In the last quarter century, early modern scholarship has expanded its borders to encompass literatures from languages outside of the European tradition, marking them as part of a global formation of early modernity. This session proposes to contribute to global early modern studies by asking about the nature, place and literary figuration of labor in works from the period. How is labor defined, fabricated, mobilized, mapoed, imagined, or deployed? How do characters showcase agency or the lack of it in terms of their labor and work? What geographies or temporal instantiations enable particular forms of labor to emerge as both historically and literarily contingent? How does the existence of labor at the margins shape global early modern literary and performance genres?