Employing innovative methods and new approaches to global labor history, the six essays in this collection explore important aspects of labor's role in global capitalism since the early modern period. Essays by Jan Lucassen and Jeffrey D. Glasco study the commercial agents, soldiers, and sailors that constituted the institutional framework for the global expansion of Western capitalism. Essays by Julie Greene and by Donna Gabaccia, Franca Iacovetta, and Fraser Ottanelli concentrate on workers who entered the international labor markets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They show how employers attempted to use migrants to promote stratification within the working classes and how workers responded to these efforts by trying to fashion their own identities. Finally, essays by Josie Fowler and Victor Silverman investigate the international organizations created by labor movements, responding to global capitalism, and illustrate how these organizations have shaped the development of the labor movement.

This essay focuses on the emergence of an international labor market connecting Europe with southern Africa and south and southeast Asia, showing the intertwining of commercialization and proletarianization in the institution that created and coordinated perhaps the most important international labor market connecting Europe to the Far East.

To date, most interpretations regarding the agency of maritime workers in the late eighteenth century have posited the seamen as a united working-class body. However, the application of gender as a mode of analysis illustrates that a division existed amongst the working-class seamen in their vision of what it meant to be a worker, specifically a maritime worker. These differing ideas of masculinity drove a wedge between the seamen of the British Royal Navy, thus weakening their class solidarity. One faction of seamen favored the existing social contract accepted a society based on inequality, even amongst men, but in return demanded that their contributions as workers and as men be acknowledged by their rulers through both material and symbolic rewards. Similarly, another element of the seamen sought a more revolutionary solution in seeking rewards for their masculine contributions, which included acknowledgement of their roles as workers and rights as men through political equality. What it meant to be a seaman and the contestation of that definition motivated and limited the historical agency of seamen in the greatest labor dispute during the Age of Sail: the British seamen's Spithead and Nore mutinies of 1797. As a new approach to labor history, the examination of the power of internalized gendered definitions to limit the actions of workers' agency offers powerful new insights.

A decade-long project on the migration of Italian laborers around the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries points to the methodological challenges, theoretical debates, and some of the rewards of transnational analysis of class, ethnicity, and gender in the making of modern national states. Analyses of internationally mobile laborers historicize current transnational studies, problematize the historiography of national groups, and reveal how profoundly—and usually also how “nationally”—every multiethnic nation-state understood relations among ethnicity, race or color, class, and gender.

This article examines the experiences of Spanish workers during the construction of the Panama Canal by the United States from 1904 to 1914. Spaniards engaged in a wide range of protest actions during the construction years, from strikes to food riots to anarchist politics. Employing Victor Turner's concept of liminality, the article highlights the mutability of the Spaniards' position and identity and examines several factors that shaped their experiences: the US government's policies of racial segregation and the injustices Spaniards experienced; the political and racial identities they brought with them from Spain; and their complex racial and imperial status in the Canal Zone. Spaniards possessed a remarkably fluid racial identity, considered white or nonwhite depending on circumstances, and that shifting status fueled their racial animosities as well as their protests.

In this article, I examine the contours of pan-Pacific revolutionary trade union internationalism from 1923 up through 1934, with special attention to the years 1928 to 1934, which years are commonly understood in Communist International (Comintern) historiography as the Third Period. The Third Period is typically viewed as being characterized by “a loss of influence” on the part of the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU or Profintern) as a result of the Comintern's “left” turn. My research shows that in spite of high levels of repression across Asia during the late 1920s and early 1930s and the continued existence of restrictive immigration and shipping laws in North America, the pan-Pacific revolutionary trade union movement retained a visible presence across the Pacific. Sustaining this movement were two groups of actors. First, were Chinese and Japanese seamen who, subject as they were to severe repression, understood that the strength of their unions at the local scale depended at least in part upon support from overseas and their ability to command space at the regional and international scales. Therefore, at great risk, through face to face contact and the medium of print, they sought to forge pan-Pacific ties of international solidarity. Second, were the Chinese and Japanese immigrant Communists who, also at great personal risk and with their efforts also always subject to repression and failure, sought to “jump” scales by boarding ships that came into North American ports and on which Chinese or Japanese seamen worked. Together these immigrant workers and seamen were the “conductors of the [pan-Pacific] revolutionary movement” linking up one side of the Pacific with the other.

This article examines evaluates the strength of the Labor-Environmentalist alliance of the late twentieth century. It traces the evolution of trade unionists' thinking about nature and the human relationship to the environment by examining intellectual and political sources of labor involvement in United Nations' environmental policy making from the 1950s through the 1980s. The article explores the reasons trade union organizations, notably the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the International Trade Secretariats (Global Union Federations) and the European Trade Union Confederation, participated in a variety of international conferences and institutions such as the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Environment, the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development. It finds that environmentally conscious trade unionists developed their own version of environmentalism and sustainable development based on a reworking of basic trade union principles, a reworking that emphasized solidarity with nature and made central the protection of the health and safety of workers, communities, and environments.

