Labor in Motion

Abstract

Abstract This chapter shows how the economic and political crises of the late nineteenth-century Atlantic world helped consolidate Massachusetts’s industrial workforce, bringing throngs of workers from Britain, French Canada, and the Azores to cities like New Bedford and Fall River. Each of these migrant groups came from a very specific set of social and economic circumstances—and were thus freighted with very different goals and ideologies—setting the stage for the ethnic conflict that made cities like Fall River such havens of industrial turmoil. Ultimately, through an analysis of immigrant politics in Massachusetts from the perspective of these immigrants’ sending states, the chapter shows how the mechanics of global labor migration and the role of British, French Canadian, and Portuguese institutions—hundreds or thousands of miles away—defined working-class development (and conflict) in industrial Massachusetts.