David McCreery is to be commended for moving beyond the national borders that usually bind our studies of working people; he should be given credit for writing not of labor movements but of work itself. Perhaps most of all, McCreery deserves admiration for attempting what most historians would not risk—a serious synthesis, for even a serious synthesis will draw more criticism than praise.
Having said that, in all honesty I have to say that this is a frustrating book to read and review. In the foreword, Robert Levine writes that McCreery’s work is “the first comprehensive analysis of labor system spanning the pre-Columbian period to the present” (p. vii). Levine’s assessment is both true and may serve as the book’s epitaph. The Sweat of Their Brow is about work, about making a living, which is the book’s appeal, but it is a book with too few distinctions. McCreery takes on...
