Colonial Labor Research Articles

Kicking black images: absent violence, unsynchronized sound and the problem of colonial labour in Trader Horn

Trader Horn (W. S. Van Dyke, 1931) has a significant place in film history because it was the first talkie filmed in Africa, and because its excess location footage provided the basis for the Tarzan franchise. This essay argues that Trader Horn has significance for film theory as well, providing a particularly revealing example of how a film's colonial ‘labour problem’ – the fact that it was made possible by black colonial labour, but needs to conceal that fact – shapes both its production and its narrative. In terms of production, the filmmakers masked the difficulties of recording sound on location with a supplementary ‘racially-synched’ sound regime, covering disjunctions of image and sound quality between shots with an ‘African’ sound that relies on the audience's ideological assumption of Africa as uniting body, place and sound. In terms of narrative, Trader Horn is notable for representing of the love between African middleman and white master as peculiarly ambivalent, continually gesturing towards the violent coercion it seeks to mask. Ultimately, Trader Horn can help us understand how later colonial films represent the black body's function in the process of ‘remembering and denying’ the labouring body under capitalism.

RETHINKING RELATIONS

By the 1910s, Ketchikan, Alaska emerged as a frontier cannery site and an integral part of the colonial Alaskan economy. Industrialized salmon-canning operations were dependent on the racial and gendered labour stratification of migrant Asian men and resident Native women. Alaskan history obscures narratives of Asian labour, while Asian American studies recuperates stories of union organizing without mention of Native women. In this essay I utilize Lisa Lowe's configuration of colonial intimacy to bring together discourses on Native and Asian cannery workers. The colonial archive, Alaskan history, labour history and ethnic studies highlight traces of Asian men and Native women in Alaskan canneries as negative and/or unproductive. Close readings of Tlingit author Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Filipino writer Carlos Bulosan, however, provide representations of embodied pleasure as strategies for survival or prescriptions for contestational joy within colonial industrialism.

Chinese Emigration to Australia around 1900: A Re‐examination of Australia’s ‘Great White Walls’

AbstractThis article reassesses the debates around Chinese emigration into the Australian colonies before Federation in 1901. Drawing on the literature relating to the emergence of the Chinese community in Australia, it argues that pressures exerted by anti‐Chinese organisations that thrived following the expansion of representative democracy in the Australian colonies, and the emergence of organised labour parties, were instrumental in the creation of exclusionary campaigns waged against Chinese migrants. By depicting the Chinese as temperamentally unsuited to democracy and through campaigns to highlight the impact of imported, low cost manual workers into the Australian colonies, the new forces of colonial labour led by radical politicians were at the heart of an attempt to erect ‘White Walls’ against migrants from South‐East and East Asia. These campaigns drew on a fund of images and popular fears that cohered around the role of the opium den, and the solitary, itinerant Chinese male.

Internationalism and the Labours of the Portuguese Colonial Empire (1945–1974)

This article aims to analyse the relationship between the Portuguese Empire and two international institutions (the United Nations and the International Labour Organization) as concerns the organization and regulation of colonial labour after World War II. Stressing the historical ballast of this relationship, particularly during the inter-war years, the article points to the instances of debate and conflict as well as of cooperation developed by the several actors after 1945, in a context marked by mounting anti-colonial pressures and bipolar competition dynamics. Contrary to traditional accounts of an ‘isolated empire, this article sheds light on the need to include international and transnational scales of analysis in order to assess the actual trajectory of Portuguese late colonial State, marked by moments of reform as well as resistance to change.

"No Real Freedom for the Natives": The Men in the Middle and Critiques of Colonial Labor in Central Mozambique

This article examines how administrators in Mozambique engaged in the international debate over labor practices in colonial Africa. Although they worked within a regime of legalized forced labor, some expressed ambivalence over their position, criticizing both the principle and the practice of forced labor. These "men in the middle" held mindsets shaped both by awareness of the broader debate over what forms of labor were acceptable in "modern" empires and by interactions with the Africans over whom they ruled. The article tracks the evolving debate around African labor rights from the 1920s to the 1940s, following discussions within the League of Nations, between Portuguese government departments, and across levels of administrative hierarchy within Mozambique.

