Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10581489
Mary Poole
As one of many examples of academic theory borrowed from social movements, “racial capitalism” was first articulated by anti-apartheid activists in South Africa. Racial capitalism is thus the product of a global system of colonization, and “race” itself a multiplicity of expressions. Histories of racial capitalism produced in the United States, however, have tended to remain contained within the United States and a Black/white definition of race. That story begins with slavery and moves through emancipation, segregation, redlining, and the creation of racial geographies and structural mechanisms of the production of property in whiteness. This is all essential work. Nonetheless, without the global context, US histories of racial capitalism can suffer from misalignment with Indigenous dispossession and settler colonization, erasing Indigenous people from land and from history.Histories of Racial Capitalism breaks from that beaten path. This outstanding book makes a modest claim to demonstrate through history that race is constitutive of capitalism. In fact, it does much more than that. It models a number of specific approaches, a new “methodological practice,” that repositions US racial capitalism in the broader history of global colonization (10).Racial capitalism is defined here not as a subfield of the study of capitalism but as the “process by which the key dynamics of capitalism—accumulation/dispossession, contract/coercion, and others—become articulated through race” (10). The process has two entwined parts: violent dispossession leads to the creation of new racial distinctions, which in turn naturalizes racial inequalities. This understanding of racial capitalism as a dynamic process contrasts with the earlier Black radical tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, Barbara Fields, C. L. R. James, and Cedric Robinson. This book draws heavily on that foundation but charts a new course that disengages from the “race first” or “class first” debate (10). While this new iteration critiques capitalism in a Marxist tradition, it rejects Marx's progressive theory of history. Borrowing from Patrick Wolfe, racial capitalism is presented here not as an event but as a “structuring logic,” one in which primitive accumulation is not a stage of capitalist development but “an ongoing organizing principle of capitalist social order” (11).Debt is a theme that demonstrates this continuity. K-Sue Park describes debt as a weapon in the hands of British settlers, who gained title to Indigenous peoples’ lands through loan defaults. Race was thus imagined into being as a means to facilitate unequal power between Indigenous people that held legal rights to land and European settlers. Thus, it was in the era of formal colonization that the mechanism of debt was invented for displacement in America. Land itself was transformed from a living thing to a commodity. In his essay, Destin Jenkins demonstrates the role of debt in the realignment of the white North and South after the e
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10581321
Elliott Young
In 1910, Antonio Rodriguez, a ranch hand in Rocksprings, Texas, was lynched and burned by a mob of white men. For historians of Texas, this is an all-too-familiar tale of Anglo violence against Mexicans, but in Bad Mexicans Kelly Lytle Hernández immediately transports us to Mexico, where people staged protests, tore down American flags, and shouted “Mueren los yanquis!” (Death to the Yankees!) in response to the brutal racist violence. Porfirio Díaz, the long-standing president of Mexico, sent security forces to squash the protests and muzzled the press, insisting that they cease to comment on the anti-American protests. This opening episode reveals Lytle Hernández's methodology. She will take us on a journey that weaves back and forth across the US-Mexico border to tell a story of a transnational anticapitalist movement at the birth of revolutionary Mexico.Historians, as Benedict Anderson intimated, are the clerics of the nation, telling the origin stories of a particular country with reverence and awe. We have been penitent and sober priests, but in our religious zeal we have forgotten that there is a world outside our temple. Kelly Lytle Hernández may be the antipreacher we have been waiting for to introduce us to this new world beyond nations and borders by bringing us back to the future with a compelling narrative about a plucky band of anarchist Mexicans living in the United States and declaring war on capital, authority, and the Church. In this transnational history, the nation remains in the frame, but other stories that cross and spill over borders come into focus. Putting Ricardo Flores Magón and the magonistas at the center rather than the Mexican Revolution or radical organizing in the US West requires us to take off our national blinders and put on our progressive lenses.Bad Mexicans, Kelly Lytle Hernández's latest in a series of groundbreaking books, forces us to confront Mexican and United States history in tandem, showing how labor struggles and political battles were not contained by the physical land border or even the boundaries of imagination of anarchists like Ricardo Flores Magón. The story of Flores Magón and the PLM has been told by historians in Mexico and elsewhere who see them as precursors of the Mexican Revolution and by Chicano historians who see them as exemplars of the fight against Anglo oppression. Lytle Hernández weaves the strands of these stories together, linking up their labor radicalism in Mexico to their work with socialists and anarchists in the United States and their strident condemnation of Anglo racism.It is fortuitous and a bit odd that Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) declared 2022 the year of Ricardo Flores Magón. A major avenue in Mexico City is named for Flores Magón, and so are several schools, libraries, and plazas. So at least in Mexico, Ricardo Flores Magón has not been forgotten, but he has been domesticated and co-opted. Flores Magón was rebranded by his former comrade a
