Civilian Labor Research Articles

Forced Labour in the Industry of the Middle Volga Region in the First Half of the XIX Century

Introduction. Industrial development of Russia in the first half of the XIX century characterized by the existence of various forms and methods of labour organization in the industrial production system. The owners of large enterprises used different practices of attracting labour force, which gave rise to socio-economic and legal heterogeneity of workers. The article considers the importance of compulsory forms of labour organization, which played a significant role in Russian industry until the early 1860s. Materials and Methods. When solving the set research tasks, materials from the funds of federal and regional archives, published sources, as well as scientific literature were used. To analyze the nature and direction of the processes taking place in the industry of serf Russia, the modernization theory was used. The need to process a significant array of quantitative data required the use of a statistical method. Results. Based on the study of archival and published sources, as well as the available scientific literature on the topic, the main categories of workers employed in the industry of the Middle Volga region within the boundaries of the Kazan, Penza and Simbirsk provinces were identified, their quantitative analysis was carried out, and some parameters were considered that show the specifics of their social-economic and legal situation. The study showed that the army of forced labor in the industrial sphere of the region in question was represented mainly by possessive workers, as well as serfs, who were reoriented to industrial labor by their owners. During the implementation of the research program, the conclusion was drawn: despite the growth in the use of hired labour in domestic industry in the first half of the 19th century, the Middle Volga region remained one of the regions where the practice of using forced labour in industrial enterprises not only persisted, but also intensified. Discussion and Conclusion. As the study shows, the dynamics of the change in the ratio of forced and civilian labour was multidirectional. In particular, in the industry of the Kazan province, the prevalence of civilian workers was noted, the proportion of which steadily increased throughout the period under study. On the contrary, with regard to the Penza and Simbirsk provinces, there was an increase in the use of forced labor, which was associated with the intensification of industrial entrepreneurship of the nobles. In the sectoral plan, the most active use of serf labor in industry was recorded in the cloth and distillery industries. It should be noted that in the second quarter of the XIX century the practice of using monetary forms of payment by industrial nobles for the labour of their own serfs. In the Kazan province, forced labour was represented mainly by the possessory workers of the Kazan cloth factory. By the early 1850s they were removed from the system of “possession law” and passed into the free estates. The presence of possessional workers was also recorded at metallurgical plants in the Penza province, which continued to remain on the “possession rights” until the early 1860s. In general, we can conclude that a specific feature of Russian industry in the pre-reform period was the extreme limitation of the “legal” free labor market, which led to the preservation of a large role for compulsory forms of labor organization.

War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War by Joan E. Cashin

Reviewed by: War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War by Joan E. Cashin Drew Swanson War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War. By Joan E. Cashin. Cambridge Studies on the American South. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 258. Paper, $24.99, ISBN 978-1-108-41318-3; cloth, $84.99, ISBN 978-1-108-42016-7.) The Civil War took much more than human lives, Joan E. Cashin points out in War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War. Union and Confederate armies consumed a variety of resources as they moved across the South, including food, trees, civilian labor, and buildings, with little regard for official intentions, plans, or antebellum codes of conduct. Cashin describes how the conflict broke down the normal structures of civic life that kept communities attentive to one another’s needs. The result was soldiers taking a range of materials from civilians—a defiance of civility and decency that would rarely have happened in peacetime—using up the “stuff” of life for tactical and personal ends. War Stuff’s structure alternates between chronological and thematic. The first chapter establishes an antebellum baseline for southern community interactions and resource use. The region possessed a communal and fairly cooperative attitude, Cashin argues, encompassing its white citizens. The war, however, generated “a series of quick transformations in attitudes toward [End Page 170] people and things. . . . that would exploit almost all of society’s human resources and material resources” (p. 29). It is to these exploitations that Cashin turns in chapters 2–5. Cashin reveals the ways in which civilians were embodied resources, with each side competing for their energies and abilities. Union and Confederate soldiers employed civilians as, among other uses, spies, mail carriers, and hostages. Food was even more sought after than the allegiance of noncombatants. Foraging and impressment kept soldiers fed when regular supply lines left them hungry—a frequent occurrence for both Union and Confederate troops. Timber, too, was a crucial resource, and Cashin argues that the Civil War was particularly hard on American forests. Armies cut standing trees, both for warming fires and to create fields of fire, and they also consumed wood in other forms, raiding sawmills and fencerows for their lumber. Housing, Cashin notes in the fifth chapter, was another wartime resource in high demand, useful for garrisoning officers, shielding snipers, and, when disassembled, raw materials. Approaching armies often caused civilians to flee their homes, which in turn meant that both sides were more likely to use the houses for military purposes. Soldiers also burned homes—both with and without orders—and arsonists were rarely punished. A recurring argument in these topical chapters is that historians have wrongly assumed that wartime rules and regulations (whether the 1806 Articles of War, General John Pope’s 1862 General Orders No. 5, or Francis Lieber’s Code of 1863) on seizing civilian resources governed how soldiers actually behaved. Cashin finds that both Union and Confederate troops were harder on the resources of the country than the rules permitted, even from the initial year of the war. Overall Cashin is quite convincing that “military policy had a negligible impact on how the two armies” pursued “the ‘stuff’ of war” (pp. 53, 4). Chapters 6 and 7 are chronological, following the use and abuse of resources in 1864 as combat intensified, at war’s end, and briefly during the years immediately after the conflict. Cashin suggests that normalcy returned haltingly and unevenly. In the final months of the war, food was even more scarce, frequent large battles burned more forest, shelling left houses and even cities as rubble, and civilians increasingly had to confront the specter of dead bodies, graves, and the wounded as casualties spiraled ever higher. Cashin argues that rather than being exceptional, campaigns like that of General Philip Sheridan in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and General William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea were fairly typical of the fighting late in the war. In contrast to recent historiographical trends, Cashin’s portrayal of the antebellum South is one of a region...

