Part One: From the British Pioneer to the Global Labor Historian

Histories of Labour “documents the development of the subject in a variety of countries around the world” and commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of the Society for the Study of Labour History (SSLH), the main labor history organization in Britain (7). With essays by the editors themselves and other experts drawn from Britain and abroad, the collection is, as the editors claim, “the first text” in the labor history field “dedicated to historiography and related organizational developments” (1, 14).

The countries selected are Britain, Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, India, and Japan. In addition, the book “concludes with a plea for global labour history” (15). The editors note that the restricted geographical focus and ipso facto, “incomplete” nature of the collection result from the facts that “Latin America, North Africa and Russia have been discussed elsewhere” and that a “variety of reasons denied us contributions from France, South Africa and China” (15). At the same time it should be observed that the preface and three of the eleven chapters concentrate mainly on Britain, while another five chapters focus on former colonies of the “mother country.”

This predominant focus on Britain and “the British world” is understandable in a volume seeking, at least in part, to celebrate, albeit critically and professionally, the formation of the UK Society and its pioneering role in the development and geographical spread of labor history. At the same time, I feel that in a collection providing both “National and International Perspectives,” a good opportunity has been missed to cast the geographical net wider. For example, since the 1960s there has been a growing interest among labor historians of the Middle East in questions of class, language, community, and, to a lesser extent, women and gender and challenges to the traditionally dominant paradigms of Orientalism and modernization theory.Footnote ² Brazil, complete with its vibrant interest among labor and other historians, in populism, corporatism, class, dependency, migration, and transnationalism, also constitutes both an important study in its own right and a fascinating point of comparison with northern and western countries.Footnote ³ These and other case studies could usefully have been incorporated into Histories of Labour.

In addition, a question mark must be raised against the guiding, if predominantly implicit, assumption of the book that the nation state is the labor historian's “natural” area of investigation. To be sure, labor historians have for the most part traditionally concentrated upon “the national” rather than other spaces and places. Only one chapter in Histories of Labour explores labor history beyond national borders. But given the recent increase in transnationalism and the questioning of the traditional centrality of “the national” by historians of empire and other subject areas, one might reasonably have expected a far more extended discussion of the problematic nature of the national focus.Footnote ⁴

A good opportunity has also been missed to include more women and younger scholars in the cast of contributors. The collection as a whole is dominated by male labor history veterans. While their contributions reflect the considerable virtues of experience and proven expertise, they are lacking in some instances in that sense of innovation and due attention to the issues of language, identity, gender, race, and transnationalism more frequently found among younger and, in some instances, women scholars. Labor history in Britain and many other countries has suffered from the perception, however exaggerated and in some cases mistaken, that it is past its “sell by date,” especially with reference to the age profile of many of its mainly male academic practitioners and its traditionally central concern with the question of social class. Although young age and the female gender are by no means guarantees of high academic quality and advanced and old age are not necessary marks of “decline,” it would have redounded greatly to the credit of labor history in Britain and its potential to re-energize itself for the editors to have recruited more younger, especially women, scholars to their team.

It is also important to observe that Histories of Labour is far too concerned with labor history as practiced mainly by mainstream and ‘respectable' professional academics in the “old” British universities. As a result, there is no attention to the development of the subject in the UK polytechnics and the “new” universities in Scotland and Wales and in the English localities and regions. This regrettable absence is compounded by the fact that the non-British chapters concentrate far more upon the institutional and academic rather than the public and “popular” characteristics of labor history in their chosen places.

Yet we must be careful not to allow the weaknesses of the collection to negate its considerable strengths. For example, the preface, over half of the introduction, and chapters one to four provide the reader with a good overview of the main concerns and standing of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and Irish labor historians. In the preface, Eric Hobsbawm attributes Britain's reputation as the 1960s labor history pioneer to the “sheer size” of the country's “community of active practitioners,” the “high quality of some of the work produced,” and “the uniquely strong and visible presence in national life” of the British industrial working class and the labor movement (3). Many of Britain's leading left-wing labor historians of the time sought to advance the position and appeal of the Left “through historical reflection,” according to Hobsbawm (5). As noted in the introduction, we may add that 1960s and early 1970s radical labor history in Britain, North America, and elsewhere gained much from its close association with students and others involved in the anti-Vietnam and pro-civil rights, socialist, and socialist-feminist movements of the time.