胡安·戈麦斯Quiñones和约翰·科克罗夫特，仅举两位历史学家的例子，他们更加重视马格尼斯塔在墨西哥革命中的重要性。他们指出了1917年墨西哥宪法中一些更为激进的元素，并将马格尼斯塔与这一基础性文件直接联系起来。然而，问题在于宪法的这些激进元素是否在当时得到了实施，或者曾经得到了实施，正如Lytle Hernández所承认的那样。虽然历史学家们对墨西哥革命到底是在1915年、1920年还是1940年结束，或者像阿道夫·吉利在1971年提出的那样只是被打断的问题争论不休，但毫无疑问，自墨西哥革命以来的一个多世纪以来，这个国家甚至还没有达到magonistas的“反资本主义、自由恋爱、没有财产、没有教会”的幻想即使是1917年的宪法，尽管其激进的承诺，也不是一个无政府主义的文件(任何宪法都可以是无政府主义的吗?)，甚至可能不是社会主义的。我可以想象，当自称为基督徒的奥夫拉多尔宣布2022年是里卡多·弗洛雷斯年Magón时，可怜的里卡多会吐出来。这些墨西哥革命的主角到底是谁?Lytle Hernández将他们描述为“移民、流亡者和公民;农场工人、佃农、矿工和知识分子”(308)。然而，将参加墨西哥革命的人视为工人阶级或作者所说的“受委屈的群众”(6)的更广泛的概念有些模糊，并且暗示了革命各派别之间的共性，而事实上，事实并非如此。虽然维拉、萨帕塔、Magón和马德罗都同意推翻Díaz的目标，但他们有非常不同的计划，代表不同的选民。萨帕塔和马德罗之间的联盟在1911年秋天迅速破裂，他们成了死敌。萨帕塔和维拉虽然有过短暂的结盟，但当他们占领墨西哥城时，他们摇摇欲坠的联盟就无法维系了。magonistas的缺席意味着他们从来没有测试过他们与萨帕塔或比利亚的团结。然而，我很难想象萨帕塔主义者进入墨西哥城时高举着瓜达卢佩圣母的横幅，这与文雅的反教会和反资本主义的马格尼塔主义者有很多共同之处。奈特试图将工人阶级分解为农业工人、农奴、城市工匠和产业工人。换句话说，他们代表大传统和小传统，一个代表城市的识字的工匠和工厂工人，另一个代表农村的文盲和农业工人1915年，当卡兰萨组织来自Casa del Obrero Mundial的城市左翼工人加入红色营与Villa和zapata作战时，这两个工人阶级的革命派系将会相互争斗。5 Ricardo Flores Magón会站在红色营的无政府工团主义工人一边，还是会加入农村的农民战士?不管怎样，墨西哥革命的概念是工人群众与资本主义精英的斗争，这掩盖了这些群体内部的主要分歧，而这些分歧不仅仅是纸上谈兵的辩论:它们是在战场上用子弹决定的。美国对墨西哥的影响和墨西哥革命的进程是另一个常年争论的话题，它让墨西哥主义的历史学家和研究生夜不能寐。考虑到这本书的跨国焦点，利特尔Hernández似乎突出了美国的影响力，历史学家约翰·梅森·哈特(John Mason harto) 6有充分的证据表明美国在该国的投资，也有大量的政治欺骗，从美国大使亨利·莱恩·威尔逊(Henry Lane Wilson)在1913年策划了弗朗西斯科·马德罗(Francisco Madero)的下台，到1914年入侵韦拉克鲁斯(Veracruz)，再到1916年潘欣将军(General Pershing)入侵奇瓦瓦(Chihuahua)，但是，正如艾伦·奈特(Alan Knight)所说，最终，美国没能掌控革命的进程。1917年宪法中激进元素的持续存在，如第27条，它允许社区ejidos和国家征用地下权利，面对美国的强烈反对，说明了美国权力的局限性。在总统Lázaro Cárdenas的领导下，革命的激进化，包括大规模的土地分配和对石油工业的没收，也证明了美国并不总是能在边境以南取得成功。美帝国主义一直在给墨西哥施加压力，而且还在继续施加压力，但有时我们最终会因为没有认识到美帝国的局限性而赋予它太多的权力。PLM故事的一个奇怪之处是，在革命期间子弹开始飞向墨西哥后，其领导人大多留在了美国，Práxedis Guerrero是一个重要的例外。
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10581545
Evelyn P. Jennings
If any more evidence were needed to dethrone Christopher Columbus as a hero, the story told by Erin Woodruff Stone in Captives of Conquest should end the debate. Stone's main contribution to studies of the enslavement of Indigenous peoples in the Americas is her geographic and temporal focus on the Caribbean and its littoral in the sixteenth century. As she notes in her introduction, much of the historiography to date, especially in English, has focused on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on areas that ultimately became part of the United States. By contrast, Stone argues that the enslavement of Indigenous peoples of the sixteenth-century Caribbean was both a crucial factor in the early collapse of Native populations in the region and a central element in Spanish strategies of conquest and colonization.Stone begins in the precontact Caribbean, highlighting the migrations and interconnections among peoples of the Antilles and the circum-Caribbean areas of Yucatán and the northern coast of South America. On the other side of the Atlantic, she argues that the Spanish physical and spiritual conquest of the Canary Islands established patterns of policy and practice that shaped later incursions in the Americas. For example, resistance by the Native Canarians led to warfare and enslavement. By the 1480s and 1490s a stream of Canarian slaves was added to a Mediterranean world of active slave trades from Africa, the Levant, and eastern Europe. The Spanish Crown sought to rationalize Canarian slavery as the result of “just war” against people who rejected the authority of the monarchy and the Christian god. These justifications for the enslavement of peoples claimed as Spanish subjects were transferred and further elaborated in the Caribbean beginning with Columbus.Popular narratives of Spanish American colonization often highlight the search for gold and converts to Catholicism as motives, but Stone is clear that Columbus proposed an active slave trade from the Caribbean to Spain as a source of labor and wealth from the beginning of his voyages. Though Queen Isabella opposed a transatlantic slave trade in Indigenous Americans, she did allow the enslavement of cannibals and those who resisted Spanish authority and conversion. Before long the Crown also claimed the royal fifth of slave sales and began to sell licenses for slaving expeditions. Hence, by the early years of the sixteenth century, the basic framework of Spanish policy and practice around Indigenous enslavement and slave trading had been established.The heart of Stone's story lies in the first half of the sixteenth century. In areas where Spaniards found resources of value, they needed laborers to extract them. In areas without such resources, or in places where they were quickly exhausted, the Indigenous people became the valued commodity. The gold mines of Española and Cuba and the pearl fisheries of coastal Tierra Firme were early sites in need of labor. Stone describes the develo
