The Origins of Worker Mobilisation

Reviews / Votes

"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 aEUR" over 30 years of excavating the history of workersaEUR (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 enormous variety of official and personal records, Michael Quinlan has created an updateable data base (the empirical material on which the book is based) from which the earliest history of class struggle in this country can be fully appreciated.

Diane Fieldes, Marxist Left Review

"This is perhaps the most significant book published for some time on Australian labour history...This is the work of a scholarly career...Michael Quinlan's documentation of labour resistance is formidable. As a historical work it will give some aid and comfort to those in the labour movement who believe that agitation does not require continuing organization in the form of unions."

John Michael O'Brien, University of Sydney

"[This work] by Quinlan in many respects constitutes an outstanding resource for coming to grips with the detail of the origins and development of Australian labour law specifically."

John Howe, University of Melbourne and Richard Mitchell, Monash University