Labor history's “golden age” of the 1960s and 1970s gave way in Britain and elsewhere to decline from the 1980s onward. The latter has been particularly marked in England. For example, membership of the UK Society, based largely in England, has declined precipitously, from 1,000 in 1980 to “around 200 members with a further 150 subscriptions” today (30, 31). The increasingly narrow concentration of much English labor history in the universities and its failure to establish a strong public imprint, including links with the labor movement, have not helped. In contrast, and despite some problems, such as the decline of key “local” occupations, the English regional societies and, more especially, the “sister societies” in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland have been far more adept than the Society in cultivating these links, sustaining a public presence and retaining members.Footnote ⁵

McIlroy, Campbell, and Allen present the convincing argument that British labor history's decline must be sought far more in a combination of adverse government and higher-education funding policies, the subject's lack of a “strong identity,” and strategic bargaining position within the universities, the decline of the labor movement and socialism, and the increasing specialization and fragmentation of history as a discipline than to the frequently encountered view that the subdiscipline has largely put its intellectual head in the sand since the 1980s and suffered accordingly (13). They rightly maintain that, from the 1960s to the present, class has remained a central rather than an exclusive concern of British labor history and that the subject as a whole has been characterized by flexibility, pragmatism, diversity, and pluralism rather than rigidity, dogmatism, and narrowness. They also make the more debatable claims that labor historians have embraced rather than resisted the study of language, while simultaneously opposing linguistic “determinism” and have integrated “gender, ethnicity and other forms of oppression” into their studies (8–14).

Further evidence may be marshalled in support of British labor history's enduring vitality and pluralism. For example, as clearly demonstrated by Allen and Malcolm Chase in chapter two and Campbell and McIlroy in chapter three, labor historians of Britain from 1750 to 1900 and the twentieth century, respectively, have greatly advanced our knowledge and understanding of a very impressive range and depth of issues, debates, topics, and themes. These embrace, inter alia, class and status, culture and structure, religion and recreation, continuity and change, the workplace and the home, male and female workers, personal and collective biography, and communities, trade unions, employers, governments and the state, popular politics (including non- and anti-labor politics), language, ethnicity, race, as well as local, regional, and national studies. These studies, moreover, have not only greatly enhanced the status of labor history, but have also at times (see, for example, the works of Thompson and Hobsbawm) brought about major paradigm shifts in history and the social sciences. McIlroy's thoroughly researched and most impressive study of “The Society for the Study of Labour History after Fifty Years” (chapter 1), further demonstrates the national and international importance of the leading lights of the Society, especially in its early years, and their ability, as pioneers, to set the national and even global historical agenda. While largely “absent” from mainstream historiography and the latter's dominant concerns with religion and a high-politics approach to Anglo-Irish relations, labor history in Ireland has, as outlined by Emmet O'Connor and Connor McCabe in chapter four, made an important contribution to the study of trade unionism, nation, class, religion, emigration, industrial relations, and women's studies.

While labor history in Britain and Ireland is thus plainly not a dinosaur, it has no reason to be complacent. As Campbell and McIlroy observe, the labor history of twentieth century Britain “on the whole” has remained “our island story” (114). This has also been the case, albeit to a lesser extent, for the nineteenth century. Studies of labor in the British Empire and the Anglophone “British World” still remain very thin on the ground. In both Britain and Ireland, there is also considerable scope to investigate in more detail the issues of language, gender, race, and ethnicity while the challenges of cross-national comparative, transnational, and global history have not been met to any great extent. While I agree with McIlroy that “we,” or perhaps more accurately a minority within, the labor history community in Britain, continued “through the 1990s” to respond “energetically” to “new times and projects,” there is still much to be done to bring British labor history as a whole into full engagement with new and exciting intellectual trends (43).

A similarly mixed conclusion may be applied to the international labor history scene covered in chapters five to ten of Histories of Labour. In chapter five, Elizabeth Faue usefully describes the ways in which labor history in the US has undoubtedly acted as an important stimulus to the study of history “from below,” with reference to both the labor movement and the wider social and political history of workers and their relations with other groups. Following the pioneering lead set by Herbert Gutman, David Montgomery, David Brody, Alice Kessler-Harris, Eugene Genovese, and Melvyn Dubofsky, US labor historians have excelled in the areas of institutions, class, culture, slavery, race, gender, and ethnicity. They have also strongly influenced the overall shape and direction of history in general. The recent upsurge of interest in transnationalism, moreover, demonstrates that US labor historians are engaged in widening their interests and perspectives. As in England, there is, however, a need for predominantly university-based US labor history to develop a much stronger base in the community and labor movement, to be less introverted and to more extensively incorporate subject areas such as cross-national comparative labor and labor and empire into its analytical framework.

