Organizing Workers in the Shadow of Slavery: Land Reform, Migration, and Strikebreaking and the Rise of Labor in the US and the UK, 1870–1900

When workers organize, they rarely do so inclusively. The boundaries of craft, race, gender, and nation have repeatedly divided workers. This paper offers a comparative history of union formation and racial boundary making by American and British workers from 1870 to 1900. In these years modern labor unions emerged and took on permanent form, white supremacy flourished globally in Jim Crow America, White Australia, and South Africa, and anti-immigrant nativism barricaded high-wage labor markets against migrants from low-wage peripheries. As working-class movements organized to challenge the power of capital, they also constructed and entrenched capitalism’s geographic and racial boundaries. The paper offers a comparative history of the American continental and the British maritime empires, but it is also grounded in the local experiences of workers in four cities, the steel centers of Pittsburgh and Sheffield and the transportation hubs of Baltimore and Liverpool. Why did the Knights collapse while the new unions of the UK survive? A comparative analysis suggests that the distinctive, narrow shape of the US labor movement arose from the economic and geographic structures entrenched by slavery. In particular, the narrow US labor movement resulted from regionally and racially divided labor markets. The paper argues that the US South and Ireland were comparable rural, near-peripheries that supplied low-wage migrant labor and strikebreakers to the industrial cores of the US and the UK in the late nineteenth century. The success of land reform in Ireland, and its failure in the Reconstruction South, provided contrasting conditions for the recruitment of strikebreakers in the late-nineteenth century.