如果需要更多的证据来推翻克里斯托弗·哥伦布的英雄地位，艾琳·伍德拉夫·斯通在《征服的俘虏》一书中讲述的故事应该会结束这场辩论。斯通对美洲原住民被奴役问题研究的主要贡献在于她对16世纪加勒比海及其沿岸地区的地理和时间关注。正如她在引言中所指出的，迄今为止，大部分史学，尤其是英文史学，都集中在17世纪和18世纪，以及最终成为美国一部分的地区。相比之下，斯通认为，对16世纪加勒比地区土著人民的奴役既是该地区土著人口早期崩溃的关键因素，也是西班牙征服和殖民战略的核心因素。斯通从接触前的加勒比地区开始，突出了安的列斯群岛和Yucatán的加勒比周边地区以及南美洲北部海岸的人民之间的迁徙和相互联系。在大西洋的另一边，她认为西班牙在物质和精神上对加那利群岛的征服建立了后来入侵美洲的政策和实践模式。例如，加那利原住民的抵抗导致了战争和奴役。到了1480年代和1490年代，从非洲、黎凡特和东欧来的加那利奴隶流入了活跃的奴隶贸易的地中海世界。西班牙王室试图将加那利奴隶制合理化，认为这是对拒绝君主权威和基督教神的人进行“正义战争”的结果。从哥伦布开始，这些奴役自称为西班牙臣民的人的理由在加勒比地区被转移和进一步阐述。关于西班牙殖民美洲的通俗叙述经常强调寻找黄金和皈依天主教的动机，但斯通很清楚，哥伦布从航行开始就提出了从加勒比海到西班牙的活跃奴隶贸易，作为劳动力和财富的来源。虽然伊莎贝拉女王反对跨大西洋贩卖美洲原住民的奴隶，但她确实允许对食人族和那些反抗西班牙权威和皈依的人进行奴役。不久之后，英国王室也声称占有奴隶销售的五分之一，并开始出售奴隶探险的许可证。因此，到16世纪早期，西班牙关于土著奴役和奴隶贸易的政策和实践的基本框架已经建立起来。斯通故事的核心发生在16世纪上半叶。在西班牙人发现有价值资源的地区，他们需要劳动力来开采这些资源。在没有这些资源的地区，或者在这些资源很快耗尽的地方，土著居民成为了有价值的商品。Española和古巴的金矿和Tierra Firme沿海的珍珠渔场是早期需要劳动力的地方。斯通描述了两种奴隶贸易的发展，以提供这些劳动力——一种是合法的，另一种是“地方性的非法和无证的”(5)。因为如此多的奴隶制和奴隶贸易在官方上是非法的，所以不可能确定地量化贸易的程度。斯通记录了大约7万名16世纪被奴役的土著人，并估计有25万到50万人最终遭受了这种命运。斯通努力展示西班牙对土著奴隶制的殖民政策的演变，以及那些被奴役者的一些经历。她出版了一些传教士和征服者的编年史，如bartolomoreise de las Casas, 16世纪文献汇编，以及西班牙早期美洲帝国的二手资料。她还查阅了来自西班牙、加那利群岛、多米尼加共和国和哥伦比亚的档案资料。殖民政策的演变主要是通过皇家法令来记录的，因为国王扩大了被奴役人民的定义，以确保劳动力和收入，尽管这些政策在实践中经常被忽视。在美洲，新的探险和征服探险队把奴隶当作向导和翻译，或者在探险队找不到黄金或其他贵重物品时作为“安慰奖”(89)。到16世纪30年代，土著奴隶的活跃贸易已经成为加勒比海沿岸港口市场的一项业务。斯通试图像其他历史学家一样，通过丰富的文件来阐明被奴役者的经历，这些文件包括人们向国王请愿的诉讼，以及被指控非法贩卖奴隶或叛乱的人的案件。这些案件揭示了奴役和经常多次流离失所的残酷。她还查阅了考古收藏，以说明奴隶贸易的文化流散。斯通指出了奴役和贩卖数十万人的几个后果。 除了这些习俗造成的难以言表的痛苦和死亡之外，土著人民是探索和征服的关键参与者，尽管往往是非自愿的。Española的Taínos最初将西班牙人的注意力引向加勒比人，而不是他们自己;其他土著部落则捕获敌人并将其卖给西班牙商人。斯通所说的这个机构，随着奴隶贸易的扩大，很快就消失了，甚至连土著盟友和合法自由的人也陷入了困境。奴隶制造成的破坏也引发了西班牙人的叛乱，直到1542年的新法律对土著奴隶制采取更坚定的立场后，才得以平息。当时，非洲奴隶制已经建立起来，墨西哥和秘鲁发现了丰富的矿产资源和大量的土著人口。然而，她正确地指出，土著奴隶制在帝国的边界上一直延续到19世纪。《征服的俘虏》为西班牙美洲早期土著奴隶制的程度和重要性提供了一个广泛的历史观点。不熟悉殖民基本历史的读者可能希望看到一个王室政策和殖民事件的时间表，因为这些细节分散在几个主题章节中。如此广泛的研究必然依赖于大量的二手作品，但不幸的是，参考书目并不包括所有引用的来源。同时，这本书的相对简洁，易懂的散文和清晰的论点将对学生和学者都有很大的好处。
{"title":"Captives of Conquest: Slavery in the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean","authors":"Evelyn P. Jennings","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581545","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581545","url":null,"abstract":"If any more evidence were needed to dethrone Christopher Columbus as a hero, the story told by Erin Woodruff Stone in Captives of Conquest should end the debate. Stone's main contribution to studies of the enslavement of Indigenous peoples in the Americas is her geographic and temporal focus on the Caribbean and its littoral in the sixteenth century. As she notes in her introduction, much of the historiography to date, especially in English, has focused on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on areas that ultimately became part of the United States. By contrast, Stone argues that the enslavement of Indigenous peoples of the sixteenth-century Caribbean was both a crucial factor in the early collapse of Native populations in the region and a central element in Spanish strategies of conquest and colonization.Stone begins in the precontact Caribbean, highlighting the migrations and interconnections among peoples of the Antilles and the circum-Caribbean areas of Yucatán and the northern coast of South America. On the other side of the Atlantic, she argues that the Spanish physical and spiritual conquest of the Canary Islands established patterns of policy and practice that shaped later incursions in the Americas. For example, resistance by the Native Canarians led to warfare and enslavement. By the 1480s and 1490s a stream of Canarian slaves was added to a Mediterranean world of active slave trades from Africa, the Levant, and eastern Europe. The Spanish Crown sought to rationalize Canarian slavery as the result of “just war” against people who rejected the authority of the monarchy and the Christian god. These justifications for the enslavement of peoples claimed as Spanish subjects were transferred and further elaborated in the Caribbean beginning with Columbus.Popular narratives of Spanish American colonization often highlight the search for gold and converts to Catholicism as motives, but Stone is clear that Columbus proposed an active slave trade from the Caribbean to Spain as a source of labor and wealth from the beginning of his voyages. Though Queen Isabella opposed a transatlantic slave trade in Indigenous Americans, she did allow the enslavement of cannibals and those who resisted Spanish authority and conversion. Before long the Crown also claimed the royal fifth of slave sales and began to sell licenses for slaving expeditions. Hence, by the early years of the sixteenth century, the basic framework of Spanish policy and practice around Indigenous enslavement and slave trading had been established.The heart of Stone's story lies in the first half of the sixteenth century. In areas where Spaniards found resources of value, they needed laborers to extract them. In areas without such resources, or in places where they were quickly exhausted, the Indigenous people became the valued commodity. The gold mines of Española and Cuba and the pearl fisheries of coastal Tierra Firme were early sites in need of labor. Stone describes the develo","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135387639","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10581279
Heidi Tinsman
