Many of the central results of Classical and Marxian political economy are examples of the self-organization of the capitalist economy as a complex, adaptive system far from equilibrium.An Unholy Trinity explores the relations between contemporary complex systems theory and classical political economy, and applies the methods it develops to the pro

Whayne also offers an analysis of the forces at work on the local level. She suggests that concerted opposition to modernization existed even before New Deal programs gave power to the planters in the 1930s. She also demonstrates that the Arkansas delta experienced many of the same conflicts based on social class and racial caste that were evident in former slaveholding areas.

From South Africa in the nineteenth century to Hong Kong today, nations around the world, including the United States, have turned to guestworker programs to manage migration. These temporary labor recruitment systems represented a state-brokered compromise between employers who wanted foreign workers and those who feared rising numbers of immigrants. Unlike immigrants, guestworkers couldn't settle, bring their families, or become citizens, and they had few rights. Indeed, instead of creating a manageable form of migration, guestworker programs created an especially vulnerable class of labor. Based on a vast array of sources from U.S., Jamaican, and English archives, as well as interviews, No Man's Land tells the history of the American "H2" program, the world's second oldest guestworker program. Since World War II, the H2 program has brought hundreds of thousands of mostly Jamaican men to the United States to do some of the nation's dirtiest and most dangerous farmwork for some of its biggest and most powerful agricultural corporations, companies that had the power to import and deport workers from abroad. Jamaican guestworkers occupied a no man's land between nations, protected neither by their home government nor by the United States. The workers complained, went on strike, and sued their employers in class action lawsuits, but their protests had little impact because they could be repatriated and replaced in a matter of hours. No Man's Land puts Jamaican guestworkers' experiences in the context of the global history of this fast-growing and perilous form of labor migration.

From 1940 to 1970, nearly four million black migrants left the American rural South to settle in the industrial cities of the North and West. Competition in the Promised Land provides a comprehensive account of the long-lasting effects of the influx of black workers on labor markets and urban space in receiving areas. Traditionally, the Great Black Migration has been lauded as a path to general black economic progress. Leah Boustan challenges this view, arguing instead that the migration produced winners and losers within the black community. Boustan shows that migrants themselves gained tremendously, more than doubling their earnings by moving North. But these new arrivals competed with existing black workers, limiting black–white wage convergence in Northern labor markets and slowing black economic growth. Furthermore, many white households responded to the black migration by relocating to the suburbs. White flight was motivated not only by neighborhood racial change but also by the desire on the part of white residents to avoid participating in the local public services and fiscal obligations of increasingly diverse cities. Employing historical census data and state-of-the-art econometric methods, Competition in the Promised Land revises our understanding of the Great Black Migration and its role in the transformation of American society.

Ten leading scholars of early American social history here examine the nature of work and labor in America from 1614 to 1820. The authors scrutinize work diaries, private and public records, and travelers' accounts. Subjects include farmers, farmwives, urban laborers, plantation slave workers, midwives, and sailors; locales range from Maine to the Caribbean and the high seas. These essays recover the regimen that consumed the waking hours of most adults in the New World, defined their economic lives, and shaped their larger existence. Focusing on individuals as well as groups, the authors emphasize the choices that, over time, might lead to prosperity or to the poorhouse. Few people enjoyed sinecures, and every day brought new risks. Stephen Innes introduces the collection by elucidating the prophetic vision of Captain John Smith: that the New World offered abundant reward for one's "owne industrie." Several motifs stand out in the essays. Family labor has begun to assume greater prominence, both as a collective work unit and as a collective economic unit whose members worked independently. Of growing interest to contemporary scholars is the role of family size and sex ratio in determining economic decision, and vice ersa. Work patterns appear to have been driven by the goal of creating surplus production for markets; perhaps because of a desire for higher consumption, work patterns began to intensify throughout the eighteenth century and led to longer work days with fewer slack periods. Overall, labor relations showed no consistent evolution but remained fluid and flexible in the face of changing market demands in highly diverse environments. The authors address as well the larger questions of American development and indicate the directions that research in this expanding field might follow.

From the founding of New Amsterdam until today, working people have helped create and re-create the City of New York through their struggles. Starting with artisans and slaves in colonial New York and ranging all the way to twenty-first-century gig-economy workers, this book tells the story of New York’s labor history anew. City of Workers, City of Struggle brings together essays by leading historians of New York and a wealth of illustrations, offering rich descriptions of work, daily life, and political struggle. It recounts how workers have developed formal and informal groups not only to advance their own interests but also to pursue a vision of what the city should be like and whom it should be for. The book goes beyond the largely white, male wage workers in mainstream labor organizations who have dominated the history of labor movements to look at enslaved people, indentured servants, domestic workers, sex workers, day laborers, and others who have had to fight not only their masters and employers but also labor groups that often excluded them. Through their stories—how they fought for inclusion or developed their own ways to advance—it recenters labor history for contemporary struggles. City of Workers, City of Struggle offers the definitive account of the four-hundred-year history of efforts by New York workers to improve their lives and their communities. In association with the exhibition City of Workers, City of Struggle: How Labor Movements Changed New York at the Museum of the City of New York