Conventionally defined, “global commodities” refer to raw materials and basic foodstuffs—sugar, bananas, cotton, coal, bauxite—that are extracted or grown in one area of the world and sold on the world market for industrial or consumer use elsewhere. Labor historians focusing on the point of extraction/production or tracking the production and circulation of specific global commodities have gained insight into the development of global capitalism, in particular relations between colonized and colonizer, developing countries and advanced industrial countries. From Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1986) to Mark Kurlansky's Cod: The Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (1998) scholars and general readers alike have found in studies of a single commodity a productive method for understanding social relations in the making of the modern world.

To understand the economic character, transnational politics, and labor regime characteristic of contemporary globalization, it is useful to revisit the concept of “merchant capitalism,” a form of market exchange that dominated trade in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Then as now, commodities proved crucial to world commerce, merchants held the whip hand over manufacturers, while workers found their remuneration and working conditions subject to competitive pressures that often debased their status. The transnational retailers who today dominate so many global supply chains therefore play many of the same roles as did the antebellum merchants of New York and Liverpool who favored free trade and formed an alliance with those who deployed unfree labor to grow the cotton and other commodities upon which the trading system of their day was built.

This article contends that the chronology of popular and legislative movements for restrictive tariffs and immigration exclusion in the United States ran parallel courses between 1898 and the 1930. Those who spoke for and against such policies did so using the rhetoric of race, labor, and empire. The article analyzes the career of Nevada Senator Francis G. Newlands in order to show how the sugar industry and Asian immigration were intrinsic to debates over imperial policy between 1898 and the First World War. The article then describes policy changes during the First World War. The war set the stage for renewed debates over immigration and the sugar trade in the 1920s as the newly formed Tariff Commission attempted to grapple with an oversupplied world sugar market. Their work ultimately reinforced the old associations among race, labor, and trade policy and did little to improve the global sugar crisis.

Major recent work in US history has credited the New Deal with a dubious double legacy. One group of historians has shown how Roosevelt's domestic policies subsidized the consolidation of a political economy and culture of mass consumption, while another has described how his foreign policies generated the strategies and institutions of neoimperialism. Scholars have analyzed these developments in isolation, but this essay demonstrates that they were linked and synergistic. Working from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to the nascent program for multilateral international development, it argues that an integrated complex of New Deal domestic and foreign policies harnessed the rise of the United States as a “consumers' republic” to the forms of imperialism refined in Latin America in the thirties and forties and deployed globally after the war. This policy complex rationalized the global production of US mass-consumer prosperity, displaced the costs of the Keynesian rehabilitation of US capitalism abroad, and evolved to regulate the metabolism between domestic mass consumerism and international hegemony after 1945.

This article analyzes the ways in which Esso Standard Italiana, the Italian affiliate of Standard Oil (New Jersey), and the state-owned firm Azienda Generale Italiana Petroli (Italian General Oil Company, Agip), redefined the job of gas station attendants in post-war Italy. It argues that, drawing on US scientific management and marketing, the two companies advanced a new understanding of masculinity and class. They promoted the idea that gas station attendants should distance themselves from the forms of male working-class identity that were associated with mechanical work and combine technical expertise with the ability to market products by relying on appearance. It shows how during the 1960s Agip exported such Americanized business practices to the developing world, by organizing a series of training courses for gas station attendants from North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. This article looks in turn at how attendants challenged the two companies' efforts to standardize and rationalize their services by joining trade associations and organizing strikes, in the name of their rights as shopkeepers and small businessmen.

This article explores the technopolitical mechanisms by which radiation hazards in South African uranium production were rendered invisible. The occupational health effects of underground uranium mining were deeply contested for decades, all over the world. From the 1950s to the 1990s, the volatile nature of labor relations under apartheid shaped how the South African mining industry responded to the presence of radon gas. With occasional help from state scientists, the industry muffled the political menace of radon gas by making its physical presence difficult to see. Sometimes this invisibility resulted from deliberate decisions, sometimes from structural suppression, sometimes from the tangle of both. This article argues that maintaining radon's invisibility took work.

With the sudden, almost ubiquitous reentry of The Coca-Cola Company to India during economic liberalization, the branded commodity became a sign of both aspirational global consumer-citizenship for India's urban middle class and of corporate enclosure for those dispossessed of material and symbolic resources to fuel this consumption. Village communities around several of Coca-Cola's rural plants, including in Mehdiganj, Uttar Pradesh, organized against the company's operations, which they accused of exploiting and polluting common groundwater in the production of bottled drinks as an increasing expanse of the country fell into a crisis of water scarcity. This “environmentalism of the poor” has articulated a powerful critique of corporate globalization and privatization, illuminating the exploitation of the resources of the rural poor for the consumption of those on the other side of an increasingly widening economic divide.

