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Our Daily Bread: Wages, Workers, and the Political Economy of the American West. By Geoff Mann. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xviii, 245 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3134-2. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-5831-8.)
What is in a wage? Something more than historians have realized, argues the historical geographer Geoff Mann. Believing that many traditional economic assessments of collective bargaining are inherently deficient, he wrote Our Daily Bread to cast wage struggles in broad social, political, and cultural terms. He draws his evidence from the American West, a region where, he alleges, unfettered "resource capitalism" bred a fight of unparalleled intensity over wages.
Mann surveys the divergent uses of the term "wage" among such diverse intellectuals as Karl Marx, Frederick Douglass, David Ricardo, and Piero Straffa. Patient readers may be able to navigate through this turgid and often barely comprehensible summary to deduce Mann's expansive, yet slippery,...