Imperial Crucible: Alcoa and the Transimperial History of American Capitalism, 1888-1953

Abstract

Imperial Crucible tells the story of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) from the company’s founding in Pittsburgh in 1888 through to the 1950s. Although scholars have long contended that American multinational corporations played a pivotal role in the industrialization of the United States, the building of a global working class, and the transformation of European empires, they have tended to see these stories as distinct, rather than interconnected. In contrast, Imperial Crucible focuses on a single firm to draw together the political-economic, working-class, and imperial history of American business. My central argument can be simply stated: the idea that corporations like Alcoa were “multinationals” obscures the world of empire on which American business depended. Empire mattered above all for two reasons. First, it enabled Alcoa industrialists to secure property rights to public goods like land and water within and beyond the United States. Alcoa depended on undemocratic political structures, first in the American South and later in the British and Dutch Caribbean, to build and string together its own web of mines, hydroelectric dams, company towns, refineries, and smelters. Second, empire underpinned not just the migration of workers and families to the frontiers of industrial production, but also their unequal integration in company towns and on the shop floor. Building this imperial crucible depended on managing race and the movement and integration of migrants from Java, Southern and Eastern Europe, the American South, and the British West Indies. The use of labor agents and indenture contracts to build a global working class shows that – well after the abolition of slavery – coercion remained a central feature of industrial production. What the industrialists behind Alcoa bult, then, was not a multinational but a transimperial corporation.