Workers Across the Americas The Transnational Turn in Labor History

by Fink, Leon

• ISBN13: 9780199778553
• ISBN10: 0199778558
• Format: Paperback
• 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

Distinguished Professor of History, University of Illinois at Chicago. Author, The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (University of North Carolina, 2003); Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (Harvard, 1998); In Search of the Working Class: Essays in American Labor History and Political Culture (U. of Illinois, 1994); Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (U. of Illinois, 1983).

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xvii
Overview: The Challenge of Transnational Labor History
Another World History Is Possible: Reflections on the Translocal, Transnational, and Global	p. 3
Historians of the World: Transnational Forces, Nation-States, and the Practice of U.S. History	p. 12
Transnational Labor History: Promise and Perils	p. 18
Labor History as World History: Linking Regions over Time	p. 23
Overlapping Spaces: Transregional and Transcultural	p. 33
Transnational Migration: A New Historical Phenomenon?	p. 39
Labor and Empire
Introduction	p. 49
"black service ... white money": The Peculiar Institution of Military Labor in the British Army during the Seven Years' War	p. 57
"We Speak the Same Language in the New World": Capital, Class, and Community in Mexico's "American Century"	p. 81
Indigenous Peoples and Labor Systems
Introduction	p. 103
Indigenous Labor in Mid-Nineteenth-Century British North America: The Mi'kmaq of Cape Breton and Squamish of British Columbia in Comparative Perspective	p. 109
"De Facto Mexicans": Coffee Workers and Nationality on the Guatemalan-Mexican Border, 1931-1941	p. 136
International Feminism and Reproductive Labor
Introduction	p. 163
"No Right to Layettes or Nursing Time": Maternity Leave and the Question of U.S. Exceptionalism	p. 171
The Battle within the Home: Development Strategies and the Commodification of Caring Labors at the 1975 International Women's Year Conference	p. 194
Labor Recruitment and Immigration Control Introduction	p. 215
Feminizing White Slavery in the United States: Marcus Braun and the Transnational Traffic in White Bodies, 1890-1910	p. 221
Patronage and Progress: The Bracero Program from the Perspective of Mexico	p. 245
Unspoken Exclusions: Race, Nation, and Empire in the Immigration Restrictions of the 1920s in North America and the Greater Caribbean	p. 267
Transnational Labor Politics
Introduction	p. 295
Claiming Political Space: Workers, Municipal Socialism, and the Reconstruction of Local Democracy in Transnational Perspective	p. 303
A Migrating Revolution: Mexican Political Organizers and Their Rejection of American Assimilation, 1920-1940	p. 329
Labor Internationalism
Introduction	p. 355
Fugitive Slaves across North America	p. 363
Movable Type: Toronto's Transnational Printers, 1866-1872	p. 384
Global Sea or National Backwater?: The International Labor Organization and the Quixotic Quest for Maritime Standards, 1919-1945	p. 409
Contributors	p. 431
Index	p. 437
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.