Organizing Workers in the Shadow of Slavery: Global Inequality, Racial Boundaries, and the Rise of Unions in American and British Capitalism, 1870-1929

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...