The Origins of Worker Mobilisation

This is a truly path-breaking study of the collective impulse among workers, with important pointers for the global historiography of labour. Terry Irving, University of Wollongong, Australia Quinlan sees much in common with today's world of work and the period he examines. He writes with the radical certainty that those who are oppressed can only redress their grievances by making those who rule uneasy, with even the smallest actions contributing to this unease. All of which, collectively and eventually, makes a difference. Overall, Quinlan's book is testament to the possibilities and persistence of dissent and rebellion despite draconian and oppressive hegemonies that would have it otherwise - yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Rowan Cahill, Labour History Melbourne In its own terms, Quinlan's book is a major achievement, not least because it has the capacity to propel the history of class structures here and overseas in new directions. Moreover, it is timely, as he points out, to consider this history in a period when precarious labour and informal methods of struggle return, as the global working class' reality, in the neo-liberal era. Terry Irving, University of Wollongong, Australia Its major contribution will remain the depth of its inquiry into a period when unfree and free labour underpinned economic growth, in often extremely harsh working conditions, but tempered by the challenges that workers, individually and collectively, threw up to them Mark Finnane Griffith University This is a remarkable, and remarkably useful, book. It is the outcome of an exhaustive project aEURO over 30 years of excavating the history of workersaEURO (TM) struggles, exactly the kind of work that the neoliberal university has no time for. From those decades of systematic and comprehensive trawling through the colonial press and an eno