It is fitting that this fascinating book appears at a time when globalization has sparked an upsurge of interest in global and transnational labor history. As the editors declare in their introduction, this collection of essays by twenty scholars from around the world “proudly proclaims itself the first-ever global history of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies)” (1). For too long the historiography of the IWW has mainly adopted a single-country focus — particularly its birthplace, the United States — and has been narrowly based upon English-language sources.
This pioneering volume transcends the national in favor of the transnational and the global levels. It charts the comings and goings, thoughts and actions, encounters and connections of the many and varied IWW activists, male and female, white and nonwhite, skilled and nonskilled, who preached and practiced the virtues of revolutionary industrial unionism and anarchism across the world. It...
