North American Social History

Peter Way recently reviewed Seth Rockman’s Scraping By in the journal Reviews in American History 39 (2011), 47-53. While Way acknowledges Rockman’s “first-rate piece of historical writing,” Rockman’s theorizing of class comes under criticism. Rockman, Way argues “characterizes class as a material condition deriving from one group’s ability to coerce labor or set the conditions for purchasing another group’s labor power within a market that is assumed to be self-regulating.” In doing so, Rockman does not place class in competition with race or gender. Instead, Rockman maintains that “historians must look for the larger system constituted at the intersection of these categories and seek the overlapping ‘relations of ruling’ that organized the lives and labors of workers of divergent subjectivities and identities.”

For Way, this formulation is “never realized nor a wholly satisfactory expression of how class works with gender and race, becoming entangled on contingency and abstractions.” Instead, Way asks some critical questions: what exactly is this “larger system”, how does it operate, and by what rules does it abide? Rockman fails to provide answers to these questions, according to Way, because of his lack of both theorizing the meaning class and critique of models of social difference. As a consequence, Rockman is “able to reproduce the diverse faces of Baltimore’s manual laborers but less able to explain how they were constructed as a class or in what ways they constituted a class.”

So how can historians move away from the abstraction of a “larger system” to something more concrete? And how can historians critique models of social difference without playing the “class trumps race, gender” card?

References

Peter Way, “Uncommon Labor in Early Baltimore,” Reviews in American History, 39 (2011), 47-53.

Seth Rockman, Scraping By; Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

The categories of class, race, and gender are at the heart of the analytical work of social historians. However, over the past 30 years the debate has stalled over which category trumps the other. For example, in The Wages of Whiteness, David Roediger argues that the “privileging of class over race is not always productive or meaningful” (p.8)

Perhaps then social historians should take a different approach?

Seth Rockman in Scraping By suggests what a different approach would look like. Rockman argues, “These analytical categories of historical experience were not in competition, and historians need not offer one primacy over another” (p.11) Rather Rockman notes, “historians must look for the larger system constituted at the intersection of these categories and seek the overlapping ‘relations of ruling’ that organized the lives and labors of workers of divergent subjectivities and identities” (p.11)

So, rather than arguing for one category over the other, social historians should explore how the categories of class, race, and gender intersected. Definitely food for thought. And definitely a more nuanced picture of social history.

References

David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1999)

Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (2009)