Linking the old world with the new: recent studies of labor migration, race, and political protest in America and the British empire

Abstract

Labor historians of the Anglophone world can enrich their field by extending the idea of ‘Atlantic community’ to include Britain's former colonies in Canada, Africa, and Australasia. Only in this way can they fully understand the world's first large-scale migration of labor, both voluntary and involuntary, and the cross-fertilization that occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries between social movements such as labor republicanism, the Knights of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World, and women's labor struggles which may have originated in the UK or the US but which are misperceived if viewed solely in the context of the nation state.

Acknowledgments

I wrote this essay while a fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, Canberra, in the summer of 2004. I am grateful to Paul Pickering and other members of the faculty for reading an earlier draft.

Notes

Alexander and Halpern, Racializing Class, ix.

Montgomery, ‘Empire, Race and Working-class Mobilizations,’ in ibid., 1–31.

Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, 8.

Pettinger, Always Elsewhere, ii–ix.

Cheng and Bonacich, Labor Migration under Capitalism.

Despite a few suggestive studies, this overall field remains largely undeveloped. See e.g. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Northrup, Indentured Labor; and Haines and Shlomowitz, ‘Emigration from Europe.’

For the US frontier, see Billington, Westward Expansion. For Southern and Eastern European immigrants, see Bodnar, The Transplanted, and for repression during US industrial development, see Lens, The Labor Wars.

Heron, Working in Steel, ch. 9.

Hofstadter and Lipset, Turner and the Sociology of the Frontier, ch. 9.

Cross, ‘Labour in Settler Societies.’

Markus, Fear and Hatred; Chen, Gold Mountain.

Woolmington, Aborigines in Colonial Society.

Insights into British influence over the growth of trade union and socialist movements elsewhere in the English-speaking world can be found in Berthoff, British Immigrants in Industrial America; McCormack, ‘Cloth Caps and Jobs;’ Mann, The Labour Movement; and Irving, ‘The Roots of Parlimentary Socialism.’

See e.g. Boston, British Chartists in America; Kealey and Palmer, Dreaming of What Might Be; Buckley, The Amalgamated Engineers; Olssen, The Red Feds; and Gain, A History of the IWW.

Laslett, Colliers Across the Sea.

Erickson, ‘Depression Emigrants;’ Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy.

Berthoff, British Immigrants, passim.

In 1990 Gregory S. Kealey and Greg Patmore edited a volume of essays called Canadian and Australian Labour History: Towards a Comparative Perspective, but only two of the essays, Richard Mitchell's study of conciliation and arbitration legislation and Patmore's piece on railroad workers, were genuinely comparative.

Pickering, ‘Conference Report.’

Linda Colley suggests that the ‘John Bull’ version of Britishness in the eighteenth century contained a great deal of anti-foreign sentiment—a fact that may help account for the development of the ‘white Australia’ policy in later years. On the other hand, ‘bottom-up’ Britishness was internationalist. It included the idea of establishing a ‘better Britain’ in the colonies, just as English colonists in America had done in the eighteenth century when they spoke of making the new world safe for ‘free-born Englishmen.’ These ‘better Britain’ ideas also influenced the perception of both the US and Australia as a ‘workingman's paradise.’ See Colley, Britons; Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution; and Pickering, ‘“Ripe for a Republic.”’

Kenneth Lunn touches on this topic in ‘A Racialized Hierarchy for Labour? Race, Immigration, and the British Labour Movement, 1880–1950,’ in Alexander and Halpern, Racializing Class, 104–21. See also Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters.

See note 13.

Published in Canberra by the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University.

Oxley and Richards, ‘Convict Women.’

Kirk, Comrades and Cousins, 133; Laslett, Colliers Across the Sea, chs. 1, 4–6.

Allen, ‘Real Incomes.’

On the dialectical relationship between race and class, see Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic.