As the labor movement pushed for greater recognition, pay, and conditions in the workplace (on land), the sailors of America had a tougher fight. The nature of maritime commerce made sailors foreign in a domestic sense, as the Supreme Court would rule. Geography complicated their place in constitutional law, and made them at once victims and agents of the American empire. Will Riddell joins me to discuss these labor issues and his new book On the Waves of Empire.

Essential Reading:

William D. Riddell, On the Waves of Empire: U.S. Imperialism and Merchant Sailors, 1872-1924 (2023).

Recommended Reading:

Julie Greene, “The Wages of Empire: Capitalism, Expansion, and Working-Class Formation,” in Daniel E. Bender and Jana K. Lipman (eds.), Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism (2015) 35-58.

Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (2018).

Leon Fink, Sweatshops of the Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World’s First Globalized Industry, From 1812 to the Present (2011).

Moon-Ho Jung, Menace to Empire: Anti-Colonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the U.S. National Security State (2022).

Marilyn Lake, Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform (2019),

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