Abstract In 1874, government officials in Qing China sent a Yale-educated special envoy named Yung Wing to Peru to survey the conditions of Chinese contract workers on plantations. A parallel mission to the better-known Qing survey of Chinese in Cuba, Yung Wing's trip to Peru has received almost no scholarly attention. Drawing on new archival evidence, this essay provides a historical analysis of the Qing mission to Peru and its official findings, as rendered in the original, 1874 English-language translation, “Yung Wing's Reports.” I argue that Yung Wing elaborated a multivocal, cross-cultural, and transimperial condemnation of Chinese indenture in Peru. Yung Wing served as a crucial broker across political and cultural systems. He strategically mobilized testimonies from American, Chilean, and Chinese informants and deployed abolitionist discourse to equate Chinese contract labor with African slavery. Denouncing Western failures to guarantee liberal principles for Chinese people, he pressured Qing authorities to protect Chinese subjects by opening formal legations in Latin America. Chinese workers in Peru had a different perspective, and their testimonies often diverged from Yung Wing's core argument. Chinese informants never equated contract labor with chattel slavery. Instead, they denounced employer failure to fulfill existing contract terms. Moreover, they provided evidence of successful collective efforts and alliances between Chinese and non-Chinese people that pressured Peruvian authorities to defend Chinese workers. Taken as a whole, “Yung Wing Reports” both elaborates a powerful Chinese denunciation of contract labor and demonstrates Chinese ability to negotiate its terms.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10581503
Nick Mansfield
Osbourne House on the Isle of Wight was Queen Victoria's favorite home and is now cared for by English Heritage. A “Swiss Cottage” in the grounds houses an eclectic museum put together by her children. One of the exhibits is a glass bottle allegedly carried during the Paris Commune of 1871 by a female incendiary (a petroleuse) who was summarily executed by government troops. The object testifies to horrific justification felt by polite Western society at the worst massacre in French history, which is at the heart of Mark Lause's latest book.Military history is too important to leave to traditional “drum and trumpet” military historians. Soldiers of Revolution joins a growing literature from labor historians interested in the role of working people in war. Examples include work of the late Victor Kiernan on transnational imperial armies, that of Peter Way and Jennine Hurl-Eamon on the eighteenth-century British army, and my own two-volume labor history on class, politics, and the nineteenth-century British army. More specialized publications include Roger Norman Buckley on the British army in the West Indies and slavery, Peter Stanley on the private army of the East India Company, and Joseph Cozens on the military and popular protest in Britain. An edited volume by Nir Arielli and Bruce Collins also covers some aspects of liberal and socialist transnational soldiers. Having previously published widely on this topic covering the period of the American Civil War, Mark Lause has accepted the challenge of using largely French sources to study a contemporaneous European conflict.It is a dense and closely argued account of an unnecessary dynastic war, the attempt by a revived French Republic to regroup after disaster, and, finally, the utter defeat of the working class led by utopian socialists in a bloodbath that took place on Paris streets familiar to tourists today. Though assuming a certain amount of knowledge from the reader, the heady chronological narrative, supported by a wide-ranging information, is completely gripping and includes a wealth of fascinating detail.The largely professional French Imperialist military endured a swift defeat at the hands of cleverly directed German conscripts backed by the industrialized might of Krupps and Co. Nevertheless, the newly proclaimed Republic improvised an army to continue the war, which reflected the rising class tensions in French society. The army was largely formed from the mobiles, the active sections of the part-time and territorial National Guard. In addition, units of self-governing francs-tireurs sprang up in patriotic fervor. Often lacking munitions or uniforms, they sometimes took the fight behind enemy lines and risked German firing squads if captured. Particular attention is also given to the militarized transnational idealists who rallied from all over Europe and beyond under the democratic socialist and republican banner of the charismatic revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi. One Italian comr
位于怀特岛的奥斯本故居曾是维多利亚女王最喜爱的居所，现在由英国遗产协会保管。庭院里有一座“瑞士小屋”，里面有一个由她的孩子们拼凑起来的不拘一格的博物馆。其中一件展品是一个玻璃瓶，据说在1871年巴黎公社期间，一名女纵火犯(一名石油工人)携带了一个玻璃瓶，她被政府军队就地处决。这件物品证明了礼貌的西方社会对法国历史上最严重的大屠杀感到可怕的理由，这是马克·劳斯(Mark Lause)新书的核心。军事历史太重要了，不能把它留给传统的军事史学家。《革命士兵》加入了对劳动人民在战争中的角色感兴趣的劳动历史学家的行列。例如，已故的维克多·基尔南(Victor Kiernan)关于跨国帝国军队的著作，彼得·韦(Peter Way)和珍妮·赫尔-埃蒙(Jennine Hurl-Eamon)关于18世纪英国军队的著作，以及我自己关于阶级、政治和19世纪英国军队的两卷本劳动史著作。更专业的出版物包括罗杰·诺曼·巴克利(Roger Norman Buckley)对西印度群岛英军和奴隶制的研究，彼得·斯坦利(Peter Stanley)对东印度公司私人军队的研究，约瑟夫·科森斯(Joseph Cozens)对英国军队和民众抗议的研究。尼尔·阿雷利(Nir Arielli)和布鲁斯·柯林斯(Bruce Collins)编辑的一本书也涵盖了自由主义和社会主义跨国士兵的某些方面。马克·劳斯此前就这一主题发表了大量文章，内容涵盖美国内战时期，他接受了挑战，主要使用法国资料来研究同时期的欧洲冲突。这本书对一场不必要的王朝战争、复兴的法兰西共和国在灾难后重组的尝试，以及乌托邦社会主义者领导的工人阶级在今天游客熟悉的巴黎街道上的一场大屠杀中彻底失败，进行了密集而缜实的描述。虽然假设读者有一定的知识，但令人兴奋的按时间顺序的叙述，在广泛的信息支持下，完全扣人心弦，包括大量迷人的细节。大部分专业的法国帝国主义军队在克鲁普斯公司(Krupps and Co.)的工业化力量支持下，迅速被聪明指挥的德国应征入伍者击败。然而，新成立的共和国临时组建了一支军队来继续战争，这反映了法国社会中日益加剧的阶级紧张关系。军队主要由机动部队、兼职国民警卫队和领土国民警卫队的现役部队组成。此外，自治的法郎-轮胎单位在爱国热情中涌现出来。由于缺乏弹药和制服，他们有时会在敌后作战，如果被俘，可能会被德军枪决。还特别注意到从欧洲各地和其他地方聚集在具有超凡魅力的革命者朱塞佩·加里波第的民主社会主义和共和旗帜下的军事化跨国理想主义者。一位意大利同志后来写到这位老战士的灵感:“(我们)不是一个国家、一个政府或一个派系的士兵。我们是人类的战士……共和国的独特原则”(175)。加里波第和他的志愿军在法国东部对抗德军的进攻中取得了少数几次胜利。鉴于这些非官方士兵几乎没有留下什么记录，大多数人都没有露面，尽管他们的一些指挥官的行为和动机更为人所知，并有一些详细的描述。在法国军队服役后，古斯塔夫·克鲁塞参加了1848年的法国大革命和1860年的意大利统一。在指挥爱尔兰芬尼亚突袭加拿大之前，他在美国内战中成为联邦将军。1871年，他似乎是巴黎公社战争代表的自然选择，但由于试图将中央纪律和组织强加给有时会叛变的防御力量，他被免职并入狱。这可能救了他的命，因为他躲藏起来，然后被流放。克鲁塞特后来在大赦下回国，并于1884年当选为社会党议员。梯也尔的法国共和政府和俾斯麦的新德意志第二帝国的反动派都惊恐地发现，1864年成立的国际工人协会(IWA)在这些动员中隐藏了一只手。劳斯在整个故事中仔细探索了这个网络。在承认其影响力的同时，他得出结论，与当时和最近的左翼和右翼评论员的观点相反，IWA总体上是无能为力的。IWA最重要的时刻是在巴黎公社期间，它的许多中央委员会声称忠诚。以其激进的左翼纲领而著称的公社被认为是超越文明社会的。支持地方公社的失败使巴黎处于危险的孤立状态。 占领军德国军队封锁了城市的东部，允许梯也尔名义上的共和军(其中许多是被遣返的战俘)从西部逼近。虽然公社是拙劣的军事组织者，但公社激励了巴黎的工人阶级(男人、女人和孩子)，动员起来，进行了一场英勇而血腥的街头抵抗，其中几乎没有俘虏。“在绝望和希望的推动下，”这场战斗在semaine sanglante达到高潮，在那里，自我毁灭的石油可能很活跃，导致一万七千多人死亡，四万多人被俘;后者大部分被驱逐到海外流放地(219)。“革命战士”彻底失败了，只有巴黎公社“本来可以”的神话还在支撑着左派。在法国，保守派的第二共和国得到加强，而在新统一的德国，普鲁士的专制统治占主导地位。实现政治变革需要几代人的时间。
