Academic literature on the topic 'Latex glove manufacturing'

The epilogue explores the lasting significance of Los Angeles-based investment in Mexico in the late twentieth century. Early Los Angeles investors bequeathed the city with tangible remembrances of their wealth in the form of libraries, colleges, public parks, and a public observatory, still visible across the city’s landscape. More significantly, late nineteenth-century investment strategies designed to link the region to financial networks in Mexico and around the globe had come to fruition in Los Angeles’s status as a “global city” or “global city-region.” In the twenty-first century, global city-regions such as Los Angeles are home to multinational corporations, major centers for manufacturing and trade, and media and finance complexes and often function as the engines of the global economy. Open trade policies such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) facilitate this economic growth but at the expense of Mexico and Mexican workers. Steady economic growth in Los Angeles also attracted Mexican workers, often displaced by policies such as NAFTA, to the region, where they play a key role in helping Los Angeles cement its position as a major economic player in the United States and around the globe.

Beginning with the rise of the American whale fishery in the 1750s, this chapter explores the violent accumulation and circulation of energy embodied in whales. The lives and struggles of workers across the Atlantic world were caught up in the politics and processes of producing oil lights. Enslaved Africans forced into nightwork in West Indian sugar houses, the London poor confronting new state-sponsored street lamps, cotton mill laborers, and Pacific mariners were tangled together around common threads of American whale oils. American deep-sea whaling voyages first triggered a street lighting revolution that radiated from London to Europe and America, while a New England run trade in spermaceti candles, whale oil, slaves, and sugar helped illuminate and circulate the people and goods caught up in colonial transatlantic sugar slavery. Later, American whale oils lubricated an industrial revolution in cotton manufacturing, while fugitive slaves and free blacks carved out a geography of freedom in the globe-spanning Quaker-run fishery. As these entwined revolutions in night and cotton intensified in the antebellum period, they overwhelmed the capacity of the American fishery to meet the demand for both light and lubrication, even as ship masters drove whalemen on harder and longer voyages for less pay.