This volume examines Brazilian labour history, integrating issues of gender, race, and ethnicity by addressing topics such as free and unfree labour in the nineteenth-century Amazon, the transnational contexts of urban sex work, the intersection of ‘class’ and ‘community’ in a Sao Paulo workers’ bairro, and the (legal) struggles of sugar cane workers in Pernambuco. At the same time, this volume presents a renewed historiography of movements and organisations (often with an emphasis on transnational dimensions), covering issues from revolutionary syndicalism in Rio, through the role of World War II in the formation of Brazilian populism, to the intervention of US ‘free unionism’ during the military dictatorships in Brazil and Argentina. This volume goes beyond a survey of more recent Brazilian labour history and offers articles that enter into conscious dialogue with the debates and findings of scholarship in other world regions.