Migratory labor has always been central to European economies

Evidence

The important meaning is that this form of enlisting human reserves was not peculiar to military apparatus but extended throughout Europe to domestic service, handicrafts, industrial labor, the shipand dock-workers of merchant capitalism, and the field laborers of agrarian capitalism. There has never been a moment in modern European history (if before) that migratory and/or immigrant labor was not a significant aspect of European economies. That this is not more widely understood seems to be a consequence of conceptualization and analysis: the mistaken use of the nation as a social, historical, and economic category; a resultant and persistent reference to national labor “pools” (e.g., “the English working class”); and a subsequent failure of historical investigation. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 194

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of how nationalist historiography distorts economic history, resonant with the reader’s interest in the Black radical tradition’s submerged history.

Related

• Migratory labor has been integral to every European economy throughout modern history (similarity 0.96)
• Black slave labor undergirded worldwide capitalist expansion. (similarity 0.81)
• Northern industrial growth offloaded labor costs onto European emigration source regions (similarity 0.81)
• Black slave labor undergirded Atlantic commerce, European industry, and new city building. (similarity 0.80)
• Early American industrial labor was overwhelmingly foreign-born (similarity 0.80)
• Black agrarian labor funded America’s industrialization; European immigrants carried labor traditions with them. (similarity 0.80)
• Immigrants, not native-born whites, composed most of the American industrial workforce. (similarity 0.79)
• Migrant laborers have become a foremost commodity in the global economy (similarity 0.79)
• Migration channels cheap labor to sustain rich countries’ dominance (similarity 0.79)
• Every major European capitalist center depended on an immigrant and ethnically distinct labor force (similarity 0.78)