"This volume presents a global range of ethnographic case studies to explore the ways in which - in the context of the restructuring of industrial work, the ongoing financial crisis, and the surge in unemployment and precarious employment - local and global actors engage with complex social...

Introduction / Matthew Hild and Keri Leigh Merritt -- Section 1. The early republic and the Old South -- Origins of the Charleston Mechanic Society: white labor activism and slave competition in Charleston, South Carolina in the early national era / Thomas Brown -- "Vagrant negroes": the...