Workers on Arrival

“Mr. Trotter has synthesized an eye-popping array of scholarship into a slim volume, one that should be read by . . . the general public, and especially by those whose bad-Twitter-argument-of-the-day calendar is turned to: ‘African-Americans have been superfluously aided by undue economic initiatives.’” * Pittsburgh Post-Gazette *
“This book shows the fruitful results of decades of scholarship in the field. This vital contribution is particularly timely after a period in which ‘the working class’ has somehow become synonymous with white Americans in the middle of the country. In fact, African Americans have been central to that history, including now in a new global capitalist economy. With consummate skill and compression of prose, the book surveys the ‘lives and labor of black workers’ . . . A splendidly rigorous and authoritative text from an accomplished senior scholar.” * CHOICE *
"Restores and presents the vast contributions of African American workers from the earliest days of the country, the 1600s, until the present. . . . A highly readable and accessible history that will be a classic in the field.” * Book Riot *

“An eloquent and essential correction to contemporary discussions of the American working class. . . . Trotter’s achievement is to synthesize [a] rich body of historical scholarship into a single volume written with an eye to a general audience.”

* The Nation *
"Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America is the type of book that shapes an entire field of knowledge. It is the type of book that I wish every senior scholar would write: a book that only becomes possible to produce after a significant amount of time and effort in careful study, paying attention to the broad movements in the field and the thousands of nuances that it produces.”
  * Journal of Working-Class Studies *
"Not just a welcome new synthesis of Black workers in urban America but an urgent history that seeks to overturn assumptions about who is part of the 'working class,' and indeed, who built America." * Journal of Social History *
"Workers on Arrival in some ways functions both as a book on African American labor history and as a survey of much of black social and community history as well. . . . Trotter's sweeping overview serves as an entrée to the work of dozens of scholars who have transformed the field over the past half century."
  * Business History Review *
"It is through this lens of racial capitalism, an intellectual framework that situates racism, patriarchy, and nationalism as the active ingredients forthe proper function of capitalism, that Workers on Arrival forces us to understand the making of the United States of America."  * Ethnic and Racial Studies *