• Chair: Susie Pak, St. John’s University
• Justene Hill Edwards, University of Virginia, “Paternalism, Control, and Capitalism in Antebellum South Carolina”
• Bernadette Perez, Princeton University, “Managing Nature’s Shortcomings in Colorado’s Sugar Industry”
• Erin Hatton, University at Buffalo, “Control over Status as Labor Coercion”
• Comment: Caitlin Rosenthal, University of California-Berkeley
Scholars have long examined the dynamic role of coercion in the history of capitalism. Histories of slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and resource extraction have been particularly generative in foregrounding the violence of profit-driven logics. In recent years, labor histories have expanded our understanding of the ways control and coercion shape both work environments and management strategies in a wide variety of settings. This panel builds upon these literatures to further develop labor control as a crucial point of intersection between business history and labor studies. The papers on this panel cross U.S. geographies, time periods, and fields of study. Moving from antebellum South Carolina to early twentieth-century Colorado to the contemporary landscape of coercive labor categories, the papers place diverse forms of labor control at the center of management practices. Justene Hill Edwards examines how nineteenth-century slaveholders’ obsessive drive to control their slaves infiltrated every aspect of their businesses, including how they variously imagined themselves and their slaves as economic actors. Bernadette Perez looks at how drought undermined the control that beet sugar companies could exert over growers and workers in Colorado, and how, in response, companies improvised and innovated new modes of control. Finally, Erin Hatton brings the panel to the present to consider how status acts coercively in the lives of four groups who fall outside the legal bounds of "employee": incarcerated workers, workfare workers, student athletes, and graduate students. Taken together, these papers demonstrate the flexibility and the durability of control and coercion in American business practices.