ABSTRACT
This chapter provides national boundaries and narrow blocs of time, in port cities as disparate as Shanghai and San Francisco, New York and Bremen, Mombasa and Liverpool, to explore how dock workers defined and experienced the logic of solidarity. The West Coast of the United States offers a third distinctive pattern of ethnic and race relations. Ethnicity only gradually became a divisive force among dock workers in Mombasa. The Irish retained control of their turf on Manhattan's West Side, and continued to treat the upper echelons of the International Longshoremen's Association as an ethnic job trust. The biographer of dockers' leader Ben Tillett reminds that while Tillett 'believed in the solidarity of labour, he believed too in a hierarchy of races'. In many countries dock workers' propensity to strike became legendary, and their unions developed a 'strong tradition of militancy'.
