Nineteenth-century Labor Research Articles

Slavery's Afterlives: Humanitarian Imperialism and Free Contract

In 1833, slavery was abolished across the British Empire, but its specter continued to haunt the new labor regimes inaugurated in slavery's wake. While much of the analysis of these dynamics focuses on the triangular trade in the Atlantic, this essay focuses on the Indian Ocean. Slavery was largely replaced by indentured labor in the Indian Ocean world, marking a historically significant shift in the political economy of empire, the legal architecture of labor, and the discourses through which the imperial racial capitalist system was legitimated and contested. In the decades that followed, labor became incorporated into market institutions that continued into the post-colonial era. Yet, today, almost two hundred years later, slavery's spectral presence continues to inhabit international labor policy. I argue that the reference to slavery was incorporated into discourses of protection and free contract in ways that sought to sanitize and rationalize regimes of indenture and wage labor in the Indian Ocean world. Thus, paradoxically, slavery is often invoked in ways that are disconnected from its own material history. This essay seeks to trace the persistence of that double move of invocation and disconnection as itself symptomatic of the past in the present. In the context of the nineteenth century labor regime transitions, we might describe imperialism, humanitarianism, and capitalism as having a Weberian relationship of “elective affinities.” Slavery's haunting of the political and normative imagination of alternative labor systems encapsulated those affinities by fusing the denunciation of slavery with the promise of protection and profit, redeeming humanitarian imperialism and commodified labor.

The movement and its monument: Victorian labour’s tribute to the eight-hour day

The Victorian labour movement's monument to the eight-hour day was proposed in 1889, upraised near the Victorian Parliament in 1903 and moved to a spot outside the Trades Hall in 1923. This article outlines and explains this history. It presents three arguments. First, that the drive to construct the ‘eight hours monument’ grew out of a long-term practice of ‘memory politics’ for industrial gain as well as a more immediate assertion of generational identity. Second, that the monument reflected the weaknesses as well as strengths of the nineteenth-century labour movement: an idealisation of white, male craft workers; a marginalisation of women; an active opposition to non-white workers. Third, that the monument was actively used by the labour movement of the early twentieth century. Those uses reflect increasing tensions and limits; they changed the location, the meaning and the prominence of the monument. This article offers both a cultural history of the monument and a wider exploration of the connections between monument-building and social movement mobilisation.

Plantation Coffee in Jamaica 1790–1848

Plantation Coffee in Jamaica 1790–1848

The Trouble with Tattycoram: Emotional Labor and the Dependent Woman inLittle Dorrit

AbstractWhile the concept of emotional labor (the presentation of a feeling as part of a job) is generally applied to a twentieth- and twenty-first-century context—indeed, Arlie Russell Hochschild, who coined the term, explicitly contrasts it with nineteenth-century labor—we can in fact use it to illuminate the particularly gendered labor of Victorian contexts, especially among women of ambiguous social status. This article examines Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit through the lens of emotional labor, focusing on the characters of Tattycoram and Mrs. General, whom this article terms “dependent women.” These two women occupy ambiguous positions, caught between the worlds of emotion and work and required to perform affection and gratitude in order to maintain themselves. While Tattycoram and Mrs. General handle this differently—Tattycoram resents it, while Mrs. General exploits it—examining them both in this light illustrates a continuity between conceptions of feeling and work in the nineteenth century and in contemporary contexts while also highlighting the uncertainties and unique tensions of the dependent woman's position. The presence of emotion makes Little Dorrit's dependent women's lives uniquely difficult by leaving both them and their employers uncertain as to their ultimate status or where they belong.

Democratizing Platform Privacy

The online platform political economy — that is, the interrelationship of economic and political power in the exchange of online services for personal information — has endowed platforms with overwhelming power to determine consumers’ information privacy. Scholarship on information privacy has focused largely on the economic problem: individual consumers do not obtain their “optimal” level of privacy due to a bevy of market failures. This manuscript presents the political problem: platforms’ hegemonic control over consumers’ information privacy renders the rules they impose illegitimate from a democratic perspective. It argues platform hegemony over consumers’ information privacy is a political problem, in the first instance, due to the social foundations of normative information privacy and the social character of personal information. Though problems affecting society in this manner are typically met with government intervention, through the promulgation of law, or class-action litigation, neither of these safeguards have effectively protected consumers’ information privacy. Rather than empower consumers to determine their information privacy norms and how to protect them, their reliance on self-regulation through notice and consent have empowered platforms to make these determinations unilaterally. In light of these failures, this manuscript explores the remaining alternative: the democratic legitimization of information privacy within the existing private governance system. To this end, it proposes that industrial democracy, as a method of legitimating employer hegemony in the labor political economy, can frame a preliminary understanding of platform democracy with respect to information privacy. The manuscript describes the late nineteenth and early twentieth century labor political economy and highlights its congruencies with and differences from the platform political economy. It then presents foundational elements of industrial democracy, which introduced democratic structures to the labor political economy, and analyzes their application to the platform political economy. Ultimately, this manuscript concludes that, with certain alterations and adaptations, the structures that formerly aimed to democratize labor can likewise democratize the private governance of information privacy.

