Company Towns in the Americas
eBook - PDF

Company Towns in the Americas

Landscape, Power, and Working-Class Communities

  1. 236 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Company Towns in the Americas

Landscape, Power, and Working-Class Communities

About this book

Company towns were the spatial manifestation of a social ideology and an economic rationale. The contributors to this volume show how national politics, social protest, and local culture transformed those founding ideologies by examining the histories of company towns in six countries: Argentina (Firmat), Brazil (Volta Redonda, Santos, Fordlândia), Canada (Sudbury), Chile (El Salvador), Mexico (Santa Rosa, Río Blanco), and the United States (Anaconda, Kellogg, and Sunflower City).

Company towns across the Americas played similar economic and social roles. They advanced the frontiers of industrial capitalism and became powerful symbols of modernity. They expanded national economies by supporting extractive industries on thinly settled frontiers and, as a result, brought more land, natural resources, and people under the control of corporations. U.S. multinational companies exported ideas about work discipline, race, and gender to Latin America as they established company towns there to extend their economic reach. Employers indeed shaped social relations in these company towns through education, welfare, and leisure programs, but these essays also show how working-class communities reshaped these programs to serve their needs.

The editors' introduction and a theoretical essay by labor geographer Andrew Herod provide the context for the case studies and illuminate how the company town serves as a window into both the comparative and transnational histories of labor under industrial capitalism.

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Yes, you can access Company Towns in the Americas by Andrew Herod, Melissa Wright, Nik Heynen, Oliver Dinius, Angela Vergara in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politics & International Relations & City Planning & Urban Development. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. List of Illustrations
  3. Foreword
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. “Company Towns in the Americas: An Introduction”
  6. CHAPTER 1 “Social Engineering through Spatial Engineering: Company Towns and the Geographical Imagination”
  7. CHAPTER 2 “From Company Towns to Union Towns: Textile Workers and the Revolutionary State in Mexico”
  8. CHAPTER 3 “The Port and the City of Santos: A Century-Long Duality”
  9. CHAPTER 4 “Whitened and Enlightened: The Ford Motor Company and Racial Engineering in the Brazilian Amazon”
  10. CHAPTER 5 “The Making of a Federal Company Town: Sunflower Village, Kansas”
  11. CHAPTER 6 “Glory Days No More: Catholic Paternalism and Labor Relations in Brazil’s Steel City”
  12. CHAPTER 7 “Borders, Gender, and Labor: Canadian and U.S. Mining Towns during the Cold War Era”
  13. CHAPTER 8 “El Salvador: A Modern Company Town in the Chilean Andes”
  14. CHAPTER 9 “Labor and Community in Postwar Argentina: The Industry of Agricultural Machinery in Firmat, Santa Fe”
  15. Selected Bibliography on Company Towns in the Americas
  16. Contributors
  17. Index