Labor historians have heretofore presented bifurcated portrayals of the relationship between defense workers and the wartime, corporatist state during the Second World War. While liberal CIO leaders energetically tried to establish labor's greater representation in wartime mobilization and politics through patriotic social unionism, militant rank and filers turned out to be antistate wildcatters. In contrast, this local study of Brewster workers producing naval aircraft suggests that the wartime fetish with patriotic productivity had converging impacts on the relationship of both international union leaders and rank and filers with the state. Industrial mobilization by the military simultaneously demanded and impeded orderly expansion of production, which in the process manufactured faltering companies like Brewster. Brewster workers, criticizing corporate and military mismanagement and calling for state intervention as a political remedy in their political letters and confidential reports, intensified their contests for joint control of production, employment, and planning. However, their struggles for patriotic control were contingent upon the Navy's continuous demands for Brewster planes, skills, and facilities and thus could not survive reconversion downsizing in defense production. Union leaders retreated into organizing new shops in metropolitan New York, which primarily involved routine interplays between few union leaders and NLRB officials. The reconversion at Brewster marked the postwar bureaucratization of defense workers' relationship with the state.

Still reeling from 9/11, I had been working in and about lower Manhattan nonstop until this trip. It was great to be far away in the smog-filtered Los Angeles sun, if even only for a day. I met Allan Sekula in his Echo Park work studio, a nondescript corner storefront filled with files of his photographs and boxes of exhibition prints just a stone's throw from Koreatown.

Readers in the humanities and social sciences abound. There are those that introduce key texts in a given field. Others seek to encapsulate the contributions of a major intellectual figure. In this latter category, there are volumes that focus on cultural critics, social theorists, literary scholars, and political writers. But there are few—if any—that highlight the writings of historians. It is thus says a great deal regarding E.P. Thompson's stature that the New Press has published The Essential E.P. Thompson. He is, as the book's editor Dorothy Thompson states, “one of the most influential historians of his generation” (vii). But he is more than this, as readers of this journal undoubtedly know. He is among the major public intellectuals of the last half of the twentieth century, certainly in the English-speaking world.

For Aristotle identifying the essence of something was a step to its classification, and thus the genre to which it belonged. For Leibniz every individual thing had an essence, and thus it established specific difference. Who was the essential E.P. Thompson, one of a kind or a type? The vogue in America was to speak of the British Marxist historians, or English social history as a genre.

E.P. Thompson was nursed on a mother's milk of transatlantic missionary work and writings on the Middle East that reached back to the last half of the nineteenth century. Fathered on Bengali literature, the poetry of the Great War, cricket with the likes of Nehru, and the struggle for Indian independence, Thompson was born into a highly literate and deeply politicized global village. Small wonder that at seventeen he was an anti-fascist and a soldier. But he took a wide Left turn, following in a brother's footsteps, to become a Marxist and a Communist in his twenties, only to find himself, by 1956, donning dissident dress, leading an exodus from the Communist Party of Great Britain, building a revolutionary New Left in the seemingly unpropitious climate of the late 1950s.

Putting together a reader from the polymorphously diverse writings of a formidably creative, dissident writer who reflects in his or her sensibility and voice the defining compass of the times that he or she has lived through and, moreover, helped remake is an unenviable task of tribute fraught with inevitable omissions and haunting incompletion. In his obituary on C. Wright Mills, his trans-Atlantic friend and comrade of the international New Left, Edward Thompson recognized that it was Mill's “style, rather than a comprehensive theory of social process . . . the style of a responsible and catholic eclectic” that he successfully attained in his late years and remains his enduring legacy. Thompson was able to make greater strides in achieving, if not a “comprehensive theory of social process,” a poetically incandescent, empirically textured way of reading this social process from the perspective of the English plebeians, artisans, and commoners, most famously with The Making of the English Working Class. Noting that in America The Making of the English Working Class “had both a Movement reading and an Academic reading,” Peter Linebaugh, a former student of Thompson's, has stressed its function as “an iconic text in some ways in the Movement . . . a text of particular class composition and a particular political moment” that also became among the students “a shield for the troops in this strategy, protecting us from the shafts and cuts of the Old Boy Network” of US higher education in the 1960s. Thirty-five years later, under the specter of another “particular class composition,” we may ask ourselves if The Essential E.P. Thompson can bid us to undertake new readings of the last “great bustard” and to pitch them against the neoliberal imperial Behemoth that encircles us today wherever we turn our eyes.

Comparative studies of social policy usually portray the French welfare state as lagging behind most of its counterparts in Western Europe during the first decades of the twentieth century. The sheer complexity of the French system, moreover, with its baroque mixture of separate private, government and quasi-public funds, made it exceptional as well. Yet tardiness and complexity by no means prevented the French from expanding social insurance at an especially rapid clip in the decades following the Second World War. By 1980 France spent more on social security as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product than any country in Europe except Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands. Today the French are among Europe's most stalwart defenders of publicly funded pensions and health insurance. Given its unimpressive beginnings, how did the French welfare state become such a heavyweight?

