Solving the ‘Labour Problem’: race, work and the state in the sugar industries of Louisiana and Natal, 1870–1910

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which sugar planters in South Africa and the United States constructed a labour problem and then moved to solve it during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In both cases, planters came to believe that black labour was unsuited for sugar cultivation and production. In both contexts planters' solutions to this problem involved the recruitment of a new workforce, the racialisation of the division of labour, and the use of state power to facilitate the workings of the new system. The results, however, diverged dramatically. Whereas sugar planters in Natal successfully used the British imperial system to secure large numbers of indentured labourers from the Indian subcontinent and to free themselves from reliance upon African workers, Louisiana's planters found the state (both local and national) an unreliable ally. Although they attempted to recruit first Chinese contract labourers and later Italian migrants, they still remained dependent upon African‐American workers for labour in their fields, mills and refineries. Two key variables explain these outcomes. First, each industry was affected in different ways by the structure of the world sugar economy: at a period when the Natal sugar industry was entering a period of growth and expansion, Louisiana's was in steep decline. Second, and more crucially, planters and estate managers in Louisiana and Natal contended with vastly different forms of state power and capacities. On the one hand, as a colony within the British empire, Natal was plugged into an efficient low‐cost system of international labour migration. Louisiana, on the other hand, supported a weak local state and contended with a federal state committed to free trade and indifferent to the labour requirements of an ailing southern industry.