Moving Workers presents an important intervention in global labour history by centring the intertwined dynamics of im/mobility and coercion. Rejecting simplistic binaries of mobility as freedom, immobility as stasis, it demonstrates  that both are relational, contingent, and shaped by power. Mobility and immobility, alongside mobilisation and immobilisation, are shown to be co-constitutive within labour regimes. Using »rhythmanalysis«, the book reveals how mobility is not merely temporally and spatially structured, but layered within the social and economic relations that precede and follow it. Drawing on Linden’s taxonomy on moments of coercion – entry, extraction, and exit – the collection frames coercion as dynamic and processual. It is not only brute force but a set of social practices, encompassing negotiation, resistance, and adaptation. The book challenges the »mobility bias« in labour history, urging a historicised and relational reading of im/mobility.

Gabriele Marcon’s chapter examines the im/mobility of German-speaking miners in mid-sixteenth-century Medici Tuscany. High wages and social mobility lured German migrants, yet recruitment relied on a coercive network of advance-debt, contracts, and intermediaries. The advances enabled mobility but also immobilised miners in cycles of debt, obligation, and deductions. Harsh conditions, incarceration, and punitive inter-mine transfers exacerbated immobility. While local Tuscan labourers (hauliers, charcoal makers, carpenters, etc.) were bound to corvée duties, restricting their choice to work in family workshops and manufacturing in nearby towns, skilled German miners (e.g. Tegler and Glöggl) sometimes negotiated favourable terms, demanding profit shares, higher wages, and family benefits, blurring lines between autonomy and coercion. Marcon shows how choice and constraint co-operated, undermining any strict division between forced and voluntary migration.

Johan Heinsen traces Denmark’s carceral transformations from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Prisons extracted extramural labour for building fortifications and ships, while aiming to »reform« the disposable workforce into productive subjects. Yet inmates repeatedly resisted through escapes and revolts, which prompted institutional responses: chained gangs, relocations, and eventually rasphouses, which were high-security prisons centred on discipline and rehabilitation through hard labour. Heinsen argues that inmates’ resistance was shaped less by forced labour than by violations of prisoners’ moral economy manifested through the supply of bad and less food, humiliation, and arbitrary punishment. This fostered camaraderie among »brothers in misfortune« and intensified resistance. By the early nineteenth century, prisons adopted features of modern penitentiaries, privileging »security and isolation« over production: labour became symbolic and surveillance paramount. He contends that the modern penitentiary in Denmark arose not from Enlightenment ideals but from the state’s failure to subdue resistance.

Magnus Ressel explores how accounting practices enabled and legitimised the transatlantic slave trade. Through »prospectuses« (advertisements for investments) and the double-entry bookkeeping of Romberg’s Belgian slaving firm, enslaved Africans were abstracted into line items – costed, anticipated for loss, and commodified. These practices normalised violence, embedded economic rationality into brutality, and fostered a »cognitive shift«: enslaved people became capital for a profitable venture. Accounting, in Foucauldian terms, functioned as a powerful disciplinary technology legitimising exploitation structures. Even Enlightenment-era texts, like Gomicourt’s Le Voyageur, positioned slavery through the angle of national progress. Ressel challenges economic historians to confront the ethical implications of seemingly neutral tools like accounting in sustaining capitalist and colonial violence, which dehumanised labour and sustained slavery.

Vilhelm Vilhelmson and Emil Gunnlaugsson examine Iceland’s internal passport-based labour regime under Danish rule, where the labouring poor: farm servants, fishermen, and the »masterless«, were forced into annual contracts unless holding tenancy or recognised occupations. The 1781 law, requiring passports for inter-district travel, was meant to stabilise rural labour and render it »legible« to the state. While elites were largely exempt, poor labourers, including women, were disproportionately targeted and immobilised. Enforcement, however, was inconsistent due to weather, hospitality norms, and administrative limits. Resistance took the form of forged documents, clandestine movements, and leveraging community ties. This »subversive mobility« revealed how workers contested immobilisation and navigated the »slow violence« or the structural harm imposed by prolonged coercion.