Canadian labor history has traditionally been influenced by both national and regional “peculiarities” and historiographies. This has manifested itself strongly in the contrast between the French- and particularly Annales-inspired historiography of workers in Quebec and the British Marxists' and US social historians' strong imprint upon the study of labor in “English Canada.” As in the US, Canadian labor history has exerted a powerful influence upon the discipline of history as a whole. This results in large measure from the excellent contributions made by Bryan Palmer, Joan Sangster, Greg and Linda Kealey, Franca Iacovetta, and others to debates concerning class and culture, Marxist historiography, comparative history, the “linguistic turn,” postmodernism, women's history, and gender history. As argued by Palmer in his thoughtful and engaging contribution (chapter six), the ongoing inter- and multidisciplinary character of Canadian labor history, particularly around issues of race and gender as well as class, augurs well for the future.

The future of Australian labor history, at least in the seasoned and reasoned view of Greg Patmore in chapter seven, also appears to be reasonably bright. Under the strong guiding influence of Patmore himself, Terry Irving, Stuart MacIntyre, Ray Markey, Raelene Frances, Lucy Taksa, and many others, Australian labor history has and continues to be highly innovative, adaptive, and influential in terms of general historiography. In addition to its traditional strengths in politics and workplace relations, it has smoothly incorporated, sometimes in a pioneering way, more recent concerns with gender, race, comparative, and transnational history into its framework. It has also established a useful presence not only in the universities, but also, in the manner of the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish societies, in the public sphere, including the labor movement. The main future challenge will be to safeguard this twofold presence in the face of the dwindling popularity of labor history among students and the declining appeal of the Australian Labor Party (ALP).

Unlike Australia, labor history in Germany has not been traditionally strong and influential. As the late Klaus Tenfelde demonstrates in chapter eight, mainly conservative “political and national conceptions of history” have traditionally dominated history as a subject area. Although it flourished in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), albeit within an official straitjacket, it was only in the contexts of the radical protests of the 1960s and the intellectual influences of the Annales school, Max Weber and Anglo-American social and labor historians and Marxists, that labor history began to flourish in West Germany. Since then it has made very good, and at times outstanding, contributions to the study of social democracy, the rise of National Socialism, comparative German and mainly British labor, social and political history, and the “everyday life” of workers. It would be fascinating and instructive to learn more about post-1960s German labor history outside the universities and its national, regional, and local characteristics and development since reunification.

It is in India and other places in the global South, with very different socioeconomic structures and experiences to those of the industrialized West, that some of the most exciting and innovative recent developments in labor history have taken place. In challenging the core-periphery “Eurocentrism” of labor history, Rana P. Behal, Chitra Joshi, and Prabhu P. Mohapatra focus in chapter nine upon the Indian historiography of “modernizers,” Marxists, nationalists, Subaltern scholars, and cultural and social historians, and the benefits to be gained from the study of the “free” and “unfree” industrial workforce, the “informal sector and the labouring poor,” caste, religion and community, migration, artisans, women, peasants, and plantation labor. The objective is to use these studies as the basis for “a new, comparative global history” (307).

Part of labor history's “globalizing” future will be to study the complex relationships between the “national”—especially supposed national peculiarities and exceptions—the “sub-national,” the “international,” the “transnational,” and the “global.” In this context, the experience of Japan is interesting. As demonstrated by Takao Matsumara, McIlroy, and Campbell in chapter ten, Japan constitutes a “distinctive” but not “unique” example of later industrialization than the West. It undertook, furthermore, “its own path to modernization,” developed “its own form of imperialism,” and was not colonized. Japanese labor was “marked by the actions of a state actively committed to capitalist development and by the world of the peasantry from which it emerged” (315). Yet some of the “singular” characteristics of Japanese labor and capital, such as the migrant roots of the working class and “the persistent attempts of capital and the state to integrate labour into the national community and eradicate trade unionism,” could fruitfully form part of a transnational and cross-national comparative research project into the nature and formation of working classes and state and employer attitudes and strategies towards labor (316–20).

