Between 1790 and 1840, in the Atlantic port city of Baltimore, lies a rich history of poverty-stricken people, a history of multicultural men, women, and children, and a history built on the families who functioned the dangerously unskilled necessary labors whose work was ultimately degrading and short term. In Seth Rockman’s Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore, the daily hardships of the African-American, European-American, native-born, immigrant, apprenticed, enslaved, indentured, and free workers in the port city of Baltimore, Maryland, are delicately expressed and validify how prevalent slavery is in the American city.
The various ethnic labor groups shared the fiery toil that yielded the early republic capitalism as it progressed to completely depriving the people from their economic security. Rockman clearly states the argument that our capitalist political economy currently succeeds, and or thrives, on labor for prosperity “At bottom, all these workers lived and worked within a broader system that treated human labor as a commodity readily deployed in the service of private wealth and national economic development” (Rockman, pg 4).…
