Book Talk: Rudi Batzell's Organizing Workers in the Shadow of Slavery

About

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters Labor History Research Center are pleased to welcome Rudi Batzell to discuss his book Organizing Workers in the Shadow of Slavery: Global Inequality, Racial Boundaries, and the Rise of Unions in American and British Capitalism, 1870–1929. Attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions.

The book compares the development of capitalism in the port cities of Baltimore and Liverpool and the steel cities of Pittsburgh and Sheffield. Through his research, Rudi Batzell reveals that the differences in the development of trade unions in the United States and Britain lies in the legacies of slavery and entrenched structures of racial inequality. Strikebreaking succeeded more often in the United States because landless Black Americans were, out of economic desperation, more likely to become scabs and fracture the class solidarity of any union movement. In emphasizing the geography of economic inequality, this book offers new clarity on the late-nineteenth-century successes and failures of working-class formation.

Rudi Batzell grew up in the rural Midwest of Michigan and Wisconsin. He graduated from Columbia University with a double major in History and Sociology in 2009. He then attended Cambridge University, where he completed an Master of Philosophy (MPhil) in Economic and Social History. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2017. During graduate school he helped lead the unionizing effort and served as a staff organizer for the UAW. He is currently an Associate Professor in the History Department at Lake Forest College and lives in Chicago. His first book, Organizing Workers in the Shadow of Slavery: Global Inequality, Racial Boundaries, and the Rise of Unions in American and British Capitalism, 1870-1929 was published by the University of Chicago Press in April 2025.