Informal Labor and the “Extra Waiter” in Inter-War Britain - David Cowan
Women’s “Return” to the Household? Struggles over the Regulation of Industrial Homework in Interwar Austria - Elisabeth Luif
Distinguishing Between Workers, Establishing Hierarchies: Categorizing Farm and other Workers in Disputes over Unemployment Insurance in Austria, 1920–1938 - Jessica Richter
THE POST-WAR PERIOD: INFORMAL WORK BETWEEN INDUSTRIALIZATION, MODERNIZATION AND BOOM
The Vulnerable Lives of “Unemployment” in Portugal’s Estado Novo Dictatorship, ca. 1930–1960 - Elisa Lopes da Silva
Rethinking Precarity: Labor, Law, and the Literary Imagination on the Margins of Europe, Late 1940–1960s - Adrian Grama
Laboring in the Twilight Zone: Contract Workers and Temporary Employees in Mid-Twentieth-Century (West) Germany - Anna Elisabeth Keim
“Agriculture is Female”: Informality, Exploitation, and Modernization in the Lives of Italian Rural Women, 1950–1970 - Eloisa Betti
Informal Work and Labor Struggle: Domestic Workers’ Private and Public Conflicts during the Franco Era in Spain, 1960–1975 - Diego Latorre Manglano
The Gender of Informality: Intimate Labors in Transnational Perspective during the Century of Labor Formalization - Eileen Boris
Chapter Abstracts
List of Contributors
Map and Tables
Index