Julie Greene

Builders of Empire: Rewriting the Labor and Working-Class History of Anglo-American Global Power

Who built the US empire? A labor history of North American and US empirebuilding focuses our attention on the interconnections between capitalist and state expansionism, migratory routes, systems of labor mobilization, segregation, and discipline, and the contested rights of citizens and colonial subjects. By taking us into the world of working people across North and South America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, the essays in this double issue of Labor also illuminate the challenges that faced government and corporate leaders as they sought to create a well-oiled expansionist machine. Their dreams could not be realized without the labor of millions of workers who moved through the reworked geography of empire and, in various ways, either accommodated themselves to the new imperial power structures or struggled to resist them. The authors who have contributed to this issue transport us in time and place to consider, among others, the fears of seventeenth-century conscripted soldiers, the demands of Puerto Ricans to share in the social welfare policies of the New Deal, the lofty hopes of liberated factory workers in Korea, the vulnerabilities of migrant Filipinos in Guam, the frustrations of segregated and monitored Marshallese domestic workers and landscapers, and the desires of West Indian canal workers wanting a chance to defend the British Empire in the Great War. In doing so, they also challenge us to reinterpret the history of labor and the working class as well as the history of empire building. Building on Labor’s prior collaborative projects—notably Workers across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History (2011) and Workers in Hard Times: A Long View of Economic Crises (2014)—this issue is part of a broader movement to explore the interconnections between the United States and the world, one that has itself been produced by a historical moment more keenly attuned to global processes. Whether one credits renewed attention to global capitalism and neoliberalism, heightened anxieties around national security in the post-9/11 world, or US wars in