Labor

Entanglements of Coerced Labor and Colonial Science in the Atlantic World and Beyond | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for May 18, 2024, is “Entanglements of Coerced Labor and Colonial Science in the Atlantic World and Beyond,” a roundtable conversation with Zachary Dorner, Patrick Anthony, Jody Benjamin, Nicholas B. Miller, and Kate Luce Mulry. It was published in “Labor and Science,” a recent special issue of Labor: Studies in Working Class History (21:1), guest edited by Seth Rockman, Lissa Roberts, and Alexandra Hui.

Read this article for free through June 30, 2024.
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Cover of Labor and Science, a special issue of Labor Studies in Working-Class History volume 21, issue 1. A purple toned vintage photograph of workers in a lab space attending materials on shelves. The journal's logo is in cyan blue in the top left, issue information is in white text at the bottom.

The five participants in this conversation have followed different paths to the intersection of labor history and the history of science but share common research questions regarding the relationship of coercion, colonialism, and scientific knowledge production. Collectively their scholarship is global in scope and offers the opportunity to think comparatively across a range of colonial regimes, populations, scientific disciplines, and modes of labor mobilization. Their inquiries emphasize the importance of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries to the structures of knowledge and power that continue to organize the modern world, while also suggesting that historians of more recent periods might gain theoretical insights from studies of a more distant past. This conversation began in Philadelphia in June 2022, unfolded diachronically in early 2023, and has been edited for clarity. An appendix contains citations for scholarship mentioned in the text.

The labor question—who will do the work and under what economic and political terms?—beckons today with renewed global urgency. As a site for both historical research and commentary, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History hopes to provide an intellectual scaffolding for understanding the roots of continuing social dilemmas.

The official journal for the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA).

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.