Coercion and Contract at the Margins: Deportable Labor and the Laws of Employment Termination Under US Capitalism (1942–2015)

In 1917, Congress created the status of temporary labor migrant. A new kind of restricted worker born from nineteenth-century free labor politics, employer and citizen worker demands under modern liberal capitalism, and state labor market regulation, temporary migrants have always had an employer-dependent legal status and been subject to deportation. Yet, since 1942, changing rights and legal processes have governed migrant employment termination across sectors. By drawing on employment cases from archival and unpublished files made available to me under FOIA, and court decisions, I compare the impact of laws of employment termination on deportable laborers beginning in 1942, when government agencies planned migration, and under privatized migration after 1964. From agriculture and war to today's service and knowledge economies, I demonstrate how employment rights have always shaped deportable workers' legal status. Yet, I also show how today's rights and legal processes, in contrast to the past, hardly mitigate employer control over migrants under contemporary capitalism.

Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class

Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class

Marc W. Steinberg. England’s Great Transformation: Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution.

In England’s Great Transformation: Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution, Marc W. Steinberg blends historical materialism with historical institutionalism, documenting employers’ use of the Master and Servant Acts to enforce work-discipline in the nineteenth century. Using detailed case studies of three cities—Hanley and the pottery industry, Hull and the fishing trade in the Northeast, and Redditch and commercial agriculture and needle manufacturing—Steinberg shows that employers took workers to court to force them back to work, to recoup profits lost due to worker misconduct, or even to imprison them for breaking long work contracts. Unfortunately, Steinberg embeds excellent primary research within a convoluted theoretical narrative. In his opening chapters Steinberg plunges into class theory, which makes the reading very slow going. He makes a straw man of Karl Marx by arguing that when Marx described nineteenth-century labor discipline, he focused exclusively on the factory system; according to Steinberg, for a complete picture one must examine institutions like the law as well. From a historian’s perspective, Steinberg’s assertion that economic arrangements and political and legal institutions dynamically interact is hardly new.

Globalizing Southeastern Europe: Emigrants, America, and the State since the Late Nineteenth Century . By Ulf Brunnbauer

During the great nineteenth-century labor migrations, over half of all Croats and Slovenes working in the United States eventually returned home. The figure was still higher for Bulgarians, Serbs, Montenegrins, and Turks. In his sweeping work, Globalizing Southeastern Europe, Ulf Brunnbauer assesses the impact of these returnees and the migration regimes that guided and monitored their behavior. Viewing this movement through the prism of sending countries, from the Habsburg Monarchy to the Ottoman Empire and the newly formed independent states in between, Brunnbauer traces the interplay of individual and familial decisions, state-building projects, and the fortunes of nationalist movements over a century of transatlantic interactions. He analyzes the migration patterns and popular memories that culminated in the resurgence of Yugoslav Gastarbeiter to North America in the 1960s. As Brunnbauer depicts it, migration from the village was neither exceptional nor traumatic for most peasant households but reflected individual and communal choice or rational reactions to moments of crisis. Travelers did not take to the road because of larger demographic or economic shifts, though such trends played a role, nor were they victims of nefarious migration agents hawking steamer tickets and false promises. Rather, networks of information and assistance from local priests, innkeepers, and notaries paved the way; letters and stories from migrants themselves communicated the lure of America. In the end, migrants “pushed and pulled on their own” (83), says Brunnbauer. Independent émigré activity continued in the founding of mutual aid and charitable societies to help keep migrants in touch with home villages and to maintain their status as a “constitutive part of the native household” (110). These associations (totaling over 1,100 separate bodies for Slovenes in the United States alone), Brunnbauer argues, were unlike anything workers had experienced before leaving home, reflecting a spirit of self-organization that belies “the notion that migrants are only victims of circumstances” (104).

From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century

This book reconstructs how a group of nineteenth-century labor reformers appropriated and radicalized the republican tradition. These 'labor republicans' derived their definition of freedom from a long tradition of political theory dating back to the classical republics. In this tradition, to be free is to be independent of anyone else's will - to be dependent is to be a slave. Borrowing these ideas, labor republicans argued that wage laborers were unfree because of their abject dependence on their employers. Workers in a cooperative, on the other hand, were considered free because they equally and collectively controlled their work. Although these labor republicans are relatively unknown, this book details their unique, contemporary, and valuable perspective on both American history and the organization of the economy.

