Historian J. H. Hexter once famously divided historians into ‘lumpers’ and ‘splitters’, suggesting that members of the profession tended to rely (too much, and sometimes to their detriment) upon sameness or difference as key lines of inquiry. In this inventive, intriguing work, Seth Rockman has engaged in extremely useful ‘lumping’ to uncover similarities that girded the lives of the working poor in early Baltimore. Labourers, whether they were men or women, slave or free, shared many commonalities that their exploiters used to maximum effect. All workers suffered from ongoing disabilities that prevented them from meeting their masters in the marketplace as equals. This is a labour history that reaches beyond and below the typical labour history for this era; instead of scrutinizing artisans, Rockman chooses to shine his spotlight upon the much more numerous – yet harder to trace – working poor. To do so, early national Baltimore is the focus of his investigation.

After his opening chapter, in which he provides census data, information on prominent exports, and other introductory-level material on Baltimore and its people, Rockman examines labour recruitment and task division between the races at job sites like the New Bridge, erected with dollar-a-day workers. Skilfully examining a municipal project – the mud machine used to dredge Baltimore harbour – allows Rockman in Chapter 3 to contrast urban with rural labour over a twelve-year period, tracking the shift from convict labour to free workers, and the ongoing use of Irish or Scots Irish immigrant labourers. Disposable, casual labourers were easy to dismiss, so the men might request higher wages, but (knowing their own expendability) they did not strike – even when the city lowered their wages following a fiscal downturn. The disgusting, dangerous quality of dredging led to some turnover of workers, yet the dredge offered regular work for men who were not skilled enough to seek other employment.

The exploitation of female workers followed similar lines: unskilled labourers were treated as interchangeable parts in the early national city. Chapter 4 explores the world of the working woman in detail: cooking, laundering, tailoring, and domestic service were crucial to the economic life of a port like Baltimore. Rockman shows how ‘labor … that once fell primarily to one's own wife, mother, or daughter could increasingly be purchased from someone else's on terms that were casual, contractual [or] coercive’ (p. 102). Wages remained low, and residents of border cities who could afford to hire domestic labourers benefited from playing off free women against slave women – ultimately lowering the wages paid to women overall. Additionally, gender discrimination artificially deflated women's wages in comparison to men's. As Rockman demonstrates by examining the wages paid to seamstresses, wage labour for most women could not sustain them for long; chronic sub-subsistence wages meant that women needed to marry or find a male provider, because it simply was not possible to make ends meet on a single female salary. Starvation or prostitution were leading alternatives, much derided by politicians and pundits of the day, yet nothing was done to help seamstresses who were paid very little for their piece work. The rising tide of manumission in the early national period created expanding numbers of soon-to-be-freed women whose labour could likewise be exploited for relatively low wages by Baltimoreans.

Rockman's exploration of the basic expenses all working poor had to pay shows how impossible it was for working men and women to escape the cycle of poverty and indebtedness. Scavenging, pawning possessions, and crime were alternatives that few of the labouring poor wanted to try, but some were forced into them because of minimal wages. Failing to find work could mean a trip to the almshouse (where numbers typically rose in winter and fell in summer) or reliance upon private charity. Impoverished children were supposed to be sent to the ‘School of Industry’, an imagined (though never built) workhouse straight out of Oliver Twist. Indeed, how the city's leaders and prominent citizens interacted with the working poor is a recurrent theme, although they rarely take centre stage in Rockman's book.

This is an important work of labour history, documenting as it does the lives of people who routinely never appeared in censuses, on tax rolls, or in the pages of city directories. At the same time, Rockman offers a compelling critique of the national ideology of free labour and the self-made man in the 1790s, 1800s, and 1810s. Images of an ever-rising, ever-improving America in this period have to be readjusted to account for the working poor whose underpaid labour made the nation's gains possible.