The archaeology of World War II karst defences in the Pacific

ABSTRACT During World War II, the Japanese military, using either their own or civilian labour, excavated tunnels into the limestone of many Pacific islands and modified natural caves for use as command posts, hospitals, combat positions, storage, and shelter. Civilians also used caves to shelter themselves during the war. This article introduces the archaeology of WWII caves and tunnels referred to collectively as ‘karst defences.’ While karst defences exist across the Pacific, little is known about these sites both historically and archaeologically. Based on a study in Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and analysis of karst defence construction and function, this article demonstrates that karst defence use extends beyond what has been described in historical accounts. The authors find that the sites in Saipan were used by three different groups of people and identifies distinct Japanese military and civilian sites and evidence of post-war use by the United States.

Second World War bomb craters and the archaeology of Allied air attacks in the forests of the Normandie-Maine National Park, NW France

Well-preserved bomb craters in the forests of central Normandy, NW France, constitute archaeological legacies of combat inland from the D-Day beachheads that greatly extend the inventory of Second World War conflict landscapes in northwest Europe. Field survey and analysis of German and Allied documents demonstrates that bombscapes in the Forêt domaniale des Andaines and Forêt domaniale d'Ecouves reflect US Ninth Army Air Force attacks on a German fuel depot and radar installation, respectively, during June-August, 1944. One hundred and thirty-six craters are mapped, described and linked to specific air raids, bomb types and, for one raid on the 13th June, six specific participating aircraft and aircrews. These landscapes echo the impact of widespread tactical bombing against targets close to civilian population centers, and in some cases employing civilian and PoW labor. They are therefore well-placed to contribute to wider heritage narratives around the non-combatant experience of aerial warfare in WWII.

The Effect of 21st Century Military Service on Civilian Labor and Educational Outcomes

I estimate the effect of military service during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars on civilian labor and educational outcomes using several empirical methodologies including sibling fixed effects and propensity score matching. Since military occupations and training have changed significantly in the past few decades, these effects may be different than those found in previous studies on veterans of earlier theaters. I find that veteran status increases civilian wages by approximately ten percent for minorities but has little or no effect on whites in this regard. Veterans of all demographic groups are found to be equally employable and equally as satisfied with their civilian occupation as non-veterans. For females and minorities, veteran status substantially increases the likelihood one attempts college. These veterans are found to be more apt to pursue and obtain a two year (associate’s) degree instead of a four year (bachelor’s) degree. Lastly, I find mixed evidence that veteran status increases the likelihood of public sector employment.

Cyber-Mobilization: The New "Levée en Masse"

The means and ends of mass mobilization are changing, bypassing the traditional state-centered approach that was the hallmark of the French Revolution and leaving advanced Western democracies merely to react to the results. Today's dynamic social, economic, and political transitions are as important to war as were the changes at the end of the 18th century that Clausewitz observed. Most important is the 21st century's levee en masse, a mass networked mobilization that emerges from cyber-space with a direct impact on physical reality. Individually accessible, ordinary networked communications such as personal computers, DVDs, videotapes, and cell phones are altering the nature of human social interaction, thus also affecting the shape and outcome of domestic and international conflict. Although still in its early stages, this development will not reverse itself and will increasingly influence the conduct of war. From the global spread of Islamist-inspired terrorist attacks, to the rapid evolution of insurgent tactics in Iraq, to the riots in France, and well beyond, the global, non-territorial nature of the information age is having a transformative effect on the broad evolution of conflict, and we are missing it. We are entering the cyber-mobilization era, but our current course consigns us merely to react to its effects. Background: The Levee en Masse in the French Revolution The French Revolution marked the beginning of the age of modern warfare, characterized by the culmination of a fundamental shift from dynastic warfare between kings to mass participation of the populace in national warfare. Although the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 is commonly cited as the point of origin for the sovereign state, the French Revolution marks its true consolidation, with the formal abolition of the Holy Roman Empire as the result of Napoleon's conquests in 1806. (1) The character of war is constantly in flux: the American Revolutionary War was associated with many of the same anti-authoritarian passions that powered the French Revolution. But as George Washington's correspondence reflected, without national institutions to support the army, the problem of mobilizing and directing resources hobbled the American colonists' war effort. The key element in the firm establishment of the modern secular state within the West, and a watershed in the evolution of modern war, was the state's connection with the mass mobilized army. And at the heart of that new army was the levee en masse. The French term levee has two meanings in this context, both and uprising, each of which is important for understanding the nature of the levee en masse and its relationship to the dramatic changes that occurred in warfare at the time. (2) In its first meaning, the levy referred literally to the 23 August 1793 decree by the French National Convention that the entire population was obliged to serve the war effort. As a result, all single men between the ages of 18 and 25 were required to join the army. The French population at the time was the second largest in Europe, bested only by the Russians, and thus it supported a huge military mobilization: by September 1794, the French Republic had 1,169,000 men under arms, out of a total population of about 25 million. (3) For comparison, the current population of France is approximately 61 million, with about 134,000 on active duty. (4) The percentage of population mobilized during the wars of the French Revolution was unprecedented in Europe, in itself a revolutionary achievement. Therefore, the first meaning of the word referred literally to the goal of mass mobilization: the provision of large numbers of soldiers supported by the people. For all of his brilliance as a general, Napoleon could not have accomplished his dramatic transformation of the European landscape without the broad-based participation of the French populace, both its young male conscripts and its civilian labor, and his ability to harness these things for the army. …