Peasent and proletarians

This book originated from discussions between P.C.W.G. and R.C. several years ago. The project we set ourselves then, and which in various ways, scholarly and practical, we are still working on now, was to establish a corpus of shared knowledge and understanding between scholars and activists interested in the study of workers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and between workers from the three continents in the advanced capitalist countries and their metropolitan counterparts. This reader is one of the major outcomes of our concern. It establishes a larger canvas for the study and comparison of workers throughout the world than any other volume we are familiar with. The list of references collected under "Further Reading" draws the attention of our readers to the hundreds of detailed monographs and studies of workers in individual countries conducted by many authors.

The twenty-one selections we have collected here represent but a fragment of this wider literature. We have selected items, first, on the basis of their scholarly importance, second, to provide a rough balance between the continents, third, on their political relevance, and finally, on their closeness to the themes that are identified in the five parts of the volume. Each part is provided with a separate editorial comment, while we have tried to identify more general issues in the introduction that opens the volume.

The collection of material for this book has been attended by many difficulties. We were fortunate in that through the good offices of Shirley Joshi of the Birmingham Polytechnic, P.B. was able to join us on a research placement to Birmingham University. There she undertook much of the preliminary work of compiling the bibliography, contacting authors, and securing permissions from publishers. The Faculty of Commerce and Social Science of Birmingham University provided some modest assistance for the large amount of photocopying of otherwise unobtainable items for inclusion in the book or bibliography. But the reader soon ran into a more serious problem-the scattering of the editors. P.B. left Britain for India and Pakistan, while R.C. departed for the Caribbean. To add to the difficulties of communication, P.C.W.G. had to periodically abandon his academic base in Montreal for examination duties and research in Africa. That the book didn't flounder at this point is because of three reasons.