This volume is the first of its kind to take a comprehensive and comparative historical perspective on labour and disability during the twentieth century. The project started in 2020 when the editors received a Research Initiation Grant from the Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond foundation to organise an international symposium. Recognising that historical research on disability varied across regions, with the symposium, we aimed to gather scholars from Eastern and Western Europe as well as North America and to facilitate an academic exchange on this topic. The symposium, which was hosted by Jönköping University and the Swedish Institute for Disability Research, brought together emerging and established scholars from ten countries and explored the nexus between disability and labour from a historical and comparative perspective. We decided early on to publish the conference papers, which eventually gave rise to the present volume.