scholarly journals Karl Marx and the Global History of the Civil War: The Slave Movement, Working-Class Struggle, and the American State within the World Market

2021 ◽  
Vol 100 ◽  
pp. 158-185
Author(s):  
Matteo Battistini
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Market ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
Global History ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
American State

AbstractThis essay stitches together the fragments of Marx's work on the United States that are scattered in newspaper articles, letters, notes, in some digressions in his early writings, in his economic manuscripts and in Capital (1867). The main aim is to show that what we can call a “global history of the Civil War” emerges from his pen: a history that is global not simply in a geographical sense, that is, because it expands the European space beyond the Atlantic and towards the Pacific, but also because of the general meaning it takes on in the history of capitalism. The essay highlights how the Civil War opened the Marxian issue of emancipation, his vision of class struggle and his view of the working class, to the presence of a black proletariat that interacted with the struggle of the white working classes, the latter of which until then had been the main focus of his work. It also highlights how the different and disarticulated voices of labor – slave and free, black and white – on both sides of the Atlantic effected a revolutionary shift in the Civil War: interjecting a “revolutionary turn” into what we can call the “long constitutional history” of the political conflict between North and South that changed the economic and social shape of the nation. More importantly, the essay reconstructs what can be termed the “state moment,” which was entangled with the “long constitutional history” and the “revolutionary turn” of the Civil War. As the transnational calls for emancipation from slavery and wage labor impacted the transnational processes of accumulation of industrial capital, the American state became a player in the world market: its financial and fiscal policies became socially linked to the government of industrial capital. In this sense, as the essay underlines in the conclusion, the “global history of the Civil War” that Marx effectively drafted, outlined the theoretical and political hypothesis that formed the basis of his mature reflection in the pages of Capital: the “emancipation of labour” should be thought of as a global issue, “neither a local nor a national, but a social problem.”

The Cambridge History of America and the World

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global History ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Early American ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Indentured Servants

The first volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines how the United States emerged out of a series of colonial interactions, some involving indigenous empires and communities that were already present when the first Europeans reached the Americas, others the adventurers and settlers dispatched by Europe's imperial powers to secure their American claims, and still others men and women brought as slaves or indentured servants to the colonies that European settlers founded. Collecting the thoughts of dynamic scholars working in the fields of early American, Atlantic, and global history, the volume presents an unrivalled portrait of the human richness and global connectedness of early modern America. Essay topics include exploration and environment, conquest and commerce, enslavement and emigration, dispossession and endurance, empire and independence, new forms of law and new forms of worship, and the creation and destruction when the peoples of four continents met in the Americas.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Parfitt
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
American History ◽  
Global History ◽  
Knights Of Labor ◽  
International Context ◽  
Global Trend ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Reformers

This chapter introduces the American history of the Knights of Labor, and provides an overview of the ways in which scholars have approached that history. It then places the Knights of Labor within a wider international context in two key ways. First, this chapter locates the Knights as part of a larger, global trend of international organising by early feminists, social reformers, and especially working-class activists. Second, it explores the global history of the Knights themselves and the fragmentary nature of the scholarship concerning it. Finally, this chapter brings together what we do know about the Knights across the world, and provides synopses of the chapters that follow.

Warehouses on wheels

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 648-665 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dara Orenstein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supply Chain ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Market ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Spatial Form ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Border

A typical depiction of a logistics corporation is a study in bright lights and blurred lines against a static landscape of territorial sovereignty. It celebrates—as in the slogan touted by the freight-carrier DHL—“logistics without borders.” This article demystifies that promise of borderlessness by explaining how the nation-state has played a lead role in facilitating the circulation of capital and in making the world safe for logistics. Specifically, I revisit two underappreciated milestones in the history of the United States: first, how Congress followed in the path of the British Empire and, in 1846, authorized the spatial form of the bonded warehouse; and second, how it went further and, in 1870, supplemented the bonded warehouse with a bonded railcar, or “warehouse on wheels.” The latter step in particular, I argue, laid a foundation for the networked geography of supply-chain capitalism. Congress permitted the bonded railcar to bypass customs clearance at ports on the seacoast and to move “directly” to ports in the interior. This protocol helped merchants expedite deliveries and generate liquidity via duty deferral, and, equally if not more importantly, it helped boosters on the urban frontiers of the Great West lure investment and spur development via the world market. What was “radical” about this innovation, as commentators noted at the time, was that it mobilized not only commodity capital but also, in effect, the national border.

Beginning of an Era: The First Blockbuster Drug, Tagamet

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jie Jack Li
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pharmaceutical Companies ◽  
Garden City ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The World ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
History Of ◽  
Blockbuster Drug

Tagamet emerged as the first blockbuster drug when its sales exceeded $1 billion in 1986, three years after its introduction to the market. An anti–peptic ulcer drug, Tagamet was discovered by James W. Black and his colleagues at Smith Kline & French’s (SK&F) British subsidiary in Welwyn Garden City. Before Tagamet, SK&F was a little-known U.S. drug firm in Philadelphia. After Tagamet, SK&F became one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. The history of Tagamet is one of the most extraordinary in the annals of medicine. It is a saga of a drug that almost escaped detection because the research efforts that began in 1964 did not seem to produce results within the first 11 years! Smith Kline started as a humble drug store in Philadelphia in 1830. During the American Civil War, Smith Kline was founded as a small apothecary by two physicians, John K. Smith and John Gilbert on North Second Street. Not only was Philadelphia the birthplace of the United States of America, it was also the cradle of American pharmacy. Wyeth, McNeil, Rorer, and Warner-Lambert all trace their origins to small drug stores established there during the Civil War. In the 1880s, Mahlon N. Kline led the company into research and manufacturing of its own products. In 1891, it absorbed French, Richards & Co. founded by Harry B. French, creating Smith Kline & French. After its establishment, the company slowly expanded its inventory. By the 1920s, it had some 15,000 products ranging from aspirin to liniment. Their Eskay’s Albumenized Food was highly popular as a digestible food for infants and the disabled. Later, the company did very well with Eskay’s Tablets for Seasickness. Its specialty, Eskay’s Neurophosphates, a nerve tonic, soothed millions of people at home and abroad. In 1929, Smith Kline & French Laboratories was created to devote itself solely to research and development (R&D). During the Great Depression year of 1936, the company stepped up its efforts in R&D (in a recent contrast, many pharmaceutical companies stepped down their R&D investments during the last recession of 2008).

Presidents and the Dissolution of the Union

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred I. Greenstein ◽  
Dale Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Organizational Capacity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Personal Strengths ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
American Leader ◽  
Policy Vision

The United States witnessed an unprecedented failure of its political system in the mid-nineteenth century, resulting in a disastrous civil war that claimed the lives of an estimated 750,000 Americans. This book assesses the personal strengths and weaknesses of presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama. The book evaluates the leadership styles of the Civil War-era presidents. The book looks at the presidential qualities of James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. For each president, the book provides a concise history of the man's life and presidency, and evaluates him in the areas of public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. The book sheds light on why Buchanan is justly ranked as perhaps the worst president in the nation's history, how Pierce helped set the stage for the collapse of the Union and the bloodiest war America had ever experienced, and why Lincoln is still considered the consummate American leader to this day. The book reveals what enabled some of these presidents, like Lincoln and Polk, to meet the challenges of their times—and what caused others to fail.

Fellow Worker

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 144
Author(s):  
Barry Pateman
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Global History ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fellow Worker

Review of Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer, Wobblies of the World. A new edited collection on the global history of the Industrial Workers of the World.  

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
English Language ◽  
Book History ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.

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