Scholarly interest in “whiteness,” white racial identity, and the social construction of race in general has grown dramatically over the past decade. ILWCH decided to examine whiteness because we thought that the body of work associated with the idea had not been critically assessed. Although David Brody correctly notes that the first book to use the idea was Alexander Saxton's The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1990), David R. Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991), a study about antebellum Irish workers, class, and blackface in the United States, popularized the notion among historians. Subsequently, Roediger and others have used the concept to analyze the consciousness and behavior of other groups of workers and immigrants. Whiteness has not populated every nook and cranny of the history of the United States. The geography of whiteness studies has been uneven. Take the field of Southern history. With several exceptions, whiteness scholarship has not challenged more established approaches. No one questions James Oakes's contention in The Rule Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York, 1982), that Southern planters conceived of themselves as a “ruling race.” But debates about the planters center on whether they were capitalists, lords, or farmers, not their racial identity. And debates about white Andrew Carnegie have not involved his whiteness.

Scholarship on whiteness has grown dramatically over the past decade, affecting nu- merous academic disciplines from literary criticism and American studies to history, sociology, geography, education, and anthropology. Despite its visibility and quantity, the genre has generated few serious historiographical assessments of its rise, development, strengths, and weaknesses. This essay, which critically examines the concept of whiteness and the ways labor historians have built their analyses around it, seeks to subject historical studies of whiteness to overdue scrutiny and to stimulate a debate on the utility of whiteness as a category of historical analysis. Toward that end, the essay explores the multiple and shifting definitions of whiteness used by scholars, concluding that historians have employed arbitrary and inconsistent definitions of their core concept, some overly expansive or metaphorically grounded and others that are radically restricted; whiteness has become a blank screen onto which those who claim to analyze it can project their own meanings. The essay critically examines historians' use of W. E. B. Du Bois's reflections on the “psychological wage”—something of a foundational text for whiteness scholars—and concludes that the “psychological wage” of whiteness serves poorly as a new explanation for the old question of why white workers have refused to make common cause with African Americans. Whiteness scholars' assertions of the nonwhite status of various immigrant groups (the Irish and eastern and southern Europeans in particular) and the processes by which these groups allegedly became white are challenged, as is whiteness scholars' tendency toward highly selective readings of racial discourses. The essay faults some whiteness scholarship produced by historians for a lack of grounding in archival and other empirical evidence, for passive voice constructions (which obscure the agents who purportedly define immigrants as not white), and for a problematic reliance upon psychohistory in the absence of actual immigrant voices. Historians' use of the concept of whiteness, the essay concludes, suffers from a number of potentially fatal methodological and conceptual flaws; within American labor history, the whiteness project has failed to deliver on its promises.

This response takes up four of Eric Arnesen's many objections to whiteness research: (1) the fuzziness of the definitions for “whiteness”; (2) the notion of a process by which European immigrants “became white”; (3) the sloppy research methods; and (4) the political posturing of some authors. Although I consider a range of works, I concentrate mainly on those of David Roediger. A serious analysis of the roots of white working-class racism was long overdue, and Roediger and his colleagues have advanced this study significantly. They have demonstrated the severe social limits and the racist implications of labor republicanism, an organizing principle for so much nineteenth-century labor history. They have placed racial identity at the center of class analysis and focused attention on the racialized character of class experience and consciousness. The notion of socially constructed understandings of race has also stimulated a more interethnic approach in studies of immigrant workers, and helped to bridge the obvious divisions between labor history and African-American, Asian-American, and Latina/o history. The study of whiteness has helped us to “denaturalize” race and look much more closely at the whole idea of white identity. We are due for a critical evaluation of this literature from the perspective of labor history, but it is far too early to discard the concept of “whiteness.” On the contrary, the most important work, in the form of rigorous studies of particular workplaces, unions, and communities, is really just beginning. In the meantime, the work has stimulated some much-needed rethinking.