Feeding the Girmitiya: Food and Drink on Indentured Ships to the Sugar Colonies

This paper looks at gastronomic identity in the age of global labor migrations. Focusing on the nineteenth-century indentured labor voyages from northern India to the sugar colonies in the Caribbean and Asia-Pacific regions, it highlights the sea voyage as both a social setting and a mirror back onto colonial society. The space of the indentured labor ship serves as an innovative site for understanding the political, cultural, and economic dimensions of historical labor movements, through which colonial politics and gustemic identities were negotiated. An analysis of the food provisions and other culinary items that British colonial officials provided to indentured workers during their journeys situates the “taste” of laborers in colonial feedings.

Desertions in nineteenth-century shipping: modelling quit behaviour

Ship jumping in foreign ports was widespread throughout the age of sail. Desertion by seamen was illegal, it occurred abroad, and men who deserted only seldom returned home. We analyse desertion quantitatively and link it to the broader question of quit behaviour and labour turnover. Though the better wages paid at the foreign ports were the main reason for desertion, the regression model of the determinants of desertion indicates that outside opportunities, such as migration, and monetary incentives played a significant role in the nineteenth-century labour market, characterized by rather strict control over labour supply, working conditions, and terms of trade.

'Law as . . .': Theory and Practice in Legal History

Some twenty years ago, the political scientist Karen Orren wrote an essay entitled “Metaphysics and Reality in Late Nineteenth-Century Labor Adjudication” that counterposed the “metaphysics” of the ancient common law of master and servant to the “reality” of the modern workplace over which it supposedly reigned. Orren’s essay celebrated the early twentieth century’s revolt against formalism in which, hand in hand, the labor movement and intellectuals fashioned a transformation of American politics and culture, a victory for latter-day materiality over antimodern metaphysics that would furnish the ideational bedrock for the coming century’s liberal politics and legalism, and for their insistence that all knowledge is historical and social. Twenty years after Orren’s essay and a century after the antimetaphysical revolution, “law as . . .” stands for a moment of reconsideration, a pause to contemplate what the theory and practice of legal history might gain by rejoining metaphysics to materiality. The objective of “law as . . .” is to use the past to confront the present. To do so, “law as . . .” rejects the sequestration of the past and the various histories that result from it. “Law as . . .” dwells instead on the conditions of possibility for a critical knowledge of the here-and-now: the moment, it might be said, when the origins of the present “jut manifestly and fearsomely into existence,” spirit into experience, metaphysics into materiality.

Boodle over the Border: Embezzlement and the Crisis of International Mobility, 1880–1890

Roughly 2,000 American fugitives fled to Canada in the 1880s—mostly clerks, cashiers, and bank tellers charged with embezzlement. This article argues that these “boodlers,” as they were popularly called, were symptomatic of a late-nineteenth-century crisis of mobility. Embezzlement was a function of new kinds of mobility: migration to cities, the rise of an upwardly mobile middle class, the fungibility of greenbacks, and the growth of international transportation networks. The boodlers were some of the earliest white-collar criminals. By focusing on their unexplored story, this article contributes to the growing literature that presents the clerk as an important figure in nineteenth-century labor history. Still, the boodlers also had a more unexpected impact on the evolution of the United States' international borders, both in the popular imagination and in actual surveillance and law enforcement techniques. Through the figure of the boodler, this article examines the links between the growth of capitalism and the development of the United States–Canada border in the late nineteenth century.

Old Questions and ‘New Biography’: Labour Activism, William Murphy and Racialisation in 1880s Victoria

The work of Patrick Joyce and Joan Scott asks scholars to rigorously historicise experience, identity and, as a consequence, subjectivity. This article suggests the combination of their insights with biographical techniques has the potential to offer new explanations for intransigent historiographic problems such as the explosion of racism in late nineteenth-century Australian labour politics. The practice of biography, moreover, provides an opportunity for Australian scholars to re-engage with the challenge of post-structuralism and resist the temptation to isolate its influence to analyses of culture and representation. Using these methodologies to investigate the subjectivity of labour activist William Murphy, this article then argues that late colonial ‘racism’ emerged as a discursive resolution to a much wider set of questions about the legitimacy of labour in public life.

