The IISH Global Labour History approach, first formulated by Jan Lucassen and Marcel van der Linden in 1999, shifted the focus of our research agenda and that of many other labour historians.i From a predominantly national approach to labour history, we redirected our perspective to a more transnational and transcontinental comparative approach. Rather than focusing on the history of white male factory workers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we began to examine all forms of work and all types of workers, globally and over the last five hundred years