Müge Özbek analyses the constrained im/mobility of early twentieth-century female domestic workers from rural Anatolia in elite Istanbul homes. Police records and legal codes show how class, gender, and state power intersected to infantilise and immobilise women. Families negotiated their placements and intercepted wages, while employers cloaked servitude in the language of charity and benevolence. Laws criminalising »unaccompanied« lower-class women on the streets empowered a »gendered form of urban policing.« The police, as »stand-in patriarchs«, enforced curfews and cleansed the public spaces under fears of supposed immorality. Özbek argues that these women, caught between roles of daughter, servant, and wife, and overtly policed by the family, state, and law, were a captive domestic workforce whose mobility and sexuality were severely restrained. However, their escapes, though often thwarted, revealed agency and defiance against the totalising reach of patriarchal and state authority.

Aigi Rahi-Tamm examines Estonia’s Sovietisation, focusing on collectivisation, land expropriation, and ideological coercion. Peasants’ property was seized, enterprises were nationalised, and work became a political duty. Dissent was punished with mass deportations. Between 1940 and 1953, 70 000 Estonians, mostly women, children, and the elderly, hardly »dangerous criminals«, were exiled. Propaganda, fear, and deportations enabled 92 per cent of farms to be collectivised. The Estonians equated the Kolkhozes with serfdom, inefficiency, and rural poverty. Many resisted state surveillance and violence through hiding or voluntary exile, resulting in »self-dekulakisation«. In the post-Stalin era, many deportees who were allowed to return faced »double marginalisation« and »second deportation« as they were denied access to their former homes and land and stigmatised. This »biographical rupture« , Rahi-Tamm argues, constituted »the most painful and lasting memories« in the Baltic people’s history. Yet, Estonian resistance against coerced im/mobility persisted in the form of innovative survival skills and cultural endurance.

Claudia Bernardi examines the Bracero Program (1942–1964) as a coercive regime where mobility and immobility jointly structured labour control, subjectivity, and value extraction. Every stage from recruitment to employment generated value through debts, bribes, forged documents, and waiting periods. Waiting times extracted value as workers were often hired locally; their necessities proliferated local economies, while employers benefited from a surplus labour pool and enhanced bargaining power. When hired, contracts and deportation threats immobilised workers, masking coercion as voluntarism. This regime commodified and valorised both mobility and stasis, producing compliant and docile subjects, and profits for mediating agencies from the existing structural vulnerabilities. Bernardi argues that immobility was productive in shaping labour subjectivities: aspirations, behaviours, and values. The Bracero Program thus redefined labour migration as a terrain of continuous im/mobilisation and value extraction.

Angelina Kussy shows Romanian women’s im/mobility in Spain’s care sector through a generational history of progressive dispossession. Under communism (1949-62), collectivisation replaced kinship relations and control over one’s labour with imposed wage work as the only form of social reproduction. While under the neoliberal reforms from the 1970s-90s, conservative gender discourses repositioned women primarily as carers rather than workers, and privatisation caused mass unemployment and erosion of the earlier social safety nets (e.g. pensions, maternity and child care benefits). Migration, thus, emerged as a survival mechanism. Yet while women moved physically, they remained socially and politically immobilised in undervalued care work. Caught in global »care chains«, Romanian women were an indispensable yet immobilised workforce, funding families and children’s education back home while enduring precarity abroad. Kussy shows how historical dispossession and contemporary market forces intersected to produce »immobile global carers«, trapped by both im/mobility and obligation.

In his afterword, Thomas Nail offers a kinetic theory of history. Rejecting static, anthropocentric views, he sees culture as fractal and dissipative, mirroring natural systems, and driven by movement. Yet capitalism’s hyper-acceleration distorts these patterns, causing ecocide and epistemicide. Positioning schismogenesis as central to cultural evolution, Nail argues that migrants embody fractal cultural production, which remains foundational yet marginalised. Coercion, in contrast, fixes or misdirects motion, as witnessed under colonialism and capitalism. Nail calls for understanding human societies through a planetary pluriverse perspective, one that abandons the mobility/immobility dichotomy and recognises all cultural forms as mixtures of movement and containment. This work and Nail’s vision provide a conceptual base for future works to explore the pluriversalities embedded in the global histories of labour and migration beyond Europe’s spatial-temporal and cultural frame.