Recruiting the ‘martial races’: identities and military service in colonial India

ABSTRACT British rule in India was entirely reliant on local troops, and the mobilization and recruitment of Indian communities gave rise to a multiplicity of discourses, traditions and identities reflecting the peculiar relationship between colonial power and indigenous military labour. Through the late nineteenth century, these discourses became increasingly racialized: only certain native communities were deemed to possess the ‘spirit’ necessary for military service. These so-called ‘martial races’—including Nepalese Gurkhas, Punjabi Sikhs and Muslims from the northern and frontier provinces—provided the backbone of the imperial military and played a vital role in defending and extending colonial authority. By the early twentieth century, the racialized nature of soldiering in India was invoked to explain the composition of imperial forces and to legitimize the preservation of colonial rule. While the theory of ‘martial races’ is the subject of an increasingly diverse literature, relatively little attention has been paid to the practice—and practical origins—of restricted recruitment. In this article Rand and Wagner seek to re-examine the role of martial-race theories in British recruitment policies and practices in colonial India, drawing attention to the incoherence and complexity that marked the relationship between ideas of race and the practicalities of colonial military administration. They focus in particular on long-term patterns of continuities, rather than neat periodizations, and suggest that racialized discourses regarding soldiering have to be considered within the context of mutually advantageous relationships between the colonial state and its indigenous allies.

Scientific Management in <i>East Goes West</i>: The Japanese and American Construction of Korean Labor

I do not want to treat efficiency as mere technique or method. There no other way for humankind beyond efficiency. I wish to emphasize that the way of man in fact efficiency. --Ueno YSichi (187-89) In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first. --Frederick Winslow Taylor (7) System, system, system! --Reporter for the Detroit Journal, after visiting a Ford plant (qtd. in Nevins and Hill 461) New York, the 1920s. Two friends on a desultory stroll across Brooklyn Bridge pause to take in the city skyline. The Korean student, Han, revels at the spectacle of New York's gleaming structures, while his mentor, Kim, stands grimacing beside him. Han effuses, What a Picture! The arched City Hall against the afternoon sunset, these long columns and these high towers. What different from the Grand Canal of Venice or the Hankang of Hanyang! ... [This city] links humanity to the world of mechanism, the world of mass production, this magnanimous gigantic structure.... All the work of a short time, in a small space. It would have taken men in different ages hundreds of years to accomplish this.... The craftsman may have worked in deadening monotony, the engineer may have planned in routine formation. But the product emerges with individual creativeness, a monument to the American age. Precise, exact, swift, poignant, and powerful. (Kang, East 245) What impresses Hart more than the sheer scale of New York the fact that these monuments were made with such celerity and precision. It efficiency--a rhythm so distinct from Europe and Asia--that enchants, but also unsettles Han; beneath the surface of Han's wonder lies a quiet acknowledgment of the individual sacrifice needed for the New York building to rise--the worker and designer must labor in anonymous tedium. On the other hand, Kim has a decidedly more sardonic outlook: This island, he muttered, is rockbound. It can't grow any more. Yet the inhabitants in it increase more and more. Probably it no longer than the span of a century since the New York of today emerged, from rural farmlands.... Now all the depraved creatures and exiled souls in humanity gather to help the big city's growth and add to the radical scare.... Well, science that tries to explain the how-and-where of truth, from simple to complex, from particular to general, no help to me. (245-46) Kim's despondency perhaps reflective of the dark modernist vision of America ruled by an efficiency bereft of a humanistic center. He sees New York as a collection of alienated souls fueling the city's unmitigated expansion. Unable or unwilling to accept efficiency without purpose, Kim--as Han's double--has been left hopelessly behind by the modern age. With these two disparate views, Younghill Kang sets the crux of his argument in East Goes West (1937), an admonition of all that can be achieved through efficiency, both beauteous and terrible. Crafted with strong autobiographical elements, the novel chronicles Chungpa Han's arrival and education in America, where he discovers the limits of his racialized potential through a series of humble jobs while pursuing his studies. Han comes to realize that the art and literature so valued in Asia goes unappreciated in America; instead, ruthless efficiency and market logic rules over all. Han's and Kim's comments hold an additional layer of complexity, for they speak as former colonial subjects. The rise of the burnished metro-pole and the desperate mass of people from rural origins would have been familiar scenes first encountered in colonial Korea and imperial Japan. Hidden behind Han's and Kim's views regarding the American way of efficiency lies an echo of the past--the Japanese way of efficiency. In America, Han learns that this efficiency has a name: Taylor. In this essay, I reconfigure Kang's critique of American capitalism as part of a more expansive argument about colonial labor and manufacturing techniques. …

