In 1672, the Royal African Company was granted a monopoly in the British slave trade in order to ensure an adequate labor force for the plantations of the Caribbean and the southern colonies of the Atlantic seaboard of North America.
Read the full storyThe North West Company was, according to journalist and historian Peter Newman, “the first North American business to operate on a continental scale.”
Read the full storyThe North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994 created a unified market of more than 370 million people with goods and services totaling $6.5 trillion annually.
Read the full storyThe navigation acts were a number of related legislative measures passed between 1651 and 1696 and designed to enhance Britain’s international economic position.
Read the full storyFounded in 1900 in New York City, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) was remarkably successful in forcing adoption of sanitary codes and safety regulations and achieving better pay during the first two decades of the 20th century.
Read the full storyIndentured servitude as a means of colonization or immigration is a labor system in which a laborer agrees to provide labor exclusively for one employer for a fixed number of years in return for his or her travel, living expenses and often some financial consideration at the end of service.
Read the full storyThe Hudson’s Bay Company, founded in London in 1670 to develop the fur trade of British North America, established British claims to northern and western Canada and opened western lands to settlement.
Read the full storyThe Homestead Act was the result of steady opposition of workers’ groups, western settlers, and agrarians to the U.S. government’s policy of using western lands as a source of revenue.
Read the full storyThe Compagnie de la Nouvelle France was a commercial company organized in 1627 by the government of France as a means of aggressively colonizing New France.
Read the full storyThe discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in the Sacramento Valley of California in January 1848 enticed thousands of immigrants from around the world.
Read the full storyThe rising demand by industrialists for Asian labor during the first decade of the 20th century led to a dramatic increase in Japanese and Chinese immigration to British Columbia and a growing fear by residents of what was called a “yellow peril.”
Read the full storyThe Waipahu Plantation strike of 1906 was one of the earliest collective labor actions in the face of state intervention and sugar industry bosses.
Read the full storyPost–World War I (1914–18) ethnic tensions, economic conditions, and the fear of bolshevism all contributed to the Winnipeg general strike of May 15 to June 28, 1919.
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