This issue is devoted to the anthropology of work and labour. The introduction attempts to outline some of the most general trends in anthropologists’ discussions of labour, tracing them back to the important socio-political and epistemological contexts in which the discipline developed. We begin with understandings of labour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the works of Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber. These classic accounts of labour have played a key role in ethnographic studies of labour and production. We then focus on the role of labour in functionalist and Marxist anthropology, pointing out the political and epistemological limitations of the discipline in the twentieth century, notably its Romantic origins and its blindness to Western colonialism. We then consider the place of postmodern and feminist critiques in anthropologists’ discussions of labour, and briefly review the main themes in labour studies at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The works included in the special issue will be presented in more detail as our narrative unfolds.