Empire and the Industrial Novel: Imperial Commodities and Colonial Labor in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South

Empire and the Industrial Novel: Imperial Commodities and Colonial Labor in Elizabeth Gaskell's <i>North and South</i>

“Natal is a White Man's Land”: Anti-Asianism and Pro-White Labour Politics in Colonial Natal, c. 1906–1909

In recent years, the history of the early South African labour movement has been increasingly revisited and reinterpreted by social historians in order to produce a new understanding and synthesis of its influence on twentieth-century South African history. Labour and socialist newspapers, as well as official trade union organs, are important documents of the history of the early twentieth-century South African labour movement and present a general reflection of the socio-political views representative of this movement. This article focuses on the policies and political sentiments of the white colonial labour and trade union movement in Natal between c. 1906 and 1909, the period of existence of the Natal Labour Party (NLP). Contemporary literature on the history of KwaZulu-Natal pays scant attention to the NLP.

Chocolate, Women and Empire: A Social and Cultural History (review)

Reviewed by: Chocolate, Women and Empire: A Social and Cultural History Kevin Grant Chocolate, Women and Empire: A Social and Cultural History By Emma Robertson . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. This well-structured and clearly written book examines the English cocoa and chocolate industry, which has long marketed the purity of its products and its ethical, beneficent employment practices. Focusing on the firm Rowntree & Co., Ltd., Robertson problematizes the paternalistic image of the industry at large by revealing the integral, subordinate roles of women in the so-called cocoa chain between a Yoruba village in Nigeria and the city of York. Robertson draws upon company archives, municipal and national archives, published sources, and a small number of oral histories to represent the daily lives of working women in the context of global capitalism and gender and racial discrimination. "This book begins with the romantic construction of chocolate," Robertson explains, "but will attempt to understand the actual human endeavors, and systematic exploitation, which have made such chocolate fantasies possible." (3) Accordingly, chapters 1 and 2 recount and critique nineteenth- and twentieth-century advertising by Rowntree and other firms, demonstrating how they blended imperial histories of chocolate into their own romantic, marketable narratives. Chapter 3 then uses oral histories to examine African women's experiences of cocoa farming, and Chapter 4 explains how Rowntree represented this colonial exploitation to its employees and the city of York in promoting an imperial culture of which the community was largely unselfconscious. Chapter 5 uses oral histories of female Rowntree factory workers to demonstrate the women's experiences of "gendered and raced labour in chocolate manufacture." (12) The study articulates York's relationship not only to imperial culture, but also to colonial labor. The third chapter on African women farmers is followed by a chapter—the strongest of the book—in which Robertson uses the Rowntree in-house publication, Cocoa Works Magazine, to offer a detailed picture of the activities through which York's working class, and especially women, engaged with an imperial world. In view of the African women's lives illuminated by the preceding chapter, the reader can appreciate the company's mediation of a colonial reality of which the Rowntree employees were dimly aware, despite the fact that the African women made their work possible. There is a productive tension in the book between local cultural and social history and global labor history. Robertson's analysis would have been given more weight by a larger number of oral histories, but she deserves credit for pushing the boundaries of the local with a creative combination of historical sources. This book is also a women's history in which the author reveals women as "active agents" who negotiated their ways between and across gendered and raced boundaries. Robertson asserts that African women "are not and never have been passive bystanders in the cocoa economy." (117) The implication that there is a prevailing perception of passivity is difficult to reconcile with fine scholarship on African women's labor history since the 1980s, such as work by Iris Berger and Elizabeth Schmidt. In addressing the activities of women in York, the author's analysis of "minority women" tends to collapse the significant cultural differences between the three women of her case study. One woman was born to Cantonese parents in Liverpool before moving to York with her family, the second was recruited by Rowntree from Malta, and the third was born to an Asian family in Zimbabwe before moving to Uganda and ultimately migrating to England as a refugee in the 1970s. (190-93) The category of minority needs nuance, as it appears equivalent here to the category of non-white. To her credit, Robertson acknowledges that the women in question sometimes do not see the same boundaries that frame her own analysis. In referring to Asian refugees from Uganda, she states, "The Rowntree firm...had a part to play in the acceptance of refugees as workers, even as they were positioned as workers within a capitalist, racist and patriarchal system." (186) She subsequently notes that the three minority women with whom she spoke "simply did not feel that they had been subjected to racial prejudice either...

