Labor geographies in a time of early globalization: Strikes against Singer in Scotland and Russia in the early 20th century

This essay provides analyses of labor strikes at two early sites (first quarter of the 20th century) of the global production line - Singer Manufacturing Company's factories at Clydebank, Scotland and Podolsk, Russia - and the labor management strategies that led to and resulted from these particular enactments of power. I focus on the degree to which Singer and its employees were embedded in local, regional and national contexts, and how and why workers' agency mattered to the course of early globalization. I also suggest that such analyses provide significant understanding of how and why early global production was both different from and similar to contemporary globalization. By so doing, this analysis contributes to theoretical discussions concerning degrees of territorial embeddedness of transnational corporations, particularly in regard to changes over time as well as geographic scale, and adds historical nuance to theoretical questions concerning labor geographies under conditions of globalization.