Travellers zooming up or down the Rhône Valley in the TGV Méditerranée, when passing through the area on a reasonably clear day, will undoubtedly notice an impressive mountain range suddenly rising from the low-level terrain of the Rhône Valley east of Valence. When this reviewer crossed on foot what is now known as Le Vercors in a week-long gruelling hike in 1984, the ubiquity of historical markers denoting the precise locations where resistance fighters had been shot and killed impressed itself upon the two trekkers holding German passports already during the very first day. In France, the Vercors has become a lieu de mémoire and incorporates a great variety of aspects and interpretations of the French resistance experience in an almost exemplary manner.

Many historians usually interpret the Spanish Civil War as a confrontation of great collective movements. Looking back into the trenches of the Iberian Peninsula, they see the organized forces of nationalism, communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and socialism clashing along battle lines as much ideological as military. In these standard accounts, such movements, whatever their sharp political differences, commanded popular support based on an ethos of heroism, sacrifice and devotion to a larger cause.

The authors succinctly note that contemporary studies of nationalism tend towards oversimplification. This oversimplification is manifested in a tacit and serious misrepresentation. The misrepresentation is a bifurcation of the colonial experience into the primary or self and the other. Such a manifestation is best represented by Said (1978) in terms of “orientalism.” Such a binary configuration of the colonial experience is an oversimplification for two reasons. First, it fails to acknowledge the interdimensional diversity of the colonized. To ignore interdimensional diversity is to fail to account for the role that gender and class play in the construct of the colonized. Second, binary configurations tend to misrepresent path dependence or the historical unfolding of particular nationalisms. In this sense, nationalism acquires an assumption of natural progression in terms of rights and welfare. The authors challenge the assumption that gender rights are acquired consummately in conjunction with nationalism. Instead, the authors make the argument that nationalism often acquires a regressive effect in terms of gender-class rights and welfare. As an example, Sharzad Mojab notes that Kurdish nationalism has had a conflictive relationship with the progression of women's welfare in addition to rights. Contemporary Kurdish nationalism has tended towards the regression of women's welfare. The root causes of a resort to regression are noted by Mojab to lie in the failure to effectively transform the preexisting precapitalist gender and class structure.

Re/Presenting Class is a timely and evocative collection of essays devoted to exploring the contribution postmodern Marxist class theory can make to the contemporary study of political economy. This multifaceted exploration marks a refreshing departure from the conventional focus of the political economic tradition on classical Marxist analysis of the capitalist system as a total system or mode of production. On this conventional approach, class functions merely as an instrument of the dominant mode of capital accumulation. By contrast, the essays in Gibson-Graham, Resnick and Wolff's collection employ various forms of class analysis as an independent means to illuminate contemporary and historical political economies. Here class is understood not simply as an instrumentality of capitalist accumulation, but as a set of independent “processes of producing, appropriating and distributing surplus labor” (17, 169). In essence, the essays attempt, in various ways, to extricate class analysis from general “theory of the capitalist totality,” (1) and to examine what kinds of insight it can offer as an independent framework in its own right. In general, the project repays the investment just as the book rewards reading.

This book portrays the labor movement in the Brazilian port city of Santos in the period between the two World Wars. Author Fernando Teixeira da Silva reconstructs a period of rapid urbanization, economic instability, and worker ferment in a city known for the combative nature of organized labor. The author focuses on the two types of work that predominated in interwar Santos: civil construction and, above all, dock work. Through his finely grained local history approach, Silva describes both the clashes of interests between labor and management and the reformulation of each class from within.

The presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), one of the leading figures of Latin American populism of the first half of the twentieth century, has long been surrounded by myth and politicized interpretations. To a certain extent this is understandable: under Cárdenas's leadership major and spectacular reforms were carried out that had their roots in claims originally formulated during and in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917). Moreover, these reforms have had a lasting impact on Mexico's political and socioeconomic development. In state-sanctioned historia oficial the figure of “grandfather” Cárdenas long reached mythical proportions: he carried out huge projects of land reform and thus finally responded to the demands of poor peasants and Indians, stood up against international capital by nationalizing the oil industry, rebuffed the conservative factions of the national bourgeoisie and laid the foundations for the corporatist state and party, that was to rule Mexico for the remaining part of the century, and thus gave institutional voice to the country's working classes. This image has also been influential in scholarly writings, particularly in those that studied cardenismo as a national phenomenon. Recent years, however, have seen important changes. Nationalist populism is drastically reevaluated in the dominant discourse of neoliberal modernity, and scholars have started to break down the phenomenon, thereby trying to overcome politicized interpretations.