The Perils and Promises of Global History: New Ideas on a Usable Past. A Review of Aviva Chomsky's <em>Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class</em> (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008)

Abstract

The central arguments that inform Aviva Chomsky’s Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class are that “labor history is at heart of understanding globalization,” that this process—seeking to maximize profits and degrade labor by cycles of immigration and deindustrialization and out-sourcing—has been playing itself out for at least a hundred years, that the textile industry has been a key bellwether of this process, and that through a complex intertwined study of New England and Colombia new light can be shed on the process of globalization and the making of a global working class.