Crossing Islands and Oceans in Labor Histories of American Empire: Capital, Commodities, Coolies, and Consumers

Abstract

In 1915, as the Great War was consuming Europe and its colonial empires, W.E.B. Du Bois completed The Negro, one of the first comprehensive histories of Africa and its diaspora ever published in the United States. Overshadowed today by his more well-known writings, The Negro meditated on how “the problem of the color line” was nothing if not the result of centuries of global capitalist development dependent upon coerced labor, especially African chattel slavery in the Atlantic world. For Du Bois, peering back in time through the smoking ruins of total war, slavery's postemancipation legacies of political disenfranchisement, landlessness, poverty, and segregation had birthed a global proletariat of color exploited by white Europeans and Americans in an international order divided more and more along imperial lines.