“Company town.” The words evoke images of rough-and-tumble loggers and gritty miners, of dreary shacks in isolated villages, of wages paid in scrip good onl

Potlatch, Idaho, was a company town--a community completely owned by a large lumber firm. This is the story of the Pacific Northwest in microcosm: the exploitat

Company towns first appeared in Europe and North America with the industrial revolution and followed the expansion of capital to frontier societies, colonies, a

Company towns were the spatial manifestation of a social ideology and an economic rationale. The contributors to this volume show how national politics, social

Company towns are often portrayed as powerless communities, fundamentally dependent on the outside influence of global capital. Neil White challenges this inter