A common feature in almost any world atlas is the colorful, symbol-driven commodity maps that identify national and global regions by the production of specific types of crops or the extraction of natural resources found there. Oranges grow in the state of Florida in the United States; copper is mined in the northern region of Chile; perhaps tiny representations of sheep indicate that Australia is a major producer of wool. These visual productions of space are both compelling and misleading, implying that access to the world's bounty is as simple as knowing where things are located within a larger division and ordering of the world. Yet oranges are not indigenous to Florida, and their contemporary mass production is made possible largely by the employment of undocumented migrant workers and the legal exclusions that make them a cheap source of labor. Without well-funded and meticulously crafted campaigns urging residents living in temperate climates to purchase and consume oranges year round, oranges' profitable hold in Florida would likewise not be sustainable. Such complexities raise the question, where are the maps that illustrate the dynamic cultural, labor, and political relationships between the commodities and the places where they are produced?

What is the relationship between the historical Soviet countryside and the post-Soviet present both for the scholars who study them and for the population that inhabits them? Together Margaret Paxson, Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village; Jessica Allina-Pisano, The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth; and Douglas Rogers, The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals create a rich, nuanced portrait of contemporary rural life in parts of the former Soviet Union. When one reads the three books together, one finds evidence of interesting continuity alongside dynamism and change that varies depending on the region and on the questions that motivated the researcher. The three works ask in varied ways how individuals in post-Soviet society perceive their world and attempt to live in it. The three studies extend far and wide across the territory of the former Soviet Union: Solovyovo, three hundred miles north of Moscow; the Black Earth, more than four hundred miles to the south; and Sepych, about one thousand miles to the east.

Miriam Glucksmann's ethnography of factory work, Women on the Line, was republished in 2009, nearly thirty years after the publication of the first edition in 1982 under the pseudonym, Ruth Cavendish. The original text is unchanged, but the new edition includes a new introduction and additional images. It is an account of Glucksmann's time working in a factory in the late 1970s, something she undertook as a political act and not with the intention of writing an ethnography, as she herself discusses below. The book was quickly recognized as a seminal account of women's work and one which disentangled the operation of gender at work. It exposed the construction of sexual difference and drew attention to forms of solidarity between women of different ethnic backgrounds. Indeed, Women on the Line is considered to be “a paradigmatic example of gender as central to understanding work” and one that has been studied closely and critiqued as well as admired. Two other “feminist ethnographies”—as they came to be described—were published at around the same time: Anna Pollert's Girls, Wives, Factory Lives in 1981, and Sallie Westwood's All Day, Every Day in 1984. They continue to be widely cited and remain key references in sociology text books and on student reading lists.

Historically there has been a variety of ways for academics to engage with working people or to combine activism with scholarship. Women on the Line represents a historically specific form of engagement that was open to western feminists at the height of second wave feminism in the 1970s.

What is the lived experience of routine wage labour? Why does it matter? In the mid-1970s, Miriam Glucksmann/Ruth Cavendish, committed as a socialist and feminist and frustrated at the political isolation of academia from working class life, went to find out. She worked in a factory, and while not originally intending to write about it, ended up producing a rich ethnography: Women on the Line. Why was it important, and does it remain so? In the preface to The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson explained his choice of title: “Making, because it is the study in an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning.” It is this interaction between agency and structure that is important to understanding how consciousness, identity, and action work—including the possibilities of challenging the status quo. Glucksmann gained the insight into what it felt like to “work on the line”; how work felt, the memories, experiences, everyday realities of her work colleagues; the control of the labour process, class and gender relations and collectivity; how wage exploitation operated; and resistance, including unionization, a dispute, division, and defeat.

The thirty years since Women on the Line has witnessed great achievement in the literature of gender and work both in the West and Global South. There was a booming literature since the 1970s and 1980s in the fields of sociology, anthropology, women studies, and cultural studies—most of them excellent works that touch upon sophisticated debates on the interplay between gender and work, production and reproduction, dominance, and resistance in an increasingly globalized context.

In her introduction to the new edition of Women on the Line, first published in 1982, Miriam Glucksmann notes that it had been written well before the body and embodiment had become an explicit focus of studies of work and employment. However, rereading Women on the Line reminds us that ethnographers have long paid attention to the embodied aspects of work, although few of them have written about them as eloquently as Glucksmann. In the original volume she was able to articulate how it felt to experience herself in relation to her environment, a phenomenological perspective made possible by her adoption of an autoethnographic writing style (a strategy linked to her rejection both of a narrowly academic approach and, in consequence, of the disembodied authorial voice that tended to go with it). Perhaps another reason why Glucksmann was able to write about her working on the line with such sensitivity to the embodiment of the experience is that she was new to assembly line work, so the embodied routines of factory life had not yet been submerged below the level of conscious articulation. It is useful therefore to summarize what she had to say and to think about how we can build on it.