{"title":"Soldiers of Revolution: The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune","authors":"Nick Mansfield","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581503","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581503","url":null,"abstract":"Osbourne House on the Isle of Wight was Queen Victoria's favorite home and is now cared for by English Heritage. A “Swiss Cottage” in the grounds houses an eclectic museum put together by her children. One of the exhibits is a glass bottle allegedly carried during the Paris Commune of 1871 by a female incendiary (a petroleuse) who was summarily executed by government troops. The object testifies to horrific justification felt by polite Western society at the worst massacre in French history, which is at the heart of Mark Lause's latest book.Military history is too important to leave to traditional “drum and trumpet” military historians. Soldiers of Revolution joins a growing literature from labor historians interested in the role of working people in war. Examples include work of the late Victor Kiernan on transnational imperial armies, that of Peter Way and Jennine Hurl-Eamon on the eighteenth-century British army, and my own two-volume labor history on class, politics, and the nineteenth-century British army. More specialized publications include Roger Norman Buckley on the British army in the West Indies and slavery, Peter Stanley on the private army of the East India Company, and Joseph Cozens on the military and popular protest in Britain. An edited volume by Nir Arielli and Bruce Collins also covers some aspects of liberal and socialist transnational soldiers. Having previously published widely on this topic covering the period of the American Civil War, Mark Lause has accepted the challenge of using largely French sources to study a contemporaneous European conflict.It is a dense and closely argued account of an unnecessary dynastic war, the attempt by a revived French Republic to regroup after disaster, and, finally, the utter defeat of the working class led by utopian socialists in a bloodbath that took place on Paris streets familiar to tourists today. Though assuming a certain amount of knowledge from the reader, the heady chronological narrative, supported by a wide-ranging information, is completely gripping and includes a wealth of fascinating detail.The largely professional French Imperialist military endured a swift defeat at the hands of cleverly directed German conscripts backed by the industrialized might of Krupps and Co. Nevertheless, the newly proclaimed Republic improvised an army to continue the war, which reflected the rising class tensions in French society. The army was largely formed from the mobiles, the active sections of the part-time and territorial National Guard. In addition, units of self-governing francs-tireurs sprang up in patriotic fervor. Often lacking munitions or uniforms, they sometimes took the fight behind enemy lines and risked German firing squads if captured. Particular attention is also given to the militarized transnational idealists who rallied from all over Europe and beyond under the democratic socialist and republican banner of the charismatic revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi. One Italian comr","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135389985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10581433
Mark Doyle
This is an ambitious, heavily researched, frustratingly undercooked book. Its purpose is to examine the extent to which the much-mythologized youth culture of sixties London was truly new. Did it signal the final death of Victorian Britain, or was it a slightly reconfigured version of older cultural formations? Setting up a dichotomy between historians who emphasize the period's continuities and those who, aligning with prevailing popular memory, emphasize change, Fuhg splits the difference, arguing that the 1960s were “a liminal period in which both the continuity of and dissociation from Victorian Britain were tangible . . . the old and new under the umbrella of the future” (7). It is a claim that is hard to refute. All ages, after all, are ages of transition. Nevertheless, unpicking the old from the new is a legitimate task for the historian, and this, in essence, is what Fuhg sets out to do.Fuhg's method is to peer beneath the breezy generalizations of contemporary commentators and the lofty claims of academic researchers by conducting a fine-grained analysis of everyday teenage life in London's urban spaces. Most historians would do this via one or several detailed case studies, but Fuhg's approach is more synthetic—or, perhaps more accurately, composite. Through prodigious research, principally in popular media, social science publications, and local government reports, he ranges freely across London's neighborhoods and entertainment districts, constructing a variegated picture of the thirteen-year period between 1958 and 1971 through the eyes of contemporaries and historians. The strongest parts of the book are those that explore how changes in the built environment facilitated cultural changes and the formation of youth subcultures. Coffee bars, suburbs, seaside