Rag Race

Adam D. Mendelsohn is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town. He is the author of The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire and co-editor of Jews and the Civil War: A Reader and Transnational Traditions: New Perspectives on American Jewish History.

"InThe Rag Race, Adam Mendelsohn traces the intertwined fates of the Jewish community and the garment industries in America and Britain...Like any good historical writer, he turns documents and data into relatable human stories." (Sewjewish.com) "An inquiry into the wellspring of modern Jewish economic success, [The Rag Race] attends to the origins of the garment industry, poking around in the dusty, and often little-known, corners of a global exchange basedon kinship and the Jewish collective...The Rag Raceis a remarkable achievement, a testament to the vitality of the historical imagination." (Jewish Review of Books) "Deeply researched and beautifully written, The Rag Race returns to a classic topicthe story of Jewish immigrants in the clothing industryto shed entirely new light on the route that led from the sweatshop to success. Moving the conventional starting point backward, from the turn of the twentieth century to the early 19th century, Mendelsohn demonstrates how early differences in Jewish settlement and the structure of the garment trade led to divergent Jewish trajectories on both the U.S. and British sides of the Anglophone world. An outstanding example of comparative history, The Rag Race offers insights that any scholar or student of immigration will appreciate." - Roger Waldinger,Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles "Drawing upon the social and economic historiography of Britain, Australia, and the United States, this book weaves together disparate historical threads into a seamless narrative with a compelling argument. Making shrewd use of historical comparison, it illuminates the interplay of inherited culture with historically contingent structures of opportunity. The result is a book studded with insight, and written with wit and style." - Jerry Z. Muller,author of Capitalism and the Jews "Mendelsohn joins the scholarly debate over the roots of Jewish economic success in the U.S. This he does with great style and energy, offering vivid descriptions, telling detail, and clear arguments, all based on meticulous research. This is a superb book that is a model of comparative and transnational history. It should be read not only by historians of American or modern Jewry, but by historians of immigration, business, fashion, and urban life." (American Historical Review) "With this gracefully written monograph, deeply researched on three continents, Mendelsohn joins a cohort of scholars writing Jewish economic history through a transnational lens." (Choice)

• Contents Introduction: The Rag Race 1 1 Goblin Market: London, 1843 18 2 New York City: A Rag-Fair Sort of Place 37 3 Rumpled Foot Soldiers of the Market Revolution 58 4 Clothing Moses 91 5 The Empire's New Clothes 112 6 A New Dawn in the West 134 7 Clothing the Blue and Gray 159 8 A Ready-Made Paradise 183 Conclusion 207 Acknowledgments 229 Notes 233 Index 287 About the Author 297