The issues of comparison and transnationalism lead logically to an evaluation of the final contribution to the collection. In chapter eleven, “Labour History beyond Borders,” Marcel van der Linden makes his familiar clarion call for “global labour history,” liberated from labor history's past straitjackets of “Eurocentrism” and “methodological nationalism.” Van der Linden anticipates that global labor history will be comparative and transnational in character with a focus upon a “reconceptualized” and “broad” working class, its “labor relations,” and “social movements” in a variety of sites of production, consumption, and reproduction across the globe, and “commodity chains” and other processes linking workers across a variety of places and spaces. The time span envisaged will be extensive: from “the growth of the world market” during the fourteenth century. In the context of the increasing “globalization” of labor history in the South and the fact that we are living in a “globalized” world, this call is most opportune, if also, as readily admitted by van der Linden himself, extremely ambitious and demanding. For its successful realization, global labor history will require far more international and transnational collaboration and collective effort than has been mainly the case in the past. Fortunately, there are signs, as seen in recent conferences, publications, and the establishment of research teams in both the global South and the West, that such collaborative work is already taking place.

As seen in the cases of “English Canada,” “French Quèbec,” and Japan above, a central question raised by van der Linden's stimulating chapter concerns the status and place of national and subnational studies in the brave new world of global labor history. Will the latter fully recognize the continuing importance of “the national” and engage with it accordingly? After all, national and subnational, as well as transnational, experiences have historically strongly informed workers' lives and identities of place and space, and in all likelihood they will continue to do so. Or will the dominant tendency be to downgrade the “national” in the mistaken assumption that the “transnational” is necessarily superior? Does there exist the even more dangerous possibility that the latter becomes in practice a substitute for the former?

Van der Linden's reply is seemingly unambiguous. In seeking to “integrate the insights of the old and new labor history within a new perspective,” and in studying “the global interconnections” between “experiences and actions,” the global labor historian will include the “national” as one possible location within the global framework of reference (362–64, 370–72). Yet there remains the doubt in my mind that van der Linden has not fully considered the potentially problematic relationship between the national and extranational levels. This is seen, for example, in his treatment of the “new” labor history, as reflected in E.P. Thompson's magisterial book, The Making of the English Working Class (1963).

While full of praise for this “great book,” a “landmark publication,” van der Linden criticizes Thompson for being “imprisoned in the old, limited, perspective” of national (my italics) boundaries, for reconstructing “the process of class formation in England (in the period between 1792 and 1832) as a self-contained process,” and for seeing “external forces” upon the “making” of the English working class as being “foreign” and “background” in character. The Making, moreover, “pays no attention” to “imperial connections,” colonialism, and the question of racial ties and conflicts, according to van der Linden (357–358).

Two observations may be offered. First, global labor historians must surely exercise due modesty, accuracy, and respect for work rooted in different paradigms, geographical frameworks, and historical contexts than their own. They dismiss or diminish the importance of national and subnational texts, and especially those such as the superbly crafted, The Making, at their peril. For example, it is surely a matter of debate, rather than van der Linden's assumption of fact, as to whether Thompson did perceive the French Revolution (and we may add the American Revolution and the works of Tom Paine) as constituting more than “foreign,” “background,” and even “important background” influences upon working-class making in England. While Thompson's overriding concern in The Making, furthermore, lay with the question of class in an English context (full and proper attention to Scotland, Wales, and Ireland meriting separate works), he was acutely aware, in his historical and political body of writing as a whole, of the importance of the wider national, imperial, and international contexts and influences upon Britain and its history, including the history of the working class. These included the Empire, colonialism, and “race.”Footnote ⁶

Second, we must offer a genuine, but suitably critical welcome to transnational and global labor history. While describing myself as a comparative and transnational historian, I do not see global labor history as a universal remedy for all the ills of the subdiscipline and transnationalism as the only “true” future for labor historians.Footnote ⁷ I consider comparative and transnational history to be extremely valuable in that they invite us to widen our terms of reference beyond the traditionally dominant national framework. Resort to the crossnational comparative method, whereby we compare two or more case studies and tease out and explain commonalities, similarities, and differences between or among them, enables us better to decide whether nationally based assumptions, “peculiarities,” and “exceptions” are indeed correct. It also allows us to enrich, rather than dismiss, the levels of the national and the subnational. As outlined by the historian of Latin America, John French, transnationalism links “supra-national processes” (for example, imperialism, capitalism, and industrialization) and “extra-national connections” (encounters, links, exchanges, and influences of people, ideas, and institutions across national boundaries). Although less “new” than claimed by French, transnational and global history have the potential to extend and deepen our knowledge and understanding of notions and identities of place and space, especially during different phases of “globalization.”Footnote ⁸