resorts, council houses, youth clubs, and other locales allowed teenagers—newly affluent and mobile—to imagine a future that drew from, but wasn't limited by, Britain's past. While elements of Victorian culture such as class divisions, gender norms, imperial mindsets (especially racism), and outdoor associational life came under pressure in such venues, they didn't disappear. Thus, for example, Fuhg challenges the conventional wisdom that slum clearance, suburbanization, and the rise of television created a hopelessly fragmented and privatized working-class culture. Though he is not the first to say this (Mark Clapson, for one, has been making similar arguments since the 1990s), this careful attention to the lived experience of individuals and nicely evokes London's youth cultures in all their richness and gradations.Unfortunately, the book's insights are too often buried in a confusing mass of data that the author fails to guide us through. Each chapter is so filled with contemporary commentary and reminiscences—one chapter has over seven hundred endnotes—that reading them is a bit like trying to drink from a firehose. Often this data is contradictory, and sometimes it is factual
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10581447
Chad Pearson
Those in search of a fast-paced book that is both inspiring and tragic will profit from reading Toni Gilpin's The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland. This well-researched study explores decades of what Gilpin aptly calls “ceaseless class warfare” at International Harvester's production plants (282). She has produced the go-to book about labor unrest at the multilocational agricultural equipment giant, which ultimately led to the establishment of the CIO-affiliated Farm Equipment Workers Union (FE). These leftist union activists struggled mightily against state and business forces in numerous worksites over the course of decades, including in the years after securing collective bargaining rights. Unlike today's MAGAs, FE members likely did not perceive the nation as “great” during the post–World War II economic boom.Originating as a Yale dissertation produced under the direction of the late David Montgomery, The Long Deep Grudge offers rich descriptions of management's dictatorial practices at the giant International Harvester plants and the multiple struggles launched by wage earners on and off shop floors. Gilpin moves chronologically, first introducing us to the filthy rich McCormick family, a dynasty determined to rule unilaterally. Cyrus McCormick II, we learn, “focused obsessively” on managerial questions and remained convinced that he was a benevolent guardian. Yet he was unable to extinguish class conflict. The Chicago-based McCormick Works was the scene of intense unrest that led to the Haymarket affair after cops killed at least one protestor on May 3, 1886. This, and the following day's riot, left a meaningful legacy on both exploiters and workers.Labor-management relations remained tense in subsequent years, and workers continued to challenge their exploitative conditions by organizing walkouts and joining unions, including the Industrial Workers of the World. Like other industrial heads of the era, McCormick recognized the necessity of addressing his chronic labor problems holistically: “What can we do now in the way of improving our relations with our own workers?” (44). Management experimented with welfare programs, and Gilpin spotlights the role played by Arthur H. Young, who had previously worked to solve labor difficulties at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. Young, who started at International Harvester in 1918, launched “a host of pioneering managerial practices,” including welfare programs and a company union, the “Industrial Council Plan” (45). Gilpin's statement that International Harvester was somewhat of a pioneer isn't entirely convincing given what industrial relations scholars like Bruce Kaufman have noted about the development of human resources, but her larger point is spot-on: management believed that repression alone could not solve their labor problems.The introduction of welfare work and company unions failed to hoodwink most proletarians into believi
如果你想找一本既鼓舞人心又充满悲剧色彩的快节奏的书，托尼·吉尔平的《漫长而深刻的怨恨:美国腹地大资本、激进劳工和阶级斗争的故事》将对你有所帮助。这项经过充分研究的研究探讨了几十年来吉尔平在国际收割机公司的生产工厂中恰当地称之为“无休止的阶级斗争”(282)。她出版了一本关于这家多地点农业设备巨头劳工骚乱的参考书，这场骚乱最终导致了cio下属的农业设备工人工会(FE)的成立。几十年来，这些左翼工会积极分子在许多工作场所与国家和企业力量进行了激烈的斗争，包括在获得集体谈判权后的几年里。与今天的MAGAs不同，在二战后的经济繁荣时期，FE成员可能并不认为这个国家是“伟大的”。这本书最初是在已故戴维•蒙哥马利(David Montgomery)指导下撰写的一篇耶鲁大学论文，对大型国际收割机(International Harvester)工厂管理层的独裁做法以及工薪层内外的多重斗争进行了丰富的描述。吉尔平按时间顺序移动，首先向我们介绍了肮脏富有的麦考密克家族，一个决心单方面统治的王朝。我们了解到，赛勒斯·麦考密克二世“痴迷地”关注管理问题，并始终相信自己是一位仁慈的守护者。然而，他无法消除阶级冲突。总部位于芝加哥的麦考密克工厂是1886年5月3日警察杀死至少一名抗议者后导致干草市场事件的激烈骚乱的现场。这一事件，以及第二天的骚乱，给剥削者和工人都留下了有意义的遗产。在随后的几年里，劳资关系仍然紧张，工人们继续通过组织罢工和加入包括世界产业工人组织在内的工会来挑战他们受到剥削的条件。像那个时代的其他工业领袖一样，麦考密克认识到有必要从整体上解决他长期存在的劳工问题:“我们现在能做些什么来改善我们与自己工人的关系?”(44)。管理层尝试了福利项目，吉尔平着重介绍了阿瑟·h·杨(Arthur H. Young)所扮演的角色，他曾在科罗拉多燃料和钢铁公司(Colorado Fuel and Iron Company)解决劳工问题。杨于1918年开始在国际收割机公司工作，他发起了“一系列开创性的管理实践”，包括福利计划和公司工会，即“工业委员会计划”(45)。考虑到布鲁斯·考夫曼(Bruce Kaufman)等劳资关系学者对人力资源发展的看法，吉尔平认为国际收割机公司是先驱的说法并不完全令人信服，但她更大的观点是正确的:管理层认为，仅靠镇压无法解决他们的劳工问题。福利工作和公司工会的引入未能蒙蔽大多数无产者，使他们相信管理者关心他们的福祉。越来越多的人加入了1919年在芝加哥成立的美国共产党(CP)。党的成立对麦考密克个人来说是一个打击，部分原因是莫斯科以外的社会主义者在俄国革命期间占领了国际收割机的工厂。在整个工业化世界，越来越多的左翼分子和工人从这场革命中找到了灵感，许多人试图追随布尔什维克的脚步。但20世纪20年代并不是革命性的十年。在收割机工厂，以及许多其他工业机构，工资仍然很低，同时，正如吉尔平所说，统治阶级变得“惊人地富有”(55)。劳工运动在20世纪30年代末和40年代初取得了重大胜利，当时，在各种国际收割机工厂发生罢工之后，1938年成立的共产党附属工会取得了重大进展。1942年5月，麦考密克在多家工厂正式承认了工会。吉尔平承认苏联对共产党的影响，但指出其成员“只占欧盟成员的一小部分”(75)。这些人的行为也不像他们的敌人所讽刺的斯大林主义傻瓜。吉尔平令人信服地证明了激进分子认识到马克思主义的实用价值和跨种族组织的必要性，同时用她的话来说，“对永恒的阶级冲突的信念将塑造他们的政治世界观，并定义他们与国际收割机合作的各个方面”(76)。这个评估是正确的。增加生产的要求和管理层的骚扰，包括红色诱饵，从未停止，工会成员仍在反抗。
