Jan Lucassen

In 2021, he published The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind, a global history of work, from prehistoric times until the present, published by Yale University Press. The book gained positive reviews in The Economist., The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The New Statesman, and Financial Times. The Economist listed the book as one of the best books of 2021, while it was also mentioned as the best book of 2021 by British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore in the BBC History Magazine. In a January 2022 online public lecture and discussion at the London School of Economics, Patrick Wallis described the book 'a culmination of decades of scholarship that is turned into an incredibly engaging book that opens up [the history of work] to a wide readership'.

In 1988 he joined the International Institute of Social History (IISH), where he set up the research department, and was IISH's Research Director until the end of 2000. Since then, he has been a Senior Research Fellow at the IISH and an Honorary Fellow since 2012. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2004. From 1990 until his retirement in 2012, he was Professor of International and Comparative Social History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Jan Lucassen is considered, together with Marcel van der Linden, as the founder of the Global Labour History approach, which advocates a worldwide perspective on the history of work and labour relations. Unlike classical labour history, Global Labour History does not focus solely on the male industrial worker in the North Atlantic region since the Industrial Revolution, but takes as its starting point the broadest possible definition of work, including domestic labour and various forms of forced labour. He is one of the principal instigators of IISH's Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, 1500-2000, in which a taxonomy of global labour relations was developed.

Johannes Mathias Wilhelmus Gerardus Lucassen (born 7 July 1947) is a Dutch historian. He studied history at Leiden University and obtained his PhD at Utrecht University in 1984 with Migrant Labour in Europe 1600-1900. The Drift to the North Sea (London, 1987). He specializes in the history of labour, the long-term development of labour relations, migration and monetisation in relation to the development of wage labour.