At the same time, I have firsthand experience of the considerable difficulties involved in writing comparative and transnational history, which is sensitive to context, complexity and contradiction, contingency, change and continuity; which is firmly rooted in primary as well as secondary sources; and which engages fully with relevant methodological and conceptual as well as substantive issues. As Campbell and McIlroy observe, “without rigorous method and the distillation and deployment of intensive and extensive original research, transnational histories can collapse into mechanical juxtaposition of sometimes flawed secondary accounts and facile conclusions” (123).

It is now incumbent upon van der Linden, as the main champion of global labor history, to show the ways in which his own work in this area has moved from a general clarion call to substantial empirical demonstration of the applied benefits of the global perspective. In the process he will be obliged, for example, to demonstrate the ways in which politics, culture, and labor movements may be successfully integrated into his broad and predominantly socioeconomic scheme for global labor history, and more fully to engage with the relevant studies of other scholars. As a result, he may well reach the conclusion that his proposals are in key respects far less novel than claimed. For example, many “new” US labor historians are by now veterans of the study of a “broad” working class in which slavery and freedom, race, ethnicity and gender, the factory, the workshop, the fields, and the home have been constituent elements, and in which “core-periphery,” “Eurocentrism,” and methodological nationalism have been rejected.

The editors express the hope that Histories of Labour will “prove useful to academics and students of history and related disciplines because of the authoritative but accessible introductions it provides to how things stand around the globe” (15). At various points in this essay, I have expressed reservations about aspects of the collection, especially gaps in its focus and coverage and the paucity of women and relatively young and new researchers among its editorial and contributory personnel. The book would also benefit from the inclusion of a full chapter, rather than a brief section (15–21), explicitly pulling together the similarities and differences of the selected national case studies. Notwithstanding these limitations and absences, Histories of Labour is undoubtedly an indispensable point of reference for labor historians across the world.

Part Two: The Transnational Turn

All those interested in either putting van der Linden's manifesto into practice or developing another kind of transnational labor history, will benefit from engagement with further examples of recent and current practice in the field. In this context the main objective of Part Two is to provide a critical review of Fink's important edited collection, Workers across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History (2011). Part Two also provides a brief guide to other relevant publications.

Fink claims that Workers across the Americas is “the first broad intellectual response by labor and working-class historians to what we might call the ‘trans-national turn' in historical studies”(xi). But this is not true. For example, some of the contributors to Jan Lucassen's 2006 ambitious and wide-ranging edited volume, Global Labour History: A State of the Art, directly concerned themselves with transnational and global issues.Footnote ⁹ In 2009 and 2010, Donald Macraild, Melanie Nolan, and I edited two issues of Labour History Review, concerned mainly with the transnational labor history of Europe, Britain, the US, and New Zealand. These issues developed out of the UK Society's conference, “A World of Labour: Transnational and Comparative History,” held at the University of Ulster in September 2008. During the same month the conference that gave rise to Fink's edited book was held at the Newberry Library in Chicago. It was organized by Labor. September 2008 was also the month in which an important transnational labor history conference took place in South Africa, a thriving center of transnationalism.Footnote ¹⁰ Although it, therefore, is not “the first broad intellectual response,” Fink's book nevertheless constitutes a valuable, if limited, attempt to extend the transnational focus beyond the US to the wider Americas. Much to its credit, it also brings to our attention the findings of women and younger, as well as older, male scholars and sets the issues of gender and race firmly within its compass.

