Mining in Sicily: Slavery, Humanitarian Rhetoric and Global Network

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses how, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of twentieth centuries, the labour conditions of the sulphur miners in Sicily were recurrently understood and described through a problematic adoption of a humanitarian language that often employed a miner – slave analogy. By identifying some lines of convergence between diverse narrations the article will explore the extent to which an intersection between global concerns about slavery and attitudes to labour in Southern Italy entered public discourse. It suggests that varied narrations mystified the ways in which complex systems of exploitation functioned together amidst significant global transformations in labour relations and capital. As a consequence, foreign and Italian debates contributed placing Sicilian labour, directly or indirectly, in a pre-modern world and to distancing the miners from the global network and modernity to which (paradoxically) they already belonged.