Frontiers of Labor: Comparative Histories of the United States and Australia ed. by Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist (review)

Australian labour historians have long been attracted to comparative analysis, and this journal has published two ambitious and relatively systematic volumes, organised around comparisons between labour’s history in Australia and Canada (Labour History, no. 71) and Australia and the United Kingdom (Labour History, no. 88). Greg Patmore was a prominent figure in both enterprises, and has since published comparative studies of the cooperative movement and workers’ participation. Together with eminent American labour historian Shelton Stromquist (the author of significant studies of railroad labour and of American progressivism), he has now edited Frontiers of Labor, a handsomely produced volume of comparative Australian–American essays.

Earlier Australian–Canadian and Australian–British comparisons published in Labour History relied upon the assembly of teams of cross-national researchers, organised in pairs to investigate a broad aspect of labour history, such as: political parties; communism; friendly societies; workers’ education; immigration; welfare; gender. Composed before the efflorescence of “transnational history,” they largely neglected interaction between national units of analysis. Frontiers of Labor is a less tightly structured and less overtly collaborative work. It is also more adventurous in its conception of “labour history,” and much more concerned with patterns of mutual influence and interpenetration. The preoccupations of the volume reflect the development of the field, as researchers understand new problems as more pressing, and as old areas of research lose a previous power of attraction.

The collection consists of 16 research chapters, bookended by relatively brief introductory and concluding statements. Editors have organised these into six parts of uneven size: the Great War: Repression and Political Countermobilization; Varieties of Labor Coercion; Ethnicity and Class Identity: The Irish Diaspora in Australia and the United States; Working-Class Collective Action and Labor Regulation; Economic Democracy and Working-Class Institutions; and Transnational Working-Class Politics.

Whereas earlier comparative volumes produced by Australian labour historians involved intense collaboration with counterparts in Britain and Canada (conventionally writing in cross-national pairs), this collection is much more strongly dominated by Australian scholars. Of the 21 contributors, only five are employed by American universities. Only the chapter “Workers against Warfare,” by Verity Burgmann and Jeffrey A. Johnson, involves co-authorship by Australian and American historians. Whether this is an expression of lesser interest in the comparative project among Americans or simply a reflection of the difficulties in attending a decisive organising conference in Sydney in January 2015, I am uncertain. But the relatively greater participation of Australians is striking.

The assembled contributors, American and Australian, demonstrate very wide conceptions of labour history. The volume includes a comparative investigation of convict labour in Virginia (1614–1778) and Australia (1788–1853); several novel investigations of anti-war activism (marked by attention to less-familiar themes, among them the role of transnationally mobile female labour journalists and transformations at the municipal level); strategies of union avoidance; (Irish) ethnicity and labour history; the comparative history of railway investment, profitability, and industrial conflict; military mutinies (and working-class agency); trade union oligarchies; welfare reform, institutional design, and working-class political language and identity; and consumer cooperatives. Three chapters are more strongly transnational studies of labour radicals: anarchists; prominent syndicalists; and trade union leader, Harry Bridges.

The breadth of attention is commendable; the standard of contributions is high. The presence of excellent younger scholars alongside senior figures is notable. Collectively, the chapters confirm the vitality of the field and the enterprise of its practitioners. If the diversity of the volume is a strength, then it also means that patterns of similarity and difference are not systematically surveyed. The editors make some important general reflections in the introduction and conclusion, but these far from exhaust the possibilities of comparative analysis. As Patmore and Stromquist argue, the volume demonstrates that the state has been more coercive in the USA, and that this has had important implications for labour’s...