This comment on the whole agrees with Eric Arnesen's critique of the whiteness historical scholarship. It suggests, however, that Arnesen insufficiently credits David R. Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991) for its achievement as a kind of charismatic history and insufficiently distinguishes between Roediger's book and the work of his emulators. The latter are the source of the multiple meanings of whiteness that Arnesen rightly criticizes, and likewise for the hardening of Roediger's suggestive notions about “becoming white” into a new dogma of American immigration history. This comment concludes by noting that in his book Roediger neglected the language of whiteness and suggests that by attending to that question he would find a response to Arnesen's pessimism over the usefulness of whiteness as an analytical concept.

As an organizing concept, whiteness rests on insecure theoretical ground—specifically, the notions of identity and agency. It replaces racism with race and equates race with racial identity, which it accepts uncritically both as an empirical datum and as a tool of analysis. It thereby establishes a false parallel between the objects and the authors of racism and between Afro-Americans and other Americans of non-European ancestry. Whiteness is the ideological counterpart of race relations, both of them ways of skirting around the relations of political, social, and economic power that have determined the place of Afro-Americans in American society.

Eric Arnesen's essay highlights some real weaknesses in the burgeoning literature of whiteness and raises serious questions about the use of whiteness as a category of historical analysis. It effectively highlights the ambiguity of the concept and the way it tends to homogenize individuals who differ among themselves on numerous issues, including the definition of race. Moreover, the notion that European immigrants had to “become” white ignores a longstanding legal structure, dating back to the time of the Constitution, that incorporated these immigrants within the category of white American. Nonetheless, Arnesen fails to take account of some of the positive contributions of this literature, or to locate its popularity in the political and racial context of the late twentieth century. Rather than being abandoned, the concept of whiteness must be refined and historicized.

Arnesen too quickly dismisses recent whiteness scholarship without first taking stock of the ways in which this work has transformed the research agenda in labor history and beyond. Whiteness scholars have made three important contributions: theorizing class as identification, historicizing race, and centering the nation. After briefly elaborating on each of these contributions, I argue that this body of new research has been limited both by its inattention to the specificity of ethnic identification and by its acceptance of the standard assimilation narratives of American immigration history. Addressing these limitations points the way to some fruitful lines of new research.

Proliferation in recent years of a literature that seeks to examine the sources, content, and meanings of whiteness in American life stems from several factors. Among these are: (1) the sociology of academic trends; (2) the growth in recent decades of new academic specialties and interdisciplinary studies that accelerate the velocity of interpretive tendencies and problematiques; (3) reaction against a perceived retreat in civic and academic discussion, and national political life, during the 1980s and 1990s from acknowledgement of the historical and persisting force of racial stratification and inequality; and 4) the combination of atrophy of extramural Left politics and heightened perceptions of the political significance of academic debates. Most consequentially, as Professor Arnesen maintains, the turn to “whiteness studies” emerges from a version of the question crystallized more than a century ago by Werner Sombart, “Why is there no socialism in America?” The literature produced under this rubric is generally marred by conceptual ambiguities, ahistorical formulations, and lack of interpretive discipline. Particularly as it engages labor history and the work of labor historians, the whiteness literature is anchored in the hoary, and fundamentally miscast, debate over the centrality of racial versus class dynamics in shaping working-class experience and American politics.

The valuable and thoughtful responses to my essay, “Whiteness and the Historians' Imagination,” illustrate the existence of a wide range of opinions on the emergence, claims, and methodologies of the whiteness genre in US and US labor history. Like Eric Foner, it is my hope that this scholarly controversy will mark the beginning of a much longer discussion that will draw in many more participants from history, American Studies, political science, and other disciplines. This is a debate that I believe is long overdue. While David Brody is certainly correct to note that readers have not been so “dazzled” that they could not be critical of whiteness scholarship, serious historiographical assessments of the genre's strengths and weaknesses have been scarce. This scholarly controversy, which aims at providing such an assessment, will not and should not be the final word on the subject. In this response, I welcome the opportunity to address a fraction of the many important issues raised by James Barrett, David Brody, Barbara Fields, Eric Foner, Victoria Hattam, and Adolph Reed.