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10581335
Sonia Hernández
Bad Mexicans is a timely piece of scholarship. Notwithstanding recent criticism of scholars’ use of history as “confirm[ation] [of] [their] current political positions,” in my state, Texas, I find a book like Lytle Hernández's both vital and useful.1 It is precisely the contemporary value (or, for others, threat) of its historical content that makes Bad Mexicans a potentially transformative book. Lytle Hernández is not shy about employing this turn-of-the-twentieth-century story to insist once and for all that the histories of Mexico and the United States are intimately linked; this shared history has been consequential for both US and Mexican peoples. With an engaging prose accessible to public audiences, Lytle Hernández re-creates this shared history. Through the lens of magonismo and its greater legacy, I outline my main thoughts on Bad Mexicans as a series of historical lessons for us to consider.Lesson 1: Silencing political criticism erodes democracy—then and now. In January of last year, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador declared 2022 the year of Ricardo Flores Magón to commemorate Magón's contributions to the Mexican Revolution. Ironically, he did so amid what has been a bloody war against Mexican journalists: 151 journalists have been killed since 1992, and thirteen in the first eight months of 2022. One cannot help but think of the crackdown on journalists and thinkers like Magón and colleagues over a century ago, precisely for critiquing then-president Porfirio Díaz and his associates, including US financiers who upheld Porfirian values.Porfirio Diaz's banning of Regeneración, the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM)’s main propaganda organ, and persecution forced Magón and colleagues to find alternative ways to spread critical knowledge and information among multiple audiences. By July 1907, as Lytle Hernández writes, Magón was not just hiding in Los Angeles; he was also making the city the new headquarters of the PLM. He worked with Modesto Díaz to reboot Regeneración under the new name Revolución. When Revolución hit the streets of Los Angeles in June 1907, authorities once again hunted Magón. Lytle Hernández outlines the way US authorities, including the newly created Federal Bureau of Investigation, collaborated with Mexican agents to silence and apprehend these “bad Mexicans” who stood as obstacles to state progress and capital buildup. Basing her narrative on binational archival material, Lytle Hernández shows the centrality of the United States in silencing political criticism to promote a state progress that quickly emerged as antidemocratic.Lesson 2: Anarchism and its various strands, including anarcho-syndicalism,2 were not obscure, narrow ideas and movements, as they have often been portrayed—even if the PLM and magonismo declined, anarchist ideas remained relevant throughout the revolution and the postrevolutionary period, and their spirit is noticeable in today's struggles in different parts of the world. Social rev
《坏墨西哥人》是一本及时的学术著作。尽管最近有人批评学者把历史作为“[他们]当前政治立场的证实”，但在我居住的德克萨斯州，我发现像利特尔Hernández这样的书既重要又有用正是其历史内容的当代价值(或者对其他人来说是威胁)使《坏墨西哥人》成为一本潜在的变革性书籍。利特尔Hernández并不羞于利用这个二十世纪之交的故事来一劳永逸地坚持墨西哥和美国的历史是紧密相连的;这段共同的历史对美国和墨西哥人民都产生了重大影响。通过吸引公众的散文，Lytle Hernández重新创造了这段共同的历史。通过magonismo及其更大的遗产，我概述了我对坏墨西哥人的主要看法，作为我们考虑的一系列历史教训。教训一:压制政治批评会侵蚀民主——无论是过去还是现在。去年1月，墨西哥总统安德烈·曼努埃尔López奥夫拉多尔宣布2022年为里卡多·弗洛雷斯年Magón，以纪念Magón对墨西哥革命的贡献。具有讽刺意味的是，他是在一场针对墨西哥记者的血腥战争中做出这一决定的:自1992年以来，已有151名记者遇害，而在2022年前8个月就有13名记者遇害。人们不禁会想起一个多世纪前对Magón及其同事等记者和思想家的镇压，原因正是他们批评了时任总统波菲里奥Díaz及其同事，包括支持波菲里奥价值观的美国金融家。Porfirio Diaz禁止了墨西哥自由党(PLM)的主要宣传机构Regeneración，并对其进行迫害，迫使Magón及其同事寻找其他途径在众多受众中传播批判性知识和信息。正如利特尔Hernández所写，到1907年7月，Magón不仅躲在洛杉矶;他还把这座城市变成了人民解放运动的新总部。他与Modesto Díaz合作，以新名称Revolución重新启动Regeneración。1907年6月，当Revolución袭击洛杉矶街头时，当局再次追捕Magón。Lytle Hernández概述了包括新成立的联邦调查局(fbi)在内的美国当局如何与墨西哥特工合作，压制和逮捕这些阻碍国家进步和资本积累的“坏墨西哥人”。基于她对两国档案材料的叙述，Lytle Hernández显示了美国在压制政治批评以促进国家进步方面的中心地位，这种进步很快就出现了反民主。教训2:无政府主义及其各种分支，包括无政府工团主义，2并非像人们经常描述的那样，是模糊、狭隘的思想和运动——即使PLM和magonismo衰落了，无政府主义思想在整个革命和革命后时期仍然相关，他们的精神在当今世界不同地区的斗争中是显而易见的。社会革命需要持久的毅力、耐心和承诺。Magón和其他一些人，比如norteño活动家Librado Rivera，坚持认为真正的革命还没有到来。他们失去了许多盟友，这些盟友认为他们不妥协、固执。当Magón发现自己在Francisco I. Madero被暗杀后很久就被关进了监狱，他的许多支持者现在已经转向巩固革命目标，通过1917年Venustiano Carranza总统的新政府。当前PLM支持者和其他人把希望寄托在卡兰萨身上时，来自边境州Coahuila的地区政府对激进的劳工活动家发动了镇压，这些激进的劳工活动家对与新兴的革命国家结盟不感兴趣。卡兰萨提倡与有组织的劳工合作，但前提是这对新国家有利。因此，那些被认为不合作、边缘、不守规矩的人很容易成为攻击目标。这些人包括与世界产业工人组织和其他集体组织(如Casa del Obrero Mundial (COM))有联系的magonistas，他们被所谓的革命总统监视、折磨，在某些情况下被杀害在这方面，Magón的不妥协值得赞扬。当其他人决定加入马德罗和后来的卡兰萨时，包括塔毛利帕斯州的精英埃米利奥·波特斯·吉尔，这些伪革命者，尤其是卡兰萨和波特斯·吉尔，反而被边缘化，追捕，下令折磨，有时谋杀激进分子，包括支持无政府主义者所倡导的许多相同目标的共产主义者(尽管通过不同的方法)。Magón的顽固思想最终使他被判无期徒刑。然而，在他去世后不久，他在引领变革可能性方面的作用得到了更充分的认识。
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10581559
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