Making the Household, Making the State: Colonial Military Communities and Labor in German East Africa

AbstractThis essay uses German East Africa as a historical example to illustrate some of the complex interrelationships between colonial labor and military practices. Analysis of African soldiers' roles in colonial labor regimes underscores the degree to which colonial militaries, labor, and punitive structures reinforced each other on a daily basis. Colonial states depended on their African soldiers, and the free and unfree laborers they recruited, conscripted, and supervised, for preservation of the German colonial state's political authority and economic viability. Moreover, these military labor practices tied soldiers' households to colonial state interests, laying the basis for new colonial cultures and campaign communities.

Colonial Legacy and Institutional Development. The Cases of Botswana and Nigeria

The thesis aims to contribute to the question of the origins of efficient institutional arrangements, which are regarded essential for economic development and long-term economic growth. In Africa most institutional frameworks were established under colonial rule and then persisted to a large extent. In this sense colonialism offers a natural experiment - a phase in which European institutions were transferred to African countries. The thesis investigates the influence of colonial rule on the institutional development of two countries and former British colonies: Botswana and Nigeria. It applies a theoretical model of institutional legitimacy based on the theoretic work of Douglass North and Oliver Williamson. The case studies' findings highlight the persistence of pre-colonial informal institutions grounded in cultural norms and beliefs of the local populations. In addition, pre-existing levels of urbanisation, constraints on political power and integration in colonial labour markets have been factors which influenced the transfer of European institutions. (author's abstract)

Modernizing the Colonial Labor Subject in India

In his article "Modernizing the Colonial Labor Subject in India" Valerian DeSousa discusses how the colonial project in India sought to counter the labor movement's evolving anti-colonial consciousness through law, the primary signifier of British dominance. DeSousa argues that colonial labor law was an instrument of "governmentality," a way of deploying the authority of the state, both in India and in Africa where the law encoded meanings of property and subjectivity. In India, labor law was the means to "reconstruct" the "traditional" worker and to constitute a "modern" and "efficient" labor subject to fit into the new industrial vision taking shape. How was modernity translated in the Indian context? Paradoxically, while the industrial exhibition became the metaphor for modernity for the metropolitan center, colonial rule "undermodernized" Indian skilled workers and constructed them as "static" and unchanging. By looking at the discourses that contextualized labor law in the colonial era, DeSousa examines the restrictive techniques employed to limit the potential of the labor movement and participation in modernity. The "conferral" of modernity and the discourses that celebrated it were embedded in Orientalist frameworks that were unquestioned.

‘We are citizens too’: the politics of citizenship in independent Ghana

ABSTRACTThis paper examines Ghana's struggle to create a pluralistic nationality that guarantees universal rights to all citizens, including people of foreign origin. A major recipient of colonial labour migrants who considered themselves citizens of Ghana at the time of independence, Ghana provides an excellent case study for exploring the ambiguities and malleability of post-colonial citizenship. Analysing the various ways in which Ghanaian politicians have struggled to redefine the nationality status of descendants of migrants from other parts of West Africa since independence, I argue that the politicisation of Ghana's post-colonial citizenship stems not only from the country's colonial legacy, but also from struggles over diminishing economic resources between the late 1960s and early 1980s that led some indigenous Ghanaians to declare the non-autochthonous population as ‘aliens’ who should be excluded from the benefits of citizenship. Constitutional provisions that recognised citizenship by birth were contested by popular perceptions that only the autochthonous are ‘true’ citizens and are thus the only legitimate beneficiaries of political and economic rights.

From Pentecostalism to politics: mass literacy and community development in late colonial Northern Ghana

This article takes as its starting point a strike among African trainee literacy workers in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1952. While the existing literature tends to concentrate on the tensions and contradictions in British colonial education policy, this article uses the strike to investigate how these agendas were experienced by, and engendered opposition from, literacy workers on the ground. It argues that, in their efforts to link mass literacy to community development, and to secure legitimacy for their campaigns, colonial officials depended heavily upon the authority of chiefs. This strategy backfired because it ignored both shorterterm instances of chiefly venality, and the longer history of colonial taxation and labour demands which had been enforced on Northern peoples through chiefs. The African trainees went on strike because they were astute in recognising how different forms of educational provision fitted into the re‐ordering of local, regional and national power relations as the Gold Coast approached Independence.

Commercial recruiting and Informal Intermediation: debate over the sardari system in Assam tea plantations, 1860–1900

AbstractThis paper engages with Rajnarayan Chandavarkar's argument that the importance accorded to the intermediation of sardars/jobbers in colonial labour arrangements followed from the perception of the Indian peasant as static and immobile, requiring especial effort at recruitment, but that, over time, employers grew resentful of the power and control acquired by these intermediaries. Drawing on this insight, the paper examines the role ofsardarsin the recruitment system of the Assam tea plantations and the ways in which they were promoted by the planters and the state in an attempt to loosen the stranglehold of professional contractors. Thesardarswere presented as the solution to abuses of Assam recruitment and portrayed as non-market agents recruiting within the closed world of kin, caste and village relationships. Towards the late-nineteenth century, however, a nexus developed between the contractors andsardars, which successive legislative interventions failed to break. Moreover, the notion that thesardarwould be a more benign agent of recruitment was repeatedly proved false.

“Courageous but insolent”: African soldiers in the Dutch East Indies as seen by Dutch officials and Indonesian neighbours

Labour shortages were endemic in colonial societies. Plantation and mining labour was notoriously unattractive, but the army posed problems of its own. In their search to satisfy the voracious appetite for labour in commercial empires and colonial societies, rulers developed racial and ethnic stereotypes as to which “race” was most suitable to perform certain jobs. Africans were deemed most suitable for hard physical labour in tropical climates. They were also portrayed as “martial races”, fit to fill the manpower needs of both Islamic and European armies. This article will first give a brief overview of the use of African labour in the Dutch East Indies. Next, I discuss in more detail one peculiar aspect of inter colonial labour migration in the Dutch colonial empire: the recruitment of West African soldiers for the Dutch East Indies army in the 19th century.

Europa, Sklavenhandel und koloniale Zwangsarbeit – einführende Bemerkungen

Europe, Slave Trade, and Forced Labour: Introductory Remarks This article provides a general introduction to the theme of this issue and attempts to place the following papers better in context within the relevant historiography. It focuses on the slave trade and its abolition, the close connection between antislavery ideologies and measurements and the colonial expansion of Europe especially in Africa, the slow death of slavery and forced labour in colonial Africa, and finally on the current debates about the relevance of the slave trade and colonial forced labour for the history of Europe.

American Artifice: Ideology and Ekphrasis in the Poema heroico a San Ignacio de Loyola

AMERICAN ARTIFICE: IDEOLOGY AND EKPHRASIS IN THE POEMA HEROICO A SAN IGNACIO DE LOYOLA by Kathryn Mayers Wake Forest University OVER the past several decades, studies of the verbal description of visual art – the literary device known as ekphrasis – have increasingly demonstrated the ways encounters between the “sister arts” bring up issues of power, gender, and alterity.1 For the highly pictorial literature of the Barroco de Indias, this new work on ekphrasis can contribute to the critical reexamination of canonical texts that is currently underway. During the latter half of the twentieth century, many scholarly studies began to associate texts from the Barroco de Indias with the articulation of a specifically American point of view and with a foundational role in the rupture with Spanish hegemony. Current scholarship, however , is questioning the inclusiveness of this americanismo and is exploring the far more complex role of many works from the Barroco de Indias in forging alternative models of social synthesis. The present essay contributes to recent discussion of criollismo2 in American Baroque writing by exploring the workings of ekphrasis in a pillar of the Colombian national canon – the Poema heroico a San Ignacio de Loyola by the Creole Jesuit, Hernando Domínguez Camargo.3 The epic-hagiographic Poema draws strongly on the tradition of arte por el arte. However, it borrows and re-frames a series of lyric ekphrases from the peninsular poet Luis de Góngora in a way that historicizes this extreme aestheticism . By exploring the ways Camargo’s ekphrases both evoke and elide Amerindian and Afro-American others, I demonstrate how the Poema’s refiguration of Gongoran ekphrases creates an ideological “space” that visualizes an American model of cultural synthesis. However, as I will suggest, this model simply replaces an imperial disregard for American political legitimacy and 1 suffering with an elite, Creole denial of Amerindian property claims and capabilities for resistance. The Poema heroico emerges during an era that some have called a rising “empire of the gaze” (Shapiro 31). Counter Reformation and Cartesian theories of the power of images brought about an intense proliferation in the production of visual artifacts including a flowering of art and architecture as well as, in literature , a burst of “writing for the eyes.”4 The numerous ekphrases that embellish the Poema heroico register some of these devotional and scientific shifts in viewing. Along with reflecting changes in visuality, they also evoke certain social changes occurring in seventeenth-century society. In the Poema, Domínguez Camargo borrows and redescribes a number of Gongoran ekphrases in a way that alters both the relationship between the word pictures and their narrative frame and the relationship between the objects within the word picture. By exploring first how Camargo intensifies Góngora’s proliferation of descriptive parentheses within a narrative and then how he modifies Góngora’s elaboration of imaginative fantasies within these parentheses, I suggest that Camargo depicts imaginary works of art in a way that counters Spanish imperialist attitudes toward America yet simultaneously undermines the rights and rationality of nonCreole peoples who shared the colonial experience. The colonial situation of seventeenth-century New Granada required negotiation between diverse and conflicting social groups. Contrary to the idyllic scenario some have painted, New Granada was not simply a peaceful counterpoint to Mexico’s wars and Peru’s knives and gunpowder.5 Along with major epidemics of smallpox and typhus in 1566, 1587-90, 1633 and 1688, the kingdom suffered conflicts over political and economic issues that divided people along national, racial, and social lines. Peninsular- and American-born whites struggled over imperial economic policy, as the former sought to enforce monopolies on labor and trade in the colonies.6 Whites and non-whites clashed over colonial labor policy, as the latter resisted the devastation of the encomienda , the alquiler general, the mita minera and the agricultural concierto. The hunt for gold created friction even between peoples of identical race and origin, as wealthy Creole bourgeoisie in the mining West vied for power with landowning Creole aristocracy in the East. Beyond monks’ chats, mystical reflections , and Baroque verses, New Granada witnessed collisions between geographic , ethnic, and regional groups with highly disparate values and uneven...

Colonized Labor: Apaches and Pawnees as Army Workers

This essay discusses the Apaches and Pawnees who joined the post-Civil War U. S. Army as workers and argues that they functioned and were used as colonized labor, a special race-based colonial labor system characterized by constant negotiation and tension between integration and exclusion, valuing and othering, and indigenous freedom and colonial control.