The coal heavers of Port Sa'id hold a distinctive place in Middle Eastern labor historiography as the first indigenous group of Egyptian workers to go on strike for higher wages (in 1882 and later). Existing accounts understand these protests in a somewhat objectivist and materialist way as the more or less inevitable outcome of the penetration of an otherwise rather passive Middle East by capitalist relations of production. This article revisits the protests of the coal heavers of Port Sa'id in the light of a rare glimpse of two documents authored by the coal heavers themselves. These documents show that coal heavers' protests were arguably linked to state-making, and were not simply the automatic product of capitalist development. The arrival of “guild” elections, intervention on taxation, regulative change, and reforming discourse operated in part to constitute worker grievance in Port Sa'id by providing a language in which to appeal, a “progressive” code against which to measure unjust contractors and employers, and a newly interventionist referee before which to make claims. Grievance formation was defined and constituted not just within economically defined “relations of production,” but also within a broader context of state-making and reform in late nineteenth-century Egypt.

This article attempts to offer a detailed profile of the labor force in early nineteenth-century Istanbul. The primary source upon which this study is based is the register of an original Ottoman survey, conducted in the Istanbul districts of the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, where some 2,000 shops along with their work force of 6,000 people as well as 1,500 peddlers (working as, among other things, boatmen, fishermen, and water carriers) were listed in a comprehensive fashion. Through an examination of the register, this article seeks to illuminate the general characteristics of employment and shop sizes, the ethno-religious profile of the labor force, occupational patterns in connection with religious allegiances and migration networks, and the degree to which the military corps were involved in commercial activities. It also questions the supposed existence of an “ethnic division of labor” in labor market and commercial activities, and demonstrates the centrality of regional allegiances in occupational specializations.

This article examines the role of women in manufacturing and the urban economy of Istanbul during the premodern period. It shows that Ottoman women engaged in a variety of economic activities, and invested in the real estate market. They participated in the textile industry of Bursa, Ankara, and Istanbul as weavers, dyers, and embroiderers. Their labor, however, remained marginal to artisanal production through the guilds. Very few women were accepted into the guilds. They were hired by the putting-out merchants to produce secretly at home. Their input to manufacturing increased in the second half of the nineteenth century when the guilds were losing their monopoly over production.

This is a translation of a truly extraordinary and rare historical document—a transcribed narrative of a coal miner who began to work in the coal fields of the Anatolian Black Sea coast during the late 19th century. To date, no comparable tale of an Ottoman worker's life has come to light. This annotated document offers a rich and vivid look into the life of underground miners of the late Ottoman Empire. It vibrantly illustrates the connections between village and mine, the power of village headmen, and the nature of labor recruitment. And, it details work inside the mines. The account should be of considerable value to labor historians in every field not only for its descriptions but for the comparative perspective which it facilitates.

The contradictory goals of state capital accumulation and redistribution eventually led to the demise of corporatism in Venezuela and probably in much of Latin America. When the Venezuelan state was at its zenith of intervention in the economy, it globalized accumulation via foreign debt. Rather than emphasize accumulation and redistribution as it had during the 1960s and 1970s, accumulation to service the debt became the state's central goal by the 1980s. Declining oil prices by the early 1980s highlighted the weakness of a state caught in the grips of antithetical demands from labor and an increasingly impoverished population, on the one hand, and private capital demanding debt repayment, on the other hand. By definition, corporatism creates a dependency between the state and organized labor. Historically, labor depended on the state for economic subsidies, and the state relied on labor to maintain legitimacy. By the late 1990s, lack of labor autonomy literally dragged labor down with a state drowning in debt and incapacitated by lack of legitimacy. While corporatism is more a relic of things past, the positive implications of increasing labor autonomy are dismal as organized labor has been disarticulated and the democratic state is all but a skeleton.