It is divided into seven parts. In Part One, John D. French, Julie Greene, Aviva Chomsky, Dirk Hoerder, Vic Satzewich, and I address many of the conceptual and methodological issues facing transnational scholars. This section of the book contains French's convincing definition of transnationalism and clearly delineates many of the strengths and pitfalls of the subject area. Since these have been outlined earlier in this essay, it is unnecessary to rehearse them further. It is important, however, to add that Greene persuasively counsels US labor historians against the adoption of an introverted, elitist, and hegemonic US focus in relation to the transnational labor history of the Americas as a whole; that Chomsky usefully reminds us that colonialism, as a “process of the transnational movement and the exploitation of labor,” “fundamentally shaped the modern world”(24); and that Hoerder and Satzewich clearly demonstrate to present-minded sociologists that networking and the formation of multiple identities are by no means restricted to recent and current transnational migrants.

Part One is both stimulating and instructive. It is followed by six other sections. In terms of the book's central concern with framing a labor history response to the “transnational turn” and, we may add, ipso facto responding to van der Linden's clarion call, these sections are more limited and uneven in character. For example, the two substantive essays in Part Two by Peter Way, entitled “Labor and Empire,” on military labor in the imperial British army during the Seven Years' War (1756–1763) and Steven Bachelor on the Ford Motor Company's establishment of automobile production in postwar Mexico, fail sufficiently to explain to the reader how they engage with and make a new contribution to the general study of transnationalism. This is not to deny their considerable virtues as original and thought-provoking empirical case studies in their own right. Way, moreover, offers the potentially fruitful definition of imperial soldiers as transnational workers, “straddling the axis of free and unfree labor” (58), while Bachelor's provides a novel attempt to integrate the study of Mexican nationalism and development with US attempts to promote the “American way of life” by means of Ford's “imperial” presence in Mexico. Yet neither author seizes the opportunity explicitly to inform the reader of the full implications of their specific studies either for the study of transnationalism as a whole or its imperial aspect.

In the Introduction to Part Two, Alex Lichtenstein calls for future researchers to build on the work of Way and Bachelor and “integrate an imperial perspective into our studies of transnational and global labor history” (53). While I fully share this sentiment, I think that it will be necessary for these researchers to engage with the existing literature on labor and empire in a way that it is not undertaken in either Part Two or the collection as a whole. In this context, American colleagues could benefit from familiarity with the recent and current historiography of workers' transnational encounters, connections, and exchanges within the British Empire and the “British world.”Footnote ¹¹

A similar lack of in-depth engagement with the relevant body of transnational historiography is also evident in Andrew Parnaby's otherwise impressive comparative study in Part Three, “Indigenous Peoples and Labor Systems,” of the mid-nineteenth century native Mi'kmaw people of Cape Breton and the Squamish of British Columbia. At the same time, however, both Colleen O'Neill, in the introduction to Part Three, and Parnaby have no doubt that his comparative analysis is also transnational in character. This is because it “not only explores historical change in more than one politically bounded territory” in “British North America, but also examines phenomena that cut across these political borders—namely, colonialism, capitalism, and movement of people” (112).

From this point onward the collection becomes more directly transnational. For example, the second chapter in Part Three, Catherine Nolan-Ferrell's insightful study of coffee workers and nationality on the Guatemalan-Mexican border, 1931–1941, attends to a key area of transnational research: the development of exclusionary racist nation-building practices alongside reliance on transnational migrant labor. Nolan-Ferrell clearly illustrates the conflict between, on the one hand, the “national” and, on the other hand, the “transnational” by showing that during periods of economic downturn during the 1930s and 1940s the Mexican and Guatemalan authorities sought to restrict access to work and land to their “own” coffee workers and to define them “from above” in terms of nationality and race. In contrast, these self-same coffee workers and their forebears living on the borderland of Mexico and Guatemala, had traditionally moved across the border “with relative ease” in order to seek work. They, moreover, continued to challenge “from below” the “narrow definitions of nationality” imposed on them in times of economic adversity. They continued to relate closely to their fellow Mexican and Guatemalan coffee workers and the transnational personal and community bonds they had built up over time. In short, Nolan-Ferrell's case study raises important questions about the relationships between national and transnational patterns of labor migration, work, community, and identity and the “protective” racialized policies of national inclusion and exclusion.

