Not a “Sack of Potatoes”: Why Labor Historians Need to Take Agriculture Seriously

International Labor and Working-Class History

Volumn 65, Issue , 2004, Pages 3-10

  Hahamovitch, Cindy ^a   Halpern, Rick ^b  

^a Dept of Economics and Thomas Jefferson Program in Public Policy at the College of William and Mary   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 4043053717     PISSN: 01475479     EISSN: 14716445     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S014754790400002X     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. A detailed historiographic tour through various nationally or regionally-centered literatures is impractical here. Let it suffice to point to three standard synthetic works in US labor history that either minimize or ignore completely rural workers: Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1989)
2. James R. Green, World of the Worker: Labor in Twentieth Century America(New York, 1980)
3. Melvyn Dubofsky, The State & Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994).
4. See the focused discussion of method in John Breuilly's introduction and conclusion to Labour and Liberalism in Nineteenth Century Europe (Manchester, UK, 1992).
5. See also James E. Cronin, “Neither Exceptional Nor Peculiar: Towards the Comparative Study of Labor in Advanced Society,” International Review of Social History 38 (1993)
6. Ira Katznelson, “Working-Class Formation: Constructing Cases and Comparisons,” in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, Katznelson and Astride R. Zolberg, eds. (Princeton, NJ, 1986).
7. The best sustained analysis of comparative approaches remains Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers, “The Uses of Comparative History in Macroso-cial Inquiry,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22:2 (1980).
8. For an overview of recent historiography, see George Fredrickson, “From Exceptionalism to Variability: Recent Developments in Cross-National Comparative History,” Journal of American History 82:2 (September 1995).
9. This point is made in especially eloquent fashion in Fredrickson, “From Exceptionalism to Variability.” It is worth noting that much of the most creative empirical work in comparative history has focused upon agrarian societies–yet this scholarship has had little impact upon labor history per se.
10. See, especially, Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA, 1987)
11. Kolchin, A Sphinx Upon the American Land: The Nineteenth Century South in Comparative Perspective (Baton Rouge, 2003)
12. Shearer Davis Bowman, Masters and Lords: Mid-Nineteenth-Century US Planters and Prussian Junkers (Oxford, UK, 1993).
13. See Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870–1945 (Chapel Hill, 1997).
14. Wayne D. Rasmussen, A History of the Emergency Farm Labor Supply Program (Washington, D.C., 1951)
15. Linda C. Majka and Theo J. Majka, Farm Workers, Agribusiness, and the State (Philadelphia, 1982)
16. Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Immigrants and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, 2003).
17. Perhaps the most relevant example is the case of South Africa, where labor and social historians have charted in detail the symbiotic relationship between the rural economy and industrialization. This historiographic tradition can be traced back to Harold Wolpe's 1972 article, “Capitalism and Cheap Labour Power in South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid.” Recently reprinted in Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth Century South Africa, William Beinart and Saul Dubow, eds. (London, 1995).
18. Key works in this tradition include Belinda Bo-zolli, ed. Town and Countryside in the Transvaal: Capitalist Penetration and Populist Response (Johannesburg, 1985)
19. William Beinart, Peter Delius, and Stanley Trapido, eds. Putting a Plough to the Ground: Accumulation and Dispossession in Rural South Africa, 1850–1930 (Johannesburg, 1986)
20. Tim Keegan, Rural Transformations in Industrializing South Africa: The Southern Highveld to 1914 (Johannesburg, 1986)
21. Jeremy Krikler, Revolution From Above, Rebellion From Below: The Agrarian Transvaal at the Turn of the Century (Oxford, 1997).
22. Historians of Reconstruction and the New South have long been aware of the way in which state power had shaped class formation, especially with regard to the distinctive situation of black labor. It is striking how the body of scholarship they have produced over the last thirty years has had virtually no impact upon Labor History. See, especially, Jonathan Wiener, “Class Structure and Economic Development,” American Historical Review 84 (October 1979).
23. Significant full length treatments include Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge, UK, 1977)
24. Gerald Jaynes, Roots Without Branches: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862–1882 (Oxford, 1986)
25. Joseph Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South (Chapel Hill, 1992)
26. most recently, Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA, 2003).
27. Enrico Dal Lago, “‘States of Rebellion’: Civil War, Rural Unrest, and the Agrarian Question in the American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno, 1861–1865.” Interested readers can consult this piece, which was written to complement the other essays presented here, at http://www.utoronto.ca/csus/ilwch