African-American writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Ida B. Wells have regarded “whiteness” as a problem for a long time. However, it is only fairly recently that white historians have taken seriously the importance of de-naturalizing “whiteness,” and critically examining its privileges. “Defining Whiteness: Race, Class, and Gender Perspectives in North American History,” was sponsored by the University of Toronto and York History Departments, the Centre for the Study of the United States, and the Centre for Ethnic and Pluralism Studies at the University of Toronto, with the cooperation of International Labor and Working-Class History and the Canadian Committee on Labour History and its journal Labour/Le Travail. Conference organizers invited several leading American scholars of “whiteness” to Toronto, where they, along with a number of Canadian scholars, presented papers on the ways that whiteness has been constructed in North America. The conference contained much to interest labor historians and those interested in class/race/gender analytical frameworks.

Eugene V. Debs made the first of five runs for the United States presidency on the Socialist Party ticket in 1900, establishing him as the popular face of American socialism for a quarter century. With Debs as its standard-bearer, the party achieved its largest share of the vote in its history in 1912. But the party's success at the presidential level waned afterward, dashing the promise of a permanent socialist electoral presence.

Established in 1970 to foster the study of Europe during the Revolutionary Period (1750–1850), the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe has grown into one of the major academic conferences in the United States. The Thirtieth Annual Meeting in Huntsville, Alabama, was held from March 2–5, 2000. It sponsored twenty-seven sessions and hosted over 123 historians who attended to hear papers ranging in topic from the problems of command in the Napoleonic Wars to the changing perception of art in eighteenth-century France. Members of the Consortium are actively seeking participants to present papers on topics related to social history. The best presentations from each conference are published in the Selected Papers.

Wayne State University, in Detroit, Michigan, once again hosted the twenty- second North American Labor History Conference (NALHC). Held between October 19–21, 2000, the conference was an incursion into cutting-edge scholarly research, examining the history of working-class and labor movements in the United States, Europe, Canada, and Mexico, as well as Central and Latin America. NALHC explored the deep-rooted relations among work and race, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, and the economy. A unique and particularly interesting aspect of the conference was that many of the panels were composed of both activists and academics of the labor movement, which made the examination of past and present issues of working-class life highly informative.

On October 19–21, 2000, scholars gathered for this annual labor history conference at Wayne State University in Detroit, this year focusing on the issues confronting working people in the so-called new economy. Globalization, growing corporate power, the need for diverse working populations to form effective alliances—all of these issues provided the context in which historians and other scholars presented and discussed a range of papers. Over the course of three days, sessions approached these issues from a number of different directions. While some panels explored the ways in which past labor struggles prefigured current dilemmas, others focused on the very recent. A third group of papers approached these issues by debating changes in methodology that would create a history of working people more responsive to the current dilemmas and more reflective of the past experiences of working people. These themes, however, did not impose any straitjacket on the proceedings. With over sixty-five formal papers and presentations, the conference provided a rich assortment of subjects, from papers offering a comparative perspective on slave labor to a profile of strikebreaking state militiamen in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Colorado.

More than half a century ago, “No Documents, No History” was the rallying cry of women's historian and archivist Mary Ritter Beard. In that spirit, the Sophia Smith Collection (SSC) at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, sponsored a two-day conference from September 22–23, 2000, to celebrate the opening of eight collections that document the incredible achievement of six women and two organizations in the collective struggle for social change throughout the twentieth century. In the papers of Mary Metlay Kaufman, Dorothy Kenyon, Constance Baker Motley, Jessie Lloyd O'Connor, Frances Fox Piven, and Gloria Steinem, and in the records of the National Congress of Neighborhood Women and the Women's Action Alliance can be found primary documents associated with the ongoing quest for social justice. The potential impact of movement history based on such archival holdings is immense. As conference organizer Joyce Clark Follet noted in her opening remarks, such documentation can change the way we think about the past, thus changing the way we think about the future.