Free Wage Labour Research Articles

Does time heal all wounds? The rise, decline, and long-term impact of forced labor in Spanish America

For most of human history, free wage labor was uncommon compared to various coercive institutions based on the threat of force. Latin America was no exception to this general rule. A number of scholars argue that past coercive labor institutions explain regional and national divergence within Latin America long after the institutions themselves have disappeared. A review of the literature, however, shows less agreement than is commonly recognized. There is evidence that forced labor on Spanish American mainland collapsed endogenously under its own weight, in which case it may have left few echoes in the present.

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Thrift, Morality, and Migration in the Barbados Savings Bank

Abstract There has been little historiographical attention to working-class banking in the Caribbean. This article adds to the scholarship by considering the founding and use of the Barbados Savings Bank by working-class Black Barbadians. Colonial administrators hoped the bank would teach formerly enslaved Barbadians how to properly transition into the free wage labor force and sought to encourage household arrangements dependent on a male breadwinner who would use the bank for long-term savings. Using the new depositor ledgers of the Barbados Savings Bank, I argue that everyday Barbadians instead used this financial institution as a family repository of targeted savings for the purpose of emigration, defying colonial desires of a dependent workforce organized in patriarchal single-income households.

International order and racial capitalism: The standardization of ‘free labour’ exploitation in international law

AbstractThe ‘question of labour’ and its exploitation in the Third World has not been given ample consideration by contemporary international legal scholars in their historical examinations of the making of the international order. This article revisits the history of the interwar institutions of the League of Nations, particularly the International Labour Organization (ILO), to argue that international law reformulated imperialism through its re-articulation of labour relations, beginning with its quest to suppress slavery and ultimately regulate forced labour in Africa. International institutions contributed to the valorization of ‘free wage labour’ in Africa and the Third World through its international ‘native labour’ policies, the development of international labour standards, and especially the passing of the 1930 Forced Labour Convention. The article argues that international institutions safeguarded the processes of capitalist racial/colonial accumulation and labour exploitation by ideologically dis-embedding the violence of slavery and forced labour from ‘free wage labour’, veiling the structural unity and totality of the international legal order with racial capitalism. Drawing on the ‘Black radical/internationalist tradition’, I propose an expansive critique of the international order as a form of ‘enslavement’ to the structures of capitalism, so as to adequately expose international law’s structural embeddedness with labour exploitation, white supremacy, and racial capitalism.

Policing Asylum Seekers’ Flight Within Europe

A critical assessment of the Dublin regulation requires a look beyond its official function of allocating asylum seekers across EU Member States. This article argues it embodies the “hidden face” of Schengen insofar as it legally fixes them in the sole country responsible for their application. Because this responsibility lies primarily with the first country of arrival, it is consistent with the core-periphery axis of division of labor in the EU. The first part of this paper examines how the Schengen/Dublin dual regime of (im)mobility might respond to the constant need for bridled labor alongside free wage labor in the world-system. However, equally constant is labor power’s propensity to evade its subsumption under capital; this is exemplified by Dubliners’ appropriation of freedom of movement through irregularity. By deserting the “plantations” of the European peripheries, those “maroons” of our present time disrupt the European geography of power and contest their assigned position in it. But the widely acknowledged failure of this regime to deter “secondary movements” does not necessarily mean it is non-effective. Attention must then be given to mechanisms of “exclusion from within” experimented on Dubliners. The second part will offer an overview of the tactics of internal rebordering that have been recently deployed in core countries and question the extent to which those attempts to recapture their flight meet the conditions for the optimization of capital’s operations.

Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail, 1740–1840 by Stephen Taylor

Reviewed by: Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail, 1740–1840 by Stephen Taylor Sharada Balachandran Orihuela (bio) Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail, 1740–1840 stephen taylor Yale University Press, 2020 XXV + 490 pp. Stephen Taylor's Sons of the Waves is an impressively researched yet distressingly undertheorized book about the seminal role of the common British sailor, or the Jack Tar, in the rise of British power. Covering the hundred years after 1740, before steam ships came to dominate the seas, this work of trade history follows the lives of dozens of ordinary seamen, some of whom left letters, memoirs, and even novels narrating their participation in British seafaring. As Taylor argues, Jack Tars, named for the tar used to waterproof their coats, were integral to a British sense of national identity, the Industrial Revolution, as well as to the expansion of British colonialism and the consolidation of its empire. Taylor's monograph is convincing in its claim that ordinary seamen were integral in the accumulation of British wealth and power. While this work is expansive in historical and archival scope, I want to focus on two aspects of Sons of Waves that I believe will be most useful to literary scholars: the first is the impressive range of written texts authored by ordinary seamen found in this monograph, and the second is the importance this work lends to ongoing debates about the place of the ordinary seaman in the creation of the liberal subject. Taylor's monograph follows in the tradition of Marcus Rediker's work on seamen and pirates on the other side of the Atlantic found in works including Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge UP, 1987); The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon P, 2000); Villains of All Nations: [End Page 273] Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Beacon P, 2004); and Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail (Beacon P, 2014). Rediker's works, like Taylor's, are focused on re-creating the life of ordinary sailors using a range of different primary documents that include works authored by the sailors themselves. In particular, they share detailed descriptions of the difficult lives of ordinary sailors, including being subject to harsh disciplinary measures, to impressment and other forms of forced conscription, as well as having to navigate the harsh conditions of life at sea (as Taylor repeatedly notes, the mortality rate of sailors was extremely high, with sometimes as many as one in three sailors succumbing to scurvy, disease, or the rough seas). However, while Rediker's works tend to focus on the place of the sailor as a figure central to the development of free wage labor, to the growth of a transnational working class, and also to the expression of revolutionary fervor across the Atlantic, Taylor's monograph focuses on sailors' rebellions that resulted in better wages, the outlawing of impressment, and reduced corporeal punishment for minor offenses at sea. As he writes, Rights of Man (1791) by Thomas Paine, himself a privateer and sailmaker, had quite an effect on sailors' demands for egalitarianism. In many ways, Taylor, like Rediker, attributes a more progressive politics to the demands made by mariners, an argument made even more compelling when considering that by and large mariners belonged to the lower classes in pre-industrial England. For example, Taylor's focus on Edward Pellew who rose from ordinary seaman to a Navy frigate captain to viscount, is illustrative of how life at sea provided some men from the lower classes with the ability to move across the class divisions of the age. Taylor makes a compelling case for why we should view these common mariners as anti-authoritarian heroes who are able to transcend their station, and in doing so, are also central to more egalitarian and less cruel lives in England. Taylor's book is also impressive in the archival materials it assembles found in the British Library, the Library of...