These questions also strongly inform sections of Part Five, “Labor Recruitment and Immigration Control.” As Camille Guerin-Gonzales states in her informative introduction, one of the key tasks of Part Five is to explore “the uneasy tension between exclusionary practices of nation building in the early years of the twentieth century and the continued reliance of the United States on the transnational migration of labor”(215). This task is superbly fulfilled by Lara Putnam in what is, in my opinion, the pick of the essays in the collection (Chapter 15). Focusing upon the extensive, explicitly race-based immigration restrictions set in place in North America and the Caribbean during the 1920s, Putnam fully exposes the conflict between commitments to relatively open borders, transnational migration, and, particularly at times of strain and crisis, the erection of national and imperial “race-based” limitations and exclusions. A combination of “eugenicist rhetoric,” “international pressures, national policies and global economic crisis,” and, we might add, the post-1917 international fear of the “spreading” Bolshevik “menace,” underpinned the new restrictionist and exclusionist orthodoxy in the US and the Caribbean. Britain's “acquiescence” and “tepid response” to the exclusion of British subjects of African and Asian ancestry by “nation and after nation” across the Americas also undermined “the fiction” of “race-blind” imperial equity(268, 287–89).

Putnam's chapter is accompanied by two others in Part Five. First, in a fascinating essay Gunther Peck explores the attempts of the state, in the form of the US Bureau of Immigration's chief undercover detective, to investigate and outlaw “coerced” immigrant contract labor and increasingly that of “enslaved” and trafficked white female prostitutes from Europe to the US between 1900 and 1910. Second, Michael Snodgrass usefully explores the neglected area of “the historical impact of emigration and return migration on Mexico” (245). This is undertaken largely as an exercise in oral history with reference to the experiences of returned Mexican migrants who had participated in the Bracero Program, “a migratory labor agreement,” largely rural in character, negotiated between Mexico and the United States during the Second World War but which lasted until 1964. Snodgrass's study acts as a timely reminder that transnationalism involves attention not only to social structure, but also to the cultural dimensions of “experience,” consciousness, and representation.

As labor historians have long realized, organized workers' voices and those of other radical activists concerning national and international issues are usefully to be located in international meetings of various kinds. Yet transnational scholars can bring something new or relatively neglected to this subject area in that they can be more attentive to the transnational and global matters discussed at these gatherings by transnational delegates. As revealed in Part Four, “International Feminism and Reproductive Labor,” Eileen Boris, Jocelyn Olcott, and the summarizer of their chapters, Premilla Nadasen, have taken on board this lesson. Boris and Olcott present fascinating accounts of the views of labor feminists at meetings of the International Labor Organization (ILO) since its foundation in 1919 and of delegates to the United Nations' sponsored International Women's Year (IWY) conference in Mexico City in 1975, respectively. Their specific purposes are to tease out debates about mandatory maternity leave at the ILO and the views on women's domestic labor expressed at the IWY conference. Their findings are instructive. US “exceptionalism” revealed itself at the ILO in terms of that country's long-term, but at times contested, support for a more privatized system of social welfare, including “private” arrangements for maternity provision and leave, than many of its European counterparts. At the IWY conference there existed a variety of views on domestic labor. These ranged from the “socialization” of reproductive labors, wages for housework, class struggle, and anticolonialism. While these views often mirrored conflicts between western and nonwestern delegates, they were overlaid by complex divisions of race, class, and culture both within and beyond national and regional boundaries.

The complex and shifting relationships between subnational, national, international, and transnational interests and concerns also dominate Part Six, “Transnational Labor Politics,” and Part Seven, “Labor Internationalism.” As maintained by Bryan Palmer and Nelson Lichtenstein in their incisive Introductions to Part Six and Seven, respectively, the ability of workers to develop strong international and transnational political and economic ties, solidarities, and rights, has been greatly influenced and often limited and thwarted by a dominant concern with local, regional, and national concerns and interests (Palmer), and by the extent to which states are “robust, intrusive and self-contained,” especially on behalf of the interests of labor movements (Lichtenstein). For example Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie's insightful study of “Fugitive Slaves across North America” shows that during the absence of a strong or “thick” central state during the nineteenth century, fugitive slaves took advantage of the conflicts between the British, the Spanish, the Americans, and the Mexicans to cross borders and establish free settlements and antislavery movements beyond the borders of the American republic in Spanish Florida, British Canada, and independent Mexico. Leon Fink impressively demonstrates that the regulatory weakness of the “ruling” ILO, combined with the polyglot and fragmented nature of the industry, racial and ethnic conflict, and the predominance of sectional national interests, negated attempts to enforce common labor standards in the global-shipping industry during the interwar years. John H. Flores also convincingly shows that the 1930s revolutionary and multiracial Mexican nationalism of some of the Mexican activist migrants to Chicago and their “radical transnational politics,” forged in alliance with communists and socialists in the city, failed to withstand the right-wing onslaught launched against them by “traditionalist” Mexican immigrants who considered themselves “Mexican American” and the anticommunist American standard bearers of national assimilation.

