The Labor of Capitalism

This chapter begins by discussing the concept transnational labor history and the challenge it poses to labor historians. It then examines the worldwide crisis of cotton production touched off by the American Civil War, emancipation, and the subsequent frantic search for alternatives, including coolie and sharecropping labor systems. It shows that despite the variety of labor regimes, cotton cultivators everywhere faced essentially similar challenges of labor in the global age: market fluctuations, state coercion, inescapable debt and contract regimes, and political marginalization. These were the people who would grow ever-larger amounts of cotton, from India to Central Asia, from Egypt to the United States, and the new labor regimes in which they found themselves symbolized one of the most significant changes of the nineteenth century.