An Interesting History Of Work , Jan Lucassen

Why At All We Work. 

The Story of Work. By Jan Lucassen. Yale University Press; 

Many time we ask ourselves, why we work. Answers vary, some work for meeting out family expenses, some for society, some for nation and few people work because they enjoy. 

To some up , we work because we have to, any in few cases  because we like it . History of work is as old as 70,000 years . It actually started from hunting-gathering taken many avatars , now confined to zoom meetings due to pandemic . The fact remains that the humans have always worked to make the world around them serve their needs.

Jan Lucassen,  is a scholar at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. His book The Story of Work is in market. The book chronicles the long-term background to the jarring developments. provides an inclusive history of humanity’s busy labor throughout the ages. Spanning China, India, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, Lucassen looks at the ways in which humanity organizes work: in the household, the tribe, the city, and the state. He examines how labor is split between men, women, and children; the watershed moment of the invention of money; the collective action of workers; and at the impact of migration, slavery, and the idea of leisure.

From peasant farmers in the first agrarian societies to the precarious existence of today’s gig workers, this surprising account of both cooperation and subordination at work throws essential light on the opportunities we face today.

Of the many habits and institutions on which covid-19 has shone a harsh light, none has been more exposed and disrupt-

ed than work. The pandemic has drawn attention to the disjuncture between the indispensability of certain jobs, from medical  to making deliveries, and how little they tend to pay. It left many workers bewilderingly idle, or stuck at a disorient- ing remove from their colleagues. Having downed their usual tools, the bored often took up Neolithic habits, like growing food or baking bread—ironically, given that it was the turn to agriculture, beginning some 12,000 years ago, which first set hu- mankind on the path towards arduous work in dense cities, through which zoo- notic diseases might one day run rampant.

If you look back , early societies could be violent, people often died young, and few enjoyed a leisurely existence — as the Cuiva do in South America today, reputedly spending up to 16 hours a day in their hammocks.

The  ancient way of life still retains an undeniable appeal. Work among hunting-gathering bands was co-operative, social and highly varied; members were masters of many skills, rather than specialists in just a few. Social inequality of any sort scarcely existed. That you can still see in our villages where ladies perform farming , harvesting activités in groups singing and dancing. The business of obtaining food generally occupied fewer hours than a modern full-time job, though work included other tasks as well, such as smith but widening to include an entire

menagerie of artisans and functionaries. From around 7,000 years ago the first great cities arose, in Mesopotamia and then India , South and East Asia. And as societies grew in size and complexity, new working ar­ rangements appeared, from unfree servi­tude to self­employment and, crucially, wage labour.

This last category expanded with the rise of the first states and their armies; soldiers were among the first working peo­ple to earn a money wage. Wage labour and standardised, low­denomination coinage combined to produce economic magic, as true markets began to operate. Not only did these allow commerce to flourish, but by granting the freedom to choose when and how to earn a living, a marketplace for work may also have helped kindle a more individualistic outlook than other ar­ rangements encouraged.

It is interesting to see that the progress brought complications. War­ like and patriarchal societies—such as the Yamnaya of the Eurasian steppe, pastoral nomads who violently displaced matriar­ chal and egalitarian communities in Europe and South Asia from roughly 5,000 years ago—upended old norms and sowed the seeds of many modern ills. States har­nessed the labour of the masses in the construction of grand projects, from temples, churches, mausoleums to aqueducts, and in the destruction of rival civilisations.

Within and across societies, the power­ ful exploited the powerless. Whereas tradi­ tional histories often present drudges and slaves as anonymous extras in the dramas of luminaries, passive in the face of their unhappy fates, Lucassen affords them attention and agency. Africans waylaid by slavers often resisted to the death, he notes. In 1785 captives placed aboard the Dutch ship Neptunus rebelled and lit the gunpowder in its hold, preferring to kill themselves and their assailants than to submit to the lash.

If economic injustice is perennial, so is dissatisfaction and resistance to it. Throughout history, elites have deployed cosmologies, from ancient religions to modern political philosophies, in a bid to legitimise inequalities. Even so, vast dif­ ferences inevitably prompt backlashes: from the first known strike action, in the 12th century bc in the village of Deir el­Me­ dina in Egypt—which housed artisans gathered to work in the Valley of the Kings—to modern trade unionism and the political unrest sparked by globalisation and mechanisation.

Indeed, the most powerful impression left by “The Story of Work” is of continuity. The Industrial Revolution brought a decisive break in the capacity to increase eco­ nomic output. But the forces that made it possible—specialisation and trade, expan­ sion of markets, intensification of produc­tion—are age­old. So is the motivating power of the desire for more, from the Neo­ lithic enthusiasm for precious stones, which gave a spur to the making of tools; to the “industrious revolution” of the centu­ ries before industrialisation, in which an appetite for new consumer goods drove in­ creased participation in labour markets among both men and women; to the mod­ ern­day cult of the side hustle.

In the end the long perspective that the book provides is a mixed blessing. These days it is tempting to imagine that new technologies might mean a chance for workers to recapture the more appealing aspects of the prehistoric past. Were ma­ chines eventually able to handle all the world’s unpleasant tasks, people could spend more time on activities that they

sion of markets, intensification of produc­ tion—are age­old. So is the motivating power of the desire for more, from the Neo­ lithic enthusiasm for precious stones, which gave a spur to the making of tools; to the “industrious revolution” of the centu­ ries before industrialisation, in which an appetite for new consumer goods drove in­ creased participation in labour markets among both men and women; to the mod­ ern­day cult of the side hustle.

A must read .