This seminar explores the transnational history of labor in North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean across the 19th and 20th centuries. We will be thinking critically about work of many kinds and international connections of many kinds, and asking how they have shaped each other, and what the societal consequences have been. How have geopolitical shifts and international capital flows remade laboring lives, working communities, and regional economies across the Americas?How have the actions of workers and potential workers shaped distant investors’ options and profits?What role have ideologies of race and gender played in labor control—and labor struggle?To what extent have different nation-states been able to impact outcomes within this supranational system? How different is the “globalized” present from this past? In addition to a series of important recent case studies in the transnational history of labor, we will explore key scholarly debates regarding scope, scale, and method in border-crossing historical research.This seminar should be of use to any student interest in paradigms for transnational research, in the historical discipline or beyond.
