Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism. Edited by Daniel E. Bender and Jana K. Lipman (New York, New York University Press, 2015) 374 pp. $89.00 cloth $35.00 paper

Scholarship about the history of U.S. empire has proliferated of late, but this volume has an innovative contribution to make. As the title suggests, it aims to bring together U.S. labor history and imperial history, centering the experiences of workers across the U.S. empire while bringing a transnational perspective to U.S. labor history, traditionally focused on the domestic realm (or, in this context, the metropole). U.S. Empire, as the editors explain in their excellent introduction, is best seen not as a collection of territories but as a far-flung system of labor mobilization and coercive management. Following in the well-trodden footsteps of William Appleman Williams, the editors and contributors frame U.S. empire primarily in economic terms, as an empire of capitalist expansion.¹ But unlike Williams and his early followers, who focused primarily on the machinations of the capitalists and their enablers in Washington, this volume seeks to recover the perspectives...