Plantation Labour Research Articles

Slaves and Peasants in the Era of Emancipation

AbstractFrom the middle of the eighteenth century until the late 1830s, the idea of enslaved people as “peasants” was a commonplace among both antislavery and proslavery writers and activists in Britain. Slaveholders, faced with antislavery attacks, argued that the people they claimed to own were not an exploited labor force but a contented peasantry. Abolitionists expressed the hope that after emancipation, freedpeople would become peasants. Yet the “peasants” invoked in these debates were not smallholders or tenant farmers but plantation laborers, either held in bondage or paid low wages. British abolitionists promoted institutions and ideas invented by slaveholders to defend the plantation system. The idea of a servile and grateful “peasant” plantation labor force became, for British abolitionists, a justification for the “civilization” and subordination of freedpeople.

Business Strategy Formulation to Increase Profit of Agung Artomoro Company

Agung Artomoro is a service company operating since February 2012. The company was established because of the high number of migrants in Indonesia associated with the high demand for labor in the plantation industry. The company focuses on offering full package service in providing labor for plantation, providing goods for plantation labor, and providing transportation service. Since it was founded, the company continues to get a positive earning year to year, but the increase in revenue followed by an increase in the cost, and it causes profit stagnation. This research investigates what causes of the stagnation in company profit. The research question design method was used in this paper, which involves using a qualitative research interview in collecting data from 11 respondents, including internal and external parties. The external analysis results show that the pulp and paper industry is still growing, which supported by government regulation. The internal analysis results show that the company has resources and capabilities that have not been fully maximized. The conclusion of the internal and external analysis resulted in details of SWOT analysis tools and formulated into the Fishbone analysis to discover the root cause of the company's problem. This research aims to create a new business model by proposing a few strategies to increase business performance evaluation for internal development. The researcher selected two strategies obtained from Porter’s Generic Strategy, which used a vertical integration strategy, both integrating backward and integrating forward. The results of the proposed strategies are mapped into Business Model Canvas and highlight how cost leadership strategy can maximize the use of resources and capabilities to make business performance more effective and efficient and create sustainability in competitive advantages.

Pengolahan Singkong Menjadi Brownies Untuk Meningkatkan Nilai Jual Singkong di Desa Tegalharjo Kecamatan Glenmore Kabupaten Banyuwangi

Tegalharjo village is a village in Glenmore sub-district, Banyuwangi district, which has a very large plantation area with a variety of plants. One of the plants that thrives on plantations and people's homes is the cassava tree. But the use of cassava as a village's potential to improve the economy of citizens is less than optimal. Cassava is generally left to rot in the trees, sometimes sold cheaply with a maximum price of Rp 3.000.00 a kilo gram and even ironically it is only used as animal feed. Meanwhile the majority of housewives only depend on the family economy for their husbands' work as farmers, farm laborers, very few who are self-employed and plantation labour majority. Seeing this, there needs to be innovations that can increase the economic value of cassava. One of them by processing cassava into brownies. After being processed into brownies, the selling value automatically increases from a kilo of Rp 3.000,00 to Rp 10,000.00 in a package. This innovation was carried out by the service team through mentoring activities and training in making Brownies of Cassava.

Subject to labor: Racial capitalism and ontology in the post-emancipation Caribbean

Racial capitalism is often understood as a process that acts upon subjects that are already racialized, facilitating their exploitative incorporation into capitalist processes. In this article, I push past that definition to argue that racial capitalism is a fundamentally ontologizing process by which subjectivity is produced. I advance this point through an analysis of the central role of labor in the foundation of post-emancipation Caribbean subject formation . I argue that in crossing the Atlantic in the service of colonial capital, enslaved Africans, and later indentured Indians, underwent a process that undid previous senses of identity, thus demanding new ontological moorings rooted in plantation labor. The practice and conditions of labor experienced by both groups after emancipation provided a common basis of ontological orientation. Thus, racial capitalism through the instrument of labor, has fundamentally structured the terms and definition of Caribbean identity.

Continuity of hegemonic power? The case of modern plantation labour in North Sumatra, Indonesia

Although it has been more than 150 years since the emergence of the plantation, labour in the democratic context of post-1998 Indonesia remains subject to similar forms of suppression. Following the distinct social and political trajectory of North Sumatra, this paper provides an explanatory analysis of the interrelation between historical hegemonic social relations and the mobility of labour in modern palm oil plantations. Following well-documented accounts of colonial plantation practices, this paper empirically examines whether it is plausible to argue that historical forms of subordination remain relevant to the political mobility of plantation labour. To guide the evaluation, I will look at the existence of historical practices of labour control on the one hand and conditions of democratic reform and structural change on the other. I argue that the modern plantation is constitutive of historically inscribed social relations that function to keep intact colonial and authoritarian structures.

A Home in Disorder is not a Home: Examining Race in Trinidad and Tobago

Among its neighbours, the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago stands out due to its ethnic makeup. The population of most Caribbean nations is mainly of African descent; similar to Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago is evenly divided between Afro-Trinidadians and Indo-Trinidadians. Unlike many of the other Caribbean colonies, Trinidad and Tobago were not extensive plantation economies until much later in the colonial period (Paton 291). This is one of the main reasons why the country presently hosts a proportionately lower Afro-Trinidadian population in comparison to other Caribbean countries. While other ethno-cultural groups reside in the country, the aforementioned groups have dominated the landscape in numbers since at least the early 20th century (United Nations Statistics Division). Afro-Trinidadians are generally descendants of enslaved Africans brought to the Caribbean to serve as plantation labourers; Indo-Trinidadians are generally the descendants of South Asian indentured labourers brought to Trinidad to fulfill the same role following the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. Trinidad and Tobago's long history of colonial subjugation has bred a modern social hierarchy highly tied to race. Racial categories centered around physical characteristics and created during the colonial period have been instrumental in the development of this social hierarchy. Its institutionalization within the