Yet, as also briefly indicated by Palmer in his introduction and more fully documented in the splendid essays by Shelton Stromquist (in Part Six) and Jacob Remes (in Part Seven), attachments to local, national, international, imperial, and transnational radical movements and causes were, at other points in time and other contexts, perfectly compatible. Stromquist makes his familiar case for the development among numerous labor and socialist municipal activists across the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrializing world of “a new species of local working-class politics,” of attempts to control urban places and spaces by means of “municipal socialism” or “localist internationalism.” (303–304, 321–322). Whether this form of internationalism existed to the extent claimed by Stromquist is open to further debate and research. Yet there is no doubt that he has presented a new and stimulating argument based upon impressive research around the globe.

In his equally stimulating essay, Jacob Remes explores the ways in which a group of local male unionized printers in Toronto “acted as trans-national subjects” during the 1860s and 1870s. Rather than living within “a stable and united nation,” they “belonged to three different yet overlapping communities,” to “a North American working class, a British imperial nation and a Canadian polity”(384–85). Remes's challenging conclusions, that “the modern ideological supremacy of nation is contingent and historically specific,” and that “transnational, subnational, or non national communities and categories of analysis might better serve historical scholarship” (385), act as a powerful spur to further research.

In sum, the publication of this edited collection marks an important step in the development of transnational labor history. As indicated above, it includes much original, new, and stimulating research, fills some of the many gaps in the literature, and will greatly aid scholars in their future transnational endeavors. At the same time, however, it is, perhaps inevitably, somewhat uneven. Some of the substantive essays lack precision and clarity about their usage of the term transnationalism and fail to engage with the relevant historiography, while the collection as a whole is weighed heavily, much in the manner of van der Linden's clarion call, in favor of the economic and social, as opposed to cultural and (albeit to a lesser extent) political, aspects of transnationalism. I would have welcomed more attention to the ways in which the transnational subjects of this collection formed links, conducted dialogues and exchanges, framed identities, and developed narratives around their experiences. Recent and current British and Australian interest in the shaping influences of political actors, languages, cultures, ideas, and institutions and their complex engagements with material and other socioeconomic factors is not really evident, at least explicitly, in Workers across the Americas.Footnote ¹² Lastly, while strong in terms of North America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, the collection is surprisingly weak on Latin America. For example, individual and comparative studies of Brazil and Argentina would have made a valuable addition to the book. This important area of neglect means that the collection is geographically and substantively somewhat limited and unbalanced.

Fortunately, questions concerning an extended geographical scope and the issues of experience, subjectivity, identity, and consciousness are more fully, if somewhat variably, addressed in other parts of the recent published literature on transnational labor history. For example, Jan Lucassen's monumental edited collection, Global Labour History: A State of the Art, referred to earlier in this essay, covers a very wide geographical area. Part 1 brings together essays by distinguished scholars on the historiography and nature of “global labor history,” on labor history in Africa, including South and North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Japan, Canada and the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America, Western Europe, Oceania, China, and Russia. While these essays are mainly national and regional rather than transnational in character, they contain some useful transnational work and insights. They are accompanied in Part 2, “Comparative Labour History Worldwide,” by some very interesting case studies on agricultural, domestic, dock, brick-making, coal-mining, and railroad labor.

Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, furthermore, have written a significant and very ambitious transnational study of “whiteness” in “the globalized world of the late nineteenth century.”Footnote ¹³ William Kenefick and Jonathan Hyslop have engaged in a fascinating and very instructive debate concerning the issue of class and race in South Africa, while Joan Sangster has explored the gendering of labor history across borders in new and insightful ways.Footnote ¹⁴ The two recent volumes of Labour History Review, noted above, have concerned themselves with a wide range and depth of transnational subject areas, including politics, propaganda, free thought, trade unionism, culture, internationalism, and empire. Finally, my Labour and the Politics of Empire (2011) focuses upon the effects of nation, empire, and race upon the fortunes of Labor politics in Australia and Britain from 1900 to the present. Along with the two collections under review, these other publications constitute useful building blocks in the further development of transnational labor history.