A long view of work shows how little it has changed over millennia

The Story of Work. By Jan Lucassen. Yale University Press; 544 pages; $30 and £25

OF THE MANY habits and institutions on which covid-19 has shone a harsh light, none has been more exposed and disrupted than work. The pandemic has drawn attention to the disjuncture between the indispensability of certain jobs, from nursing to making deliveries, and how little they tend to pay. It left many workers bewilderingly idle, or stuck at a disorienting remove from their colleagues. Having downed their usual tools, the bored often took up Neolithic habits, like growing food or baking bread—ironically, given that it was the turn to agriculture, beginning some 12,000 years ago, which first set humankind on the path towards arduous work in dense cities, through which zoonotic diseases might one day run rampant.

“The Story of Work” by Jan Lucassen, a scholar at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, chronicles the long-term background to these jarring developments. The narrative begins with the hunting-and-gathering past, which accounts for most of humankind’s time as a distinct species. Hunter-gatherer life is often portrayed as Edenic. In fact, early societies could be violent, people often died young, and few enjoyed a leisurely existence—as the Cuiva do in South America...