Title: Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore
Author: Seth Rockman
Year of Publication: 2009
Thesis:
Asserts that there was no sense of class consciousness nor unity among laborers in Baltimore, only overlapping forms of opression with Capitalists exploiting a surplus of laborers, who included enslaved and free African Americans, women, immigrants, poor whites, and people of color. Bucks a mechanistic Marxist timeline, in which slavery gives way to free labor (they co-exist in harmony) and works toward interpretations that include, as much as possible a "bottom up" approach.
Time: 1790-1840
Geography: Baltimore
Organization:
List of Figures and Tables
Series Editor's Foreword
Introduction
- Street scraping (of manure) a metaphor)
I. Coming to Work in the City
2. A Job for a Working Man
3. Dredging and Drudgery
4. A Job for a Working Woman
5. The Living Wage
6. The Hard Work of Being Poor
7. The Consequence of Failure
8. The Market's Grasp
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index
Type:
Labor history / Capitalism
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography:
Keywords:
Capitalism: "For all their variety, scholarly accounts of early republic economic change have been content to define capitalism by its manifestations and effects rather than by its underlying social relations. Too often capitalism appears as a synonym for mar ket exchange and not as a political economy that dictated who worked where, on what terms, and to whose benefit. But to follow the careers of low-end laborers through an early republic boomtown like Baltimore lays bare those rules and the unequal relationships of power that propelled economic development in the decades following the American Revolution." (5)
Slavery (commodifying people AND their work): "Historians are now reconsidering the presumptive antagonism of slavery and capitalism. One approach has involved thinking about slavery less as a labor system and more as a property regime—that is, as a legally protected way of invest ing, storing, transporting, and bequeathing wealth." (6)
Chattel principle (7) - from Pennington & restated in Walter Johnson's Soul by Soul
On slavery performing cultural work - that is, defining whiteness based on Black people:
"Other historians have suggested that the “cultural work" of slavery should be considered alongside the actual work that enslaved men and women performed. What slaveholders obtained from their human property was not merely labor, but a way of conceptualizing themselves as “masters,” a vehicle for performing pa triarchal obligations to one’s wife and children, a means of class differentiation relative to nonslaveholding whites, a mode of social discipline to keep impover ished European immigrants grateful for their low wages, and a tool for under mining interracial solidarity of working people in general. Slavery sustained, if not promoted, many ofthe values and practices associated with early republic cap italism, such as the performance of self, the attainment of middle-class standards of respectability, and the pursuit of upward mobility. Seen in this light, slavery appeared worth preserving as a system not merely for compelling labor and ac cumulating capital, but for its ability to shape the contours of a broader range of social and cultural relations." (7)
Themes:
Critiques:
Questions:
Quotes:
"At bottom, all these workers lived and worked within a broader system that treated human labor as a commodity readily deployed in the service of private wealth and national economic development." (4)
Notes:
Thinking aloud about Capitalism - it's goal is to commodify everything and everyone. Social relations then encourage people to commodify others and de-commodify themselves (ex: Black people commodified to relieve white people of that).