Oil Landscapes

Oil Landscapes Maria Whiteman (bio) Oil. Edward Burtynsky. Steidl. http://www.steidlville.com 215 pages; cloth, $128.00. This extravagant book is larger than most coffee table books, and one that catches the eye not only because of its bulk but by the visual demand made by the photo on its cover: an army of pump jacks stretching away to the California desert horizon. This latest collection of Edward Burtynsky's photographs (winner of the 2010 Deutscher Fotobuchpreis Silver Medal) is made up of both new and old photos that address the topic of oil from every possible angle. In Burtynsky's characteristic style, which emphasizes scale and number (most often from the vantage point offered by a construction crane), these photos prompt shock and awe in the face of the visual representation of the sheer size of those varied infrastructures that enable oil to course through the veins of global society. Burtynsky describes Oil (which has been exhibited at galleries and museums around the world, beginning at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 2009) as the outcome of an "oil epiphany" he had in 1997. "It occurred to me that all the vast man-altered landscapes I had pursued for over twenty years," he writes, "had been made possible by the discovery of oil and the progress occasioned by the internal combustion engine.... These images can be seen as notations by one artist— contemplating the world made possible through this massive energy force, and the cumulative effects of the industrial evolution." The book is divided into three sections intended to document the life cycle of oil, passing from "Extraction and Refinement" to "Transportation and Motor Culture" to "The End of Oil." The photos making up each section are heterogeneous in theme and content, and photographed at numerous locations around the world. "Extraction and Refinement" includes images of older oil fields in the California desert, which tend to be jam-packed with drill rigs and pump jacks; the expansive oil sands extraction sites and tailing ponds in Fort McMurray, Alberta; and the complex, visually dynamic (if virtually incomprehensible) twists and turns of refinery structures in Ontario, New Brunswick, and Texas. "Transportation and Motor Culture" begins with a series of M. C. Escher-like images of enormous highway interchanges before taking us to massive car import lots in the U.S. and China, as well as sites at which people accumulate around the fantasy of driving, as in the biker and trucker jamborees held in Sturgis, South Dakota and Walcott, Iowa, respectively. Click for larger view View full resolution Detail from Cover If the photos in the first two sections draw our attention to the apparatuses and infrastructures that produce and are produced by oil—from sites of extraction largely hidden from view to the quotidian landscape of highways and car lots—"The End of Oil" probes the consequences of oil society, especially through the detritus that it leaves behind. The multiple images of the ancient oilfields of Baku, as well as of gigantic graveyards of cars, helicopters, planes, jet engines, tires, and oil drums, are concluded [End Page 6] with a sequence of photos on which Burtynsky made his fame: the shipbreaking yards of Chittagong, Bangladesh, where nineteenth-century labor meets twentieth-century garbage through the mechanism of twenty-first century offshoring of multinational capitalism's expenses and responsibilities. Oil is a photo narrative—an attempt to tell a story through images. Rather than an exhibition of his latest pieces, the book (and the show it represents) is akin to a curatorial exercise in which one aspect of an artist's thematic preoccupations are drawn out of a larger body of work. What makes Oil unique is that in this case, the curator is the artist himself, who has revisited his large body of images in an effort to produce a tale that might generate in its viewers the same oil epiphany that prompted their production. Burtynsky is far from the only photographer to generate photo essays with political intent. One thinks immediately, for instance, of Allan Sekula's Fish Story (1996), though text (the powerful essays included alongside his photos in most of his published work) is important for...

Nineteenth-Century Labour Figures for Demolition: A Theoretical Approach to Understanding the Economics of Re-use

Nineteenth-Century Labour Figures for Demolition: A Theoretical Approach to Understanding the Economics of Re-use

Working Ethics: William Beaumont, Alexis St. Martin, and Medical Research in Antebellum America

Analyzing William Beaumont's relationship with his experimental subject, Alexis St. Martin, this article demonstrates how the "research ethics" of antebellum America were predicated on models of employment, servitude, and labor. The association between Beaumont and St. Martin drew from and was understood in terms of the ideas and practices of contract labor, informal domestic servitude, indentures, and military service. Beaumont and St. Martin lived through an important period of transition in which personal master-servant relations existed alongside the "free" contract labor of market capitalism. Their relationship reflected and helped constitute important developments in nineteenth-century American labor history.

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. …

Wage structures and family economies in the Catalan textile industry in an age of nascent capitalism

This article deals with changes in the management of industrial labour in Catalonia between 1830 and 1925. In the absence of state welfare, families developed a number of strategies to try and secure an adequate standard of living. During the nineteenth century labour markets were informal, and working contracts implicit. However, with the advent of scientific organization of labour in the 1920s, hourly wage agreements began to be recorded. The application of cooperative game theory illuminates the processes by which households in this era managed to generate income. Both kin- and non-kin-related networks were used to improve the living standards of the household. Strategies of co-residence initially developed by migrants were later imitated by locally born inhabitants. Initially the living standards of migrants were thus higher than those of natives.