Workers Across the Americas The Transnational Turn in Labor History

by Fink, Leon

• ISBN13: 9780199731633
• ISBN10: 0199731632
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-04-13
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The first major volume to place U.S.-centered labor history in a transnational or U.S.-in-the-world focus, Workers Across the Americas collects the newest work of leading Canadianist, Caribbeanist, and Latin American specialists, as well as U.S. historians. As distinct from comparative histories built around the integrity of their nation-state subjects, these essays highlight both the supra- or sub-national aspect of selected topics without ignoring the power of nation-states themselves as historical forces. Indeed, the transnational focus opens new avenues for understanding changes in the concepts, policies and practice of states, their interactions with each other and their populations, and the ways in which the popular classes resist, react, and use both nation-state and non-state entities to advance their interests. What does this transnational turn encompass? And what are its likely perils as well as promise as a framework for research and analysis? To address these questions six eminent scholars (John French, Julie Greene, Neville Kirk, Aviva Chomsky, Dirk Hoerder, and Vic Satzewich) lead off the volume with their own critical commentaries on the very project of transnational labor history. Their responses effectively offer a tour of explanations, tensions, and cautions in the evolution of a new arena of research and writing. Thereafter, Workers Across the Americas groups fifteen research essays around themes of Labor and Empire, Indigenous Peoples and Labor Systems, International Feminism and Reproductive Labor, Labor Recruitment and Immigration Control, Transnational Labor Politics, and Labor Internationalism. Topics range from military labor in the British Empire to coffee workers on the Guatemalan/Mexican border to the Atlantic white slavery traffic to the role of the International Labor Organization in attempting to set common labor standards. Leading scholars--including Camille Guerin-Gonzalez, Alex Lichtenstein, Nelson Lichtenstein, Colleen O'Neill, Premilla Nadasen, and Bryan Palmer--introduce each section and also make recommendations for further reading.

Author Biography

Leon Fink is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago and editor of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas.

Table of Contents

Preface
Leon Fink

I. Beyond Borders: The Challenge of Transnational Labor History
Introduction: Another 'World' History Is Possible: Latin Americanist Reflections on Translocal, Transnational, and Global History
John French

Chapter 1: Historians of the World: Transnational Forces, Nation-States, and the Practice of U.S. History
Julie Greene

Chapter 2: Transnational Labor History: Promise and Perils
Neville Kirk

Chapter 3: Labor History as World History: Linking Regions over Time
Aviva Chomsky

Chapter 4: Overlapping Spaces: Transregional and Transcultural
Dirk Hoerder

Chapter 5: Transnational Migration: A New Historical Phenomenon?
Vic Satzewich

II. Labor and Empire
Introduction
Alex Lichtenstein

Chapter 6: "Black service . . . white money": The Peculiar Institution of Military Labor in the British Army during the Seven Years' War
Peter Way

Chapter 7: "We Speak the Same Language in the New World": Capital, Class, and Community in Mexico's "American Century"
Steven Bachelor

III. Indigenous Peoples and Labor Systems
Introduction
Colleen O'Neill

Chapter 8: Indigenous Labor in Mid-Nineteenth-Century British North America: The Mi'kmaq of Cape Breton and Squamish of British Columbia in Comparative Perspective
Andrew Parnaby

Chapter 9: "De Facto Mexicans": Coffee Workers and Nationality on the Guatemalan/Mexican Border, 1931-1941
Catherine Nolan-Ferrell

IV. International Feminism and Reproductive Labor
Introduction
Premilla Nadasen

Chapter 10: "No Right to Layettes or Nursing Time": Maternity Leave and the Question of United States Exceptionalism
Eileen Boris

Chapter 11: The Battle Within the Home: International Women's Year 1975 and the Debate Over Development Feminism, and the Commodification of Caring Labors
Jocelyn Olcott

V. Labor Recruitment and Immigration Control
Introduction
Camille Guérin-Gonzales

Chapter 12: Feminizing White Slavery in the United States: Marcus Braun and the Transnational Traffic in White Bodies, 1890-1910
Gunther Peck

Chapter 13: Patronage and Progress: The Bracero Program from the Perspective of Mexico
Michael Snodgrass

Chapter 14: Unspoken Exclusions: Race, Nation, and Empire in the Immigration Restrictions of the 1920s in North America and the Greater Caribbean
Lara Putnam

VI. Transnational Labor Politics
Introduction
Bryan D. Palmer

Chapter 15: Reclaiming Political Space: Workers, Municipal Socialism and the Reconstruction of Local Democracy in Transnational Perspective
Shelton Stromquist

Chapter 16: A Migrating Revolution: Mexican Political Organizers and their Rejection of American Assimilation, 1920-40
John H. Flores

VII. Labor Internationalism
Introduction
Nelson Lichtenstein

Chapter 17: Fugitive Slaves Across North America
Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie

Chapter 18: Movable Type: Toronto's Transnational Printers, 1866-1872
Jacob Remes

Chapter 19: Global Sea or National Backwater? The ILO, Protective Subsidies, and the Shoals of Solidarity
Leon Fink

Contributors
Index