Organizing Workers in the Shadow of Slavery
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A01=Rudi Batzell
Americans
Author_Rudi Batzell
Baltimore
Black
British
capitalism
Category=KCF
Category=KNX
Category=NH
Category=NHTK
Category=NHTS
cities
class
colonialism
comparisons
desperation
economic
empire
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
inequality
justice
labor
Liverpool
migration
Pittsburgh
port
pursuit
racism
reparations
scabs
Sheffield
solidarity
steel
strikebreaking
trade
UK
Product details
- ISBN 9780226838762
- Weight: 653g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 29 Apr 2025
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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An original analysis of the relationship between slavery and the labor movement in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
During the rise of the labor movement in the late nineteenth century, why were American workers unable to organize inclusive trade unions like those formed by their counterparts in the United Kingdom? Comparing American and British capitalism in the port cities of Baltimore and Liverpool and the steel cities of Pittsburgh and Sheffield, Rudi Batzell reveals that the answer lies in the legacies of slavery and entrenched structures of racial inequality. Strikebreaking succeeded more often in the United States because landless Black Americans were, out of economic desperation, more likely to become scabs and fracture the class solidarity of any union movement. Batzell shows, in short, how racism was and is deeply connected to class, migration, and capitalism in a global economy marked by slavery and empire. In emphasizing the geography of economic inequality, this book offers new clarity on the late-nineteenth-century successes and failures of working-class formation. More broadly, Organizing Workers in the Shadow of Slavery makes it clear that the pursuit of justice today will require sustained economic reparations for slavery and colonialism.
During the rise of the labor movement in the late nineteenth century, why were American workers unable to organize inclusive trade unions like those formed by their counterparts in the United Kingdom? Comparing American and British capitalism in the port cities of Baltimore and Liverpool and the steel cities of Pittsburgh and Sheffield, Rudi Batzell reveals that the answer lies in the legacies of slavery and entrenched structures of racial inequality. Strikebreaking succeeded more often in the United States because landless Black Americans were, out of economic desperation, more likely to become scabs and fracture the class solidarity of any union movement. Batzell shows, in short, how racism was and is deeply connected to class, migration, and capitalism in a global economy marked by slavery and empire. In emphasizing the geography of economic inequality, this book offers new clarity on the late-nineteenth-century successes and failures of working-class formation. More broadly, Organizing Workers in the Shadow of Slavery makes it clear that the pursuit of justice today will require sustained economic reparations for slavery and colonialism.
Rudi Batzell is associate professor of history at Lake Forest College. His research has appeared in journals including Past & Present, Gender & History, and the Journal of Social History.
