In 1907, pioneering labor historian and economist John Commons argued that U.S. management had shown just one "symptom of originality," namely "playing one race against the other." In this eye-opening book, David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch offer a radically new way of understanding the history of management in the United States, placing race, migration, and empire at the center of what has sometimes been narrowly seen as a search for efficiency and economy. Ranging from the antebellum period to the coming of the Great Depression, the book examines the extensive literature slave masters produced on how to manage and "develop" slaves; explores what was perhaps the greatest managerial feat in U.S. history, the building of the transcontinental railroad, which pitted Chinese and Irish work gangs against each other; and concludes by looking at how these strategies survive today in the management of hard, low-paying, dangerous jobs in agriculture, military support, and meatpacking. Roediger and Esch convey what slaves, immigrants, and all working people were up against as the objects of managerial control. Managers explicitly ranked racial groups, both in terms of which labor they were best suited for and their relative value compared to others. The authors show how whites relied on such alleged racial knowledge to manage and believed that the "lesser races" could only benefit from their tutelage. These views wove together managerial strategies and white supremacy not only ideologically but practically, every day at workplaces. Even in factories governed by scientific management, the impulse to play races against each other, and to slot workers into jobs categorized by race, constituted powerful management tools used to enforce discipline, lower wages, keep workers on dangerous jobs, and undermine solidarity. Painstakingly researched and brilliantly argued, The Production of Difference will revolutionize the history of labor race in the United States.

Making a vital contribution to our understanding of North American borderlands history through its examination of the northernmost stretches of the U.S.-Canada border, Andrea Geiger highlights the role that the North Pacific borderlands played in the construction of race and citizenship on both sides of the international border from 1867, when the United States acquired Russia's interests in Alaska, through the end of World War II. Imperial, national, provincial, territorial, reserve, and municipal borders worked together to create a dynamic legal landscape that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people negotiated in myriad ways as they traversed these borderlands. Adventurers, prospectors, laborers, and settlers from Europe, Canada, the United States, Latin America, and Asia made and remade themselves as they crossed from one jurisdiction to another. Within this broader framework, Geiger pays particular attention to the ways in which Japanese migrants and the Indigenous people who had made this borderlands region their home for millennia—Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian among others—negotiated the web of intersecting boundaries that emerged over time, charting the ways in which they infused these reconfigured national, provincial, and territorial spaces with new meanings.

“Pacific Connections is a shrewd, fascinating, and cogent examination of a Pacific Northwest borderland often taken for granted as a peaceful but inconsequential meeting point between two friendly nations. Chang shows instead how it has been a violent point of contention, shaped by empire and Anglo-American aspirations to hegemony, migration and ubiquitous racism, the creation of boundaries through state formation, and the transgression of those boundaries by the mechanisms of capital. Sharply written and deeply researched, this book brings the Pacific Northwest into both the history of the Pacific World and the literature on borderlands that has until now focused largely on the U.S. and Mexico. Pacific Connections is a brilliant achievement.”—Bruce Cumings, author of Dominion From Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power. "This wonderful book combines impressive archival research with a strong grounding in migration studies, political economy, cultural studies, and critical race studies. Chang examines weighty questions through compelling human dramas set in far-flung places across the Pacific Rim. This is transnational history at its best."—David Roediger, coauthor of The Production of Difference. "Kornel Chang grapples with big ideas and big questions. Tracing the global movements behind racial and national borders and unraveling the messy contradictions of empire at the dawn of the twentieth century, Pacific Connections explores a history that continues to haunt us, with particular resonance in our current moment."—Moon-Ho Jung, author of Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation. “Pacific Connections is a capacious study that recasts the U.S.-Canadian borderlands as a crucial site of migration, trade, and exclusion within the formation of Pacific empire. Chang shows how Chinese merchants, Japanese and European migrants, indigenous traders, Anglo labor activists, and both South Asian and white radicals played important roles in the negotiations of sovereignty.”—Lisa Lowe, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, San Diego.

A focus on the sites of Asian interaction enables this volume to shed new light on the growing field of diaspora studies. Research on Asia's many diasporas has enriched the older literature on migration to illuminate the links of kinship, affect, trade, and information that connect locations across Asia, and beyond. But where many recent works on particular diasporas have tended to look inwards - at how distinctive diasporic cultures maintained a sense of 'home' while abroad - the volume's focus has been on how different diasporas have come into contact with each other in particular places, often for the first time. It also engages with research in the fields of urban studies and urban history. The articles develop the already rich historical literature on port cities across Asia – the quintessential sites of Asian cosmopolitanism – as well as more recent work on the 'moving metropolises' and 'mobile cities' of contemporary Asia.

With the railroad's arrival in the late nineteenth century, immigrants of all colors rushed to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, transforming the region into a booming international hub of economic and human activity. Following the stream of Mexican, Chinese, and African American migration, Julian Lim presents a fresh study of the multiracial intersections of the borderlands, where diverse peoples crossed multiple boundaries in search of new economic opportunities and social relations. However, as these migrants came together in ways that blurred and confounded elite expectations of racial order, both the United States and Mexico resorted to increasingly exclusionary immigration policies in order to make the multiracial populations of the borderlands less visible within the body politic, and to remove them from the boundaries of national identity altogether. Using a variety of English- and Spanish-language primary sources from both sides of the border, Lim reveals how a borderlands region that has traditionally been defined by Mexican-Anglo relations was in fact shaped by a diverse population that came together dynamically through work and play, in the streets and in homes, through war and marriage, and in the very act of crossing the border.

Concerned with people called variously: eta, burakumin, buraku jumin, buraku people, outcastes, or "the lowest of the low", this book examines how their experience of caste/status-based discrimination in 19th century Japan affected their experience of race-based discrimination in the West of the US and Canada in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This volume explores cultural, social and economic connections between the Americas and the South Pacific. It reaches beyond Sino-American collaborations to focus on rather neglected, and sometimes invisible, Southern linkages, asking how these connections originated and have developed over time, which local responses they have generated, and what impact these processes have in the region in terms of representational forms and strategies, new cultural practices, and empowerment of individuals in (post)colonial contexts. The volume also compares and contrasts intriguing parallels of politics and identity formation. By extending the focus beyond East Asia to the Southern Pacific region, including Island connections with the Americas, the volume provides a more comprehensive understanding of recent dynamics and shifting relations across the Pacific. By approaching the Transpacific Americas as an assemblage or relational space, which is created and becomes meaningful through multiple localities and their translocal connections, the book complicates the Euro-American distinction between "centre" and "rim". While the collection offers a distinctive geographical focus, it simultaneously emphasizes the translocal qualities of specific locations through their entanglements in transpacific assemblages within and across cultural, social and economic spheres. Furthermore, without neglecting the inextricable, historical dimension of anthropological perspectives, the focus is on the diverse and unexpected contemporary forms of cultural, social and economic encounters and engagements, and on (re)emerging Indigenous networks. Primarily based on empirical research, the volume explores face-to-face encounters, relations "from below," and transcultural interactions and relationships in, as well as ideas and conceptualizations of, cultural spaces across localities that have long been perceived as separate, but are indeed closely interconnected.