Most Americans know Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a feminist icon whose likeness can still be found (more than two years after her passing) on T-shirts, mugs, and stickers. Images of the “Notorious RBG” usually show her in Supreme Court robes with the kind of stylish white collar the justice favored, and fans can now buy or get knitting patterns for the collar online. This cult following really grew in the new millennium, when Ginsburg developed a reputation for fiery opinions that thrilled progressives and liberals frustrated with conservatives on the Court and in Congress.But political scientist and legal expert Philippa Strum boldly argues that Ginsburg made her real impact on the law years before her 1993 nomination. On Account of Sex: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Making of Gender Equality Law focuses on Ginsburg's work in the 1970s for the American Civil Liberty Union's (ACLU) Women's Rights Project. This short, compelling book does a far better job than RBG, the 2018 documentary, to explain the work involved in bringing cases to the Court as well as Ginsburg's legal tactics, failures, and successes. She embraced opportunities to highlight to an all-male Court that sex discrimination affected women and men. She also later admitted taking inspiration from one of those justices, former NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall. He pursued cases that Ginsburg recognized as “building blocks” that had led to the monumental 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision (40). “We copied that,” Ginsburg admitted, because, she insisted, “real change, enduring change . . . happens one step at a time” (40, 53–54). But the Court resisted a clear forward march toward gender equality in the 1970s. Ginsburg pithily summarized it as a halting move “From No Rights to Half Rights to Confusing Rights” in a 1978 law review article published just two years before Jimmy Carter nominated her to the US Court of Appeals (142).Strum's account refreshingly stresses that RBG was never the only person, never the only woman lawyer, advancing the cause of women's rights or fighting sex discrimination. As such, On Account of Sex implicitly critiques the singular focus on RBG as a jurist as well as a lawyer. The book instead illustrates the value of telling the stories of the many people and movements fighting for lasting change. Strum, for example, highlights how legal icons Dorothy Kenyon and Pauli Murray pressured the ACLU to start the Women's Rights Project years before Ginsburg joined. Strum emphasizes that Ginsburg worked with others on or affiliated with that project and that she also relied on the work of her Columbia law students as well as attorneys connected to other important initiatives, like the still-potent Southern Poverty Law Center. Strum, like RBG, also recognizes the bravery of the ordinary people willing to go to court, including Susan Struck, an unwed air force captain who was given the choice to leave the service or terminate her pregnancy before the 1972 Roe decision, an
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10581405
James P. Kraft
In this concise, engaging study, Colin J. Davis explores the history of a neglected group of workers—transatlantic fishermen. The study compares the problems and political activities of New England and British fishermen after World War II, when foreign competition and technological innovations threatened the men's livelihoods as well as the health of Atlantic Ocean fisheries. Fishermen's trade unions and wives helped to confront these threats, with uneven levels of success. This working-class drama unfolds gradually, and it speaks to major themes in social and labor history.The drama begins with an overview of the North Atlantic fishing business. The book's opening chapter discusses the types of fish that men harvested and areas of the seas where the fish were found. It also describes daily routines and job hierarchies on modern fishing vessels, whose large trawls collected fish by the ton. At that point, the book brings the hazards of deep-sea fishing into sharp relief. Working on a constantly moving trawler for long periods of time presented enormous challenges. Injuries and fatalities were relatively high in this line of work, especially during stormy weather. Trawlers sometimes capsized at sea and entire crews perished.Fishermen's unions struggled valiantly to protect their members’ interests, but only those of the New Englanders had much success. The reason was partly structural. Ignoring old craft traditions, the Americans established unions that included skippers and engineers as well as deckhands and cooks. As a result, the men had more power vis-à-vis shipowners than their British counterparts did. On both sides of the Atlantic, however, getting fishermen to support union goals proved challenging. The men were often at sea and rarely wanted to spend their shore time involved in union activities. Trade union leaders were typically more militant than the rank and file, and union victories hinged largely on their own dedication and hard work.Unlike other labor studies, this book shows how workers’ wives helped to solve industry-wide problems. In chapter 4, for example, readers learn how a group of British women who had lost their husbands at sea protested the lack of safety standards in the fishing business. Speaking publicly about the problem, the women complained that British trawlers often headed out to sea without reliable communication equipment, or even basic medical supplies. The women's speeches drew nationwide attention and eventually shamed shipowners and lawmakers into improving safety conditions. In New England, fishermen's wives created local organizations that highlighted the importance of fishing to coastal economies and thus justified the exclusion of foreign fishing fleets from coastal waters. In 1976, the women garnered support for the Magnuson Fisheries Conservation Act, which significantly extended America's territorial fishing limits and thereby protected their husbands’ jobs.The politics of exclusion occasionally spark
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