Homosexuality in the Late Imperial Russian Navy: A Microhistory

Homosexuality in the Late Imperial Russian NavyA Microhistory Irina Roldugina (bio) During the winter of 1916, at the height of World War I, Second-Rank Captain Vladimir Grigor´evich Petrov, aged 35, found himself in a trouble-some situation. The Naval Procuracy in Kronstadt had opened a preliminary investigation: he was suspected of homosexual activity with his subordinates.1 Petrov refused to assist the investigation and said nothing about the sensitive topic. His reluctance to cooperate did not prevent officials from conducting the inquiry, but it meant that they had to rely on the testimonies of witnesses. More than 20 people were thoroughly questioned about Petrov's same-sex liaisons during his service at the Kronstadt Naval Base. Some of them had to answer the official investigator's questions two and even three times. As a result, the surviving paperwork provides a unique perspective on how homo-sexuality was discussed and perceived by people not professionally engaged with the subject. Since Michel Foucault first raised the question about the birth of the modern homosexual, historians have been quite prolific in researching and contextualizing the issue in various regions and countries. Alongside the important role of medical science, they argue, homosexual selfhood was forged by such factors as capitalism, the rise of free wage labor, secularization, the [End Page 451] spread of literacy, and urban growth.2 The present article seeks to contribute to this historiography by examining how the figure of the homosexual emerged and was understood outside the expert community in prerevolutionary Russia. The military context, I further suggest, shaped the perception of homosexuality in this case. Scholarship in this area is still relatively modest. In her groundbreaking book The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia, Laura Engelstein suggests that homosexuality had never been a subject of broad public discussion or political attention in Russia, as it was in England and Germany.3 By the turn of the century, however, she shows that a significant proportion of Russian legal scholars were advocating for a modernizing approach to homosexuality and the decriminalization of consensual male intercourse, although this agenda subsequently failed.4 "The reformers refused, however, to endorse a notion of privacy and individual self-determination that would have allowed adult males to deviate freely from public norms and reproductive sexuality and gender definition."5 According to Engelstein, Russian medical experts did not provide significant help to these legal reformers. Frustrated by the lack of autonomy within tsarist society, they were not as influential as their European colleagues: "The medical interpretations of homosexuality, which Foucault sees as crucial to the development of modern sexual identity in the West, had little effect on Russian legal thinking."6 One of the most important implications of Engelstein's analysis for the present article is her argument about the failure of the "political and sexual modernity" that Russian professionals had sought to achieve in late imperial Russia.7 Having worked mainly with printed sources and focusing her attention exclusively on medical and legal discourses among "educated Russians," Engelstein [End Page 452] ignores the question of how expert medical and legal debates might have influenced laypeople. What exactly could they have absorbed through the era's flourishing print culture on the question of homosexuality? Indeed, she admits the sexual question preoccupied not only professionals in the years following the revolution of 1905 but also began to attract attention "in settings open to a more general audience."8 A decade later, Dan Healey offered a different approach.9 Using previously unknown archival material, he demonstrates how a "masculine tradition indulgent of mutual eros," and the increasing visibility of male prostitution in St. Petersburg and Moscow by the end of the 19th century combined to shape the emergence of a homosexual subculture in the capital cities.10 He also discusses the intersection of masculinity and social status, arguing that class played a central role in same-sex urban sexuality: "Men who experienced same-sex desire expressed it according to the social roles they played."11 At the end of the 19th century, according to Healey, "traditional mutual male sexuality in the provinces highlights the apparent patriarchal confidence...

Liberated Africans, Slaves, and Convict Labor in the Construction of Rio de Janeiro's Casa de Correção: Atlantic Labor Regimes and Confinement in Brazil's Port City

AbstractFrom 1834 to 1850, Latin America's first penitentiary, the Casa de Correção in Rio de Janeiro, was a construction site where slaves, “liberated Africans”, convicts, and unfree workers interacted daily, forged identities, and deployed resistance strategies against the pressures of confinement and the demands of Brazil's eclectic labor regimes. This article examines the utilization of this motley crew of workers, the interactions among “liberated Africans”, slaves, and convict laborers, and the government's intervention between 1848 and 1850 to restrict slave labor at the prison in favor of free waged workers. It asserts that the abolition of the slave trade in 1850 and the subsequent inauguration of the penitentiary augured profound changes in Rio's labor landscape, from a predominantly unfree to a free wage labor force.

Kapitalismus und Konzepte von Arbeit

Abstract This article analyzes the role of free wage labor in Karl Marx’s and Max Weber’s theories of capitalism. Both view free wage labor as constitutive for capitalism, since, inMarx’s words, there is no capitalwithout a worker in full command of his labor power.Weber believed that it was more the fear of losing his or her only available source of income that motivated the worker to expend his or her labor power. Nevertheless, it took a long time for free wage labor contracts to become the norm, and they were met with widespread resistance from employers, at least inWestern Europe and the United States. Meanwhile unfree labor lived on as an anachronism in the global and industrial periphery, and different forms of bonded labor were revitalized on a broad basis around the globe. Still, the article concludes that the systematic position of free wage labor in capitalism should not be downplayed.

Wage labour and capitalism: a comparative and historical analysis of Eritrea and Kenya

This paper seeks to explain the development of capitalism in Eritrea and Kenya from a labour history perspective. Indeed, the assumption in this research is that capitalism can only be explained by taking into consideration free wage labour as one of the sine qua non conditions for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. Therefore, the article looks at the paradigmatic socio-economic shifts: from unfree to free labour, from free to precarious labour and from unfree to precarious labour. These are the result of the complicated relationship that exists between capital and labour. The point of departure of the analysis is the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis on the structural origins of slavery, which despite severe criticism, it has been largely remained unchallenged until the present. In Eritrea, colonised by Italy, and Kenya, colonised by England, free wage labour fully developed between the nineteenth and twentieth century. This could be considered the era of the advent of capitalism, with the advent, for a fraction of the working population, of labour relations based on wages. The precarisation of life of free wage workers is also partially analysed in this article.

Compressions of Scale: World Literature in Miniature

Fifty years ago, in 1966, Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey published a famous book called The Tyranny of Distance that argued how spatial distance from other centers of civilization had been the most important factor in determining the trajectory of Australian history. Now, under the impact of communications revolutions and environmental theory of various kinds, such tyrannies are more likely to be those of propinquity, with scholars of world literature and culture intent upon examining ways in which different parts of the globe are now, and indeed always have been, tightly imbricated within one another’s orbits. Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents is a distinguished contribution to these contemporary critical discourses of planetary scale, with Lowe being particularly incisive in her deconstruction of what she calls “the violence of liberal universality” (7). One purpose of her book is to show how it was an Anglo American cultural tradition, “best exemplified” by John Stuart Mill (106), that provided a key rationale not only for the expansion in the nineteenth century of an international trade in manufactured goods and migrant labor, but also, more implicitly, for styles of writing that worked as a corollary to such rhetorical invocations of liberty. Lowe has an excellent discussion in her second chapter of Olaudah Equiano, where she challenges the received idea of “transition” upon which his Narrative (1789) is predicated, along with its associated suggestion “that the system of slavery was gradually superseded by a new system of free wage labor” (46). She argues instead that slavery and “free” wage labor are closely intertwined with each other, with autobiography, “the liberal genre par excellence,” performing “the important work of mediating and resolving liberalism’s contradictions” (46). Lowe has done much productive research for this project in colonial archives, and she illuminatingly juxtaposes Lord Aberdeen’s 1841 declaration, in a letter to the first governor of Hong Kong, that “a secure, well-regulated trade, not conquest, is all we desire” with the twentieth-century “imperial governmentality” of the US, which was similarly less concerned with “direct conquest or occupation of territory” than with “managing the biopolitical circulation of goods and peoples within an expanded international market” (132).

War, the state and the formation of the North Korean industrial working class, 1931–60

This article examines how Koreans became industrial workers in the first and second phases of industrialisation on the peninsula: under Japanese colonial rule, 1931–45 and under the DPRK’s post-Korean War heavy industrialisation, 1953–60. While the political regimes of the Japanese colony and postcolonial DPRK were different, industrialisation occurred under similar conditions, characterised principally by war, state capitalism and imperialism. Processes of proletarianisation also reveal similarities in the two periods, including the widespread use of forced mobilisation and immobilisation of workers, and a bureaucratic apparatus supporting close control of labour. The article contributes to the critique of conventional views about the role of ‘free wage labour’ during the transition to capitalism.

Wage Labor and Mobility in Colonial Eritrea, 1880s to 1920s

AbstractMobility and wage labor are two key variables that help to explain some of the complexities of the labor history of colonial Eritrea. Focusing on the initial period of Italian colonization, between the 1880s and 1920s, this article analyzes the relationship between the two above-mentioned variables. Based on previously unexplored archival sources and documents, the authors conclude that wage labor did contribute to the mobility of workers throughout the region (and not vice versa). In the period under consideration, Eritrea did not become a settler colony, despite Italy's initial efforts to import a national labor force. Instead, through a mix of capital investments in construction and transport, and increasing military recruitment, the Italian regime contributed significantly to an increase in free wage labor in the region. Within a year of Italy's 1911 invasion of Libya, it needed to reinforce its colonial army. From 1912 onward, in return for wages, tens of thousands of Eritreans entered the Italian colonial army to fight on the Libyan front. This military employment left voids in the local labor market, which were filled by people from neighboring countries, particularly Ethiopians and Yemenis. A relationship thus developed and continued between mobility and wage labor.

Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves by Henry Wiencek (review)

Reviewed by: Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves by Henry Wiencek Douglas R. Egerton (bio) Keywords Thomas Jefferson, Monticello, Slavery, Race Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves. By Henry Wiencek. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Pp. 336. Cloth, $28.00.) Henry Wiencek, the author of An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (New York, 2003), here takes on the far more daunting task of investigating Thomas Jefferson's lifelong entanglement with race and unfree labor. Compared to the uncomplicated, straightforward soldier whose military service and subsequent political career revealed a slow but steady retreat from slavery, the enigmatic master of Monticello makes for a far more elusive subject. As journalist Jon Meacham's recent biography, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (New York, 2012), suggests, Jefferson's views on race and his refusal to divest himself of a practice he consistently denounced are nearly impossible stories to untangle. Meacham's unfortunate solution is to say almost nothing about slavery over the course of 500 pages. Wiencek bravely wades into this thicket; but in the end, Jefferson all but defeats him as well. Master of the Mountain exhibits all of the virtues and vices of popular scholarship. Wiencek writes exceedingly well, and he has a sure eye for irony, a gift clearly required by the topic at hand. Lay readers and undergraduate students will enjoy the lively prose, and at 275 pages of text, this volume is considerably shorter than Wiencek's previous study. But most readers of this journal will find little new here, and specialists in early national slavery may regard Wiencek's effort as simplistic, lacking in nuance, and oddly deficient in both primary and secondary sources. Most historians who have examined Jefferson's interconnected public and private policies on slavery have depicted his life as a depressing [End Page 557] retreat from a brief, early antislavery stance. Shortly after election to the House of Burgesses in 1769, he drafted a bill overturning the 1723 ban on private manumissions. In Wiencek's retelling of this famous episode, the public condemnation of the senior colleague who introduced the bill on Jefferson's behalf warned him of the dangers of getting too far out in front of popular sentiment. Jefferson then inherited his father-in-law's debts, co-signed a bankrupt's note, and, doubting he could ever achieve solvency with free wage labor, spent the rest of his long life refusing to live within his means while rationalizing his ownership of black Americans. To that familiar saga, Wiencek adds what he believes to be an overlooked but key 1792 epiphany, in which Jefferson calculated a small profit each year on the birth of black children. Wiencek dubs this "Jefferson's 4 percent theorem" and suggests that the figure was based on "a phenomenon he had perceived at Monticello but never actually measured" (8-9). Although Wiencek never mentions this fact, the sum remained unmeasured as Jefferson was then in Philadelphia, far from his account books, and his rough notation—which mostly pertains to comparative costs of English and American labor, wheat prices, and the cost of mutton relative to beef—was done at Washington's request in response to one of the president's correspondents. Since Wiencek is generally unable to factor this scribble into Jefferson's overall plantation management or public policies, any discussion of it vanishes for most of the book, reappearing only near the end (246). Jefferson's ill-fated ruminations on skin complexion and biology in his Notes on the State of Virginia are hardly underanalyzed, and numerous historians have previously chronicled those white and black Virginians who were far more progressive when it came to race relations. Wiencek goes further, however, by suggesting that Jefferson penned his Notes just as his state "came close to outlawing the continuation of slavery" (48). Sadly, it did not. The fact that many planters, including Washington, took advantage of the 1782 law that allowed for individual manumission hardly indicates that the legislature came anywhere near to passing an act for gradual emancipation. Wiencek admits as much eighteen pages later, when he observes that historian...

Lineages of Capital

AbstractBanaji’s essays offer a powerful plea for a renewal of Marxism, a passionate argument to emancipate Marxism from the dead weight of vulgar traditions – with their simplifications, forced abstractions, mechanical reductions, generalised a-historical theorising, and familiar teleologies. To reinvigorate Marxism, argues Banaji, it is essential to use theory creatively, and recognise the need for complexity in thinking about categories. We cannot generalise about modes of production simply by referring to the forms of labour exploitation in the abstract: associate serfdom or coerced labour with feudalism, and free wage-labour with capitalism. Without historical research into the specific ways in which each economy works – its history and logic of operation – we cannot in the abstract characterise a mode of production: we only end up producing a formal evolutionary sequence of modes. Agreeing with the general thrust of the critique mounted in the book, this essay suggests that Banaji’s own arguments often reproduce the binaries and linearities he opposes, and remain framed within certain forms of reductionism.

‘Peculiar circumstances of the land’: Artists and Models in Nineteenth‐Century Brazilian Slave Society

The essay situates the members of the French Artistic Mission of 1816 and their successors within the visual economy of nineteenth-century Brazil. It follows the adaptations of academic artists and their students to the aesthetics and labour market conditions of the largest and most enduring slave society of the Americas. The evolution of a pedagogical aesthetic of the human body, via instruction from the modelo vivo (artist’s model), and the associated labour relations of life modelling in the context of widespread slaveholding are the two primary concerns. The research considers the career of the artist’s model in the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts (AIBA), from the ad hoc recruitment of seemingly suitable individuals to the subsequent formalization and casualization of life model employment that accompanied the long arc of the last four decades of the transatlantic slave trade, gradual abolitionism, the expansion of free-wage labour, and the early consolidation of a post-emancipation, republican order.

The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba (review)

Reviewed by: The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba Philip A. Howard The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba. By Lisa Yun . Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008. 336 pp. $56.50 (cloth); $26.95 (paper and e-book). Employing the testimony of 2,841 Chinese workers initially recruited by British and American companies and later by Cuban traffickers of African slaves and indentured workers to labor in Cuba alongside African slaves, Lisa Yun provides a worthy examination of the lives of Asian immigrant laborers during the last half of the nineteenth century. Positing these workers within the context of the global economy and at a time when the economic growth and prosperity of the North Atlantic world were dependent on the exploitation and oppression of African slaves and East Indian and Chinese indentured workers, Yun demonstrates that employing coolie labor was critical to the shift away from slavery and toward the adoption of free wage labor in Cuba. Although these Chinese workers were theoretically free wage earners, the testimony that some Chinese coolie laborers gave in front of members of a commission sent by the Chinese government to determine their role, status, and treatment in Cuba illuminated the disturbing fact that the majority of them were held and treated in the same fashion as African slaves, argues Yun. As a result, Yun is able to "reexamine the liberal philosophies and assumptions regarding contracts and freedom," as well as the "very structures of a free society, a contractual society based upon the concepts of self-ownership." After exploring the historiography on transitional laborers in the Americas in general, and Cuba specifically, Yun points out that much [End Page 615] of the literature written on the Chinese experience in Cuba underlined the fact that the production of certain commodities, such as sugar, as well as the laws that governed indentured servitude and known as the Chinese Codes transformed the majority of coolies into slaves. For example, the codes required Chinese indentured workers to obtain the permission of their masters to marry. The codes also declared that the status of any child born of a coolie originated from that of the mother. Finally after 1860, the codes denied freedom to any Chinese worker who completed his contract. The latter regulation, better known as "recontracting," tied the coolie to one owner or owners beyond the period of his initial contract. Recontracting made the coolie trade profitable to British, American, and later Cuban commercial interests. As a result, between 1847 and 1877 some 142,000 Chinese arrived in Cuba. Interestingly, another 100,000 Chinese coolies landed in Peru during this time. Yun argues that the Cuban plantocracy sought coolie laborers for many reasons. Two of the most important causes were that they sought to reduce the intensity of the African slave trade to ensure that Cuban society would not resemble, at least demographically, Saint Domingue and experience that country's same violent fate after 1791. The fact that the cost of one coolie tended to be one-third to one-half less than that of an African slave drove demand among Cuban planters. The relatively lower cost of a Chinese indentured worker explains why after British and American companies started the coolie trade, the island's wealthiest African slaveholding families from Havana and Matanzas, particularly the Zulueta family, subsequently replaced them. By the 1860s, the most prominent Cuban slave owners became not only the principal investors in the Asian trade but also the largest holders of coolie workers. To substantiate her thesis that Chinese coolies were held and treated similarly to the African slaves, Yun traced their experiences from the moment they were recruited in China and transported to Cuba. Their "middle passage" resembled that of the African slaves, according to Yun. Once they arrived, the contracts that they signed to work for an individual for a period of eight years were deceptive in nature. Although owners were obligated to pay their workers four pesos monthly, they immediately deducted from their workers' salaries the cost for their clothes and food as well as medical care and "lost-time." As a result, by the time that the contracts...

Forced Labor in Colonial West Africa

AbstractDuring the colonial period in West Africa, European officials and businessmen faced a perennial shortage of labor; their response was to rely on coercion. Despite their rhetoric of “free wage labor,” colonial officials thought Africans needed encouragement to understand time and work discipline. Africans continually resisted, making forced labor inefficient and costly. West Africans incorporated the European rhetoric of the abolition of slavery, free wage labor and workers’ benefits into their protests against colonial labor practices. By the late 1940s, most forms of forced labor had been abolished.

Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century

Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century. By Robert J. Steinfeld. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xi, 329. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $22.95.) In book, Robert J. Steinfeld continues his exploration of the changing legal constructions of Anglo-American labor. An earlier study, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 (1991) focused first on the ascendance of indentured servitude in the American colonies, and then on the institution's normative and legal repudiation in the United States (particularly outside the South) during the early nineteenth century. The present volume pursues the evolving legal meanings of free wage labor into the twentieth century. Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century is dense and demanding - though rewarding - study. The opening section, Introduction: Free Wage Labor in the History of the West, is likely to hold the greatest interest for scholars outside the field of legal history. Here Steinfeld renews his assault on the conventional wisdom that dominant eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understandings of free wage labor were similar to our own. On the contrary, earlier generations accepted that labor contracts might compel so-called free wage laborers, through various extra-- market-force threats and pressures (e.g., incarceration, legally-sanctioned pecuniary penalties), to perform their labor agreements. From central argument (documented in the body of the book), Steinfeld proceeds in the introductory section to wide-ranging assessment of the mix of compulsions and pressures upon which employers have historically relied to exact labor. This assessment is, to my mind, persuasive. Yet it may prove controversial, since the author concludes that, because in all cases laborers are induced to choose between unpleasant alternatives, the distinction between and coerced labor is inevitably an arbitrary one. Steinfeld does offer the disclaimer that this is not an argument that wage labor was form of slavery (8). But those who believe that the physical compulsions and other circumstances impressed on human chattels were not merely particularly harsh, but were of unique order altogether, are unlikely to be appeased by the author's disclaimer. I include here, among other probable critics of Steinfeld's perspective, the adherents of Orlando Patterson's neoabolitionist thesis of natal alienation. In his determination that all forms of nineteenth-century labor were motivated by mix of incentives and that chattel servitude and wage labor existed along a very broad continuum rather than as binary opposition (8), Steinfeld acknowledges the influence of Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman's Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974). Of comparable influence is the work of the Progressive Legal Realist thinker, Robert Hale - above all Hale's ground-- breaking emphasis upon how the legal and regulatory functions of the state establish significant background conditions and otherwise contribute to differential economic power, the options available to individuals, and the ensuing market compulsions experienced by waged laborers. (See for example Force and the State: A Comparison of 'Political' and 'Economic' Compulsion, Columbia Law Review, 35 [1935], 149-61.) Steinfeld devotes most of his book to close examination of statutes and judicial rulings regulating contract labor in nineteenth-century England. Reflecting the authority of common-law Master and Servants Acts, the use of penal sanctions to discourage and punish contract breach remained compatible with English understandings of free labor into the 1870s, and employers often resorted to these to minimize workers' premature exits from agreements and to otherwise manage their labor costs and supply. Thereafter, the growing power of organized labor proved instrumental in altering the dominant view. …

"To Wed or Not to Wed?": The Struggle to Define Afro-Jamaican Relationships, 1834-1838

This article examines the extent to which Afro-Jamaicans could live up to the metropolitan, middle-class ideal of marriage during the Apprenticeship System, that is the period 1834–1838 during which slaves in the British Caribbean were prepared for free-wage labour. It shows that the Abolition of Slavery Act issued by the Imperial Government in 1833, the various local Acts that had to give effect to this Act, and legal and extra-legal practices adopted by the planters, made it far more difficult for Afro-Jamaicans to mirror their relationship to the metropolitan ideal during the Apprenticeship System than during slavery. It explains this phenomenon by examining the planters' concerns about the change in their social and economic status and several factors that impinged upon the Imperial Government's ability to bring the metropolitan ideal within close range of the apprentices. This explanation confirms the thesis that the Apprenticeship System was worse than slavery and provides also an insight into the ways in which planters tried to retain the social hierarchy that had been established during slavery.