Work, Race, and Internationalism on the Global Waterfront

If some U.S. diplomatic historians may not see the history of labor as essential to their field, recent scholarship is placing work and workers near the center of American foreign relations. Historians such as Jana Lipman, Julie Greene, Daniel Bender, and Chris Capozzola, to name a few, have argued the United States assumed an imperial stature partly through Americans’ encounters with foreign labor, from Cubans at Guantánamo and West Indians at the Panama Canal, to Filipino porters and soldiers for the U.S. military. Kim Scipes, Elizabeth McKillen, Victor Silverman, and Steve Striffler, among others, have plumbed the making and contestation of organized American labor’s foreign policy over the course of the twentieth century, as AFL-CIO officials lent support to liberal internationalist and anti-communist Cold War era foreign policies. This literature is now complemented by Peter Cole’s study of dockworkers in northern California and South Africa in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His book demonstrates how interracial groups of workers and their unions, half the world apart from each other, used their critical position at the connective nodes of a globalizing world economy to pursue a robust anti-racist and internationalist politics, even as technological change undermined their power on the waterfront, if not beyond it.

Alliance · Communism · Economic history · Foreign policy · International relations · Internationalism (politics) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Scholarship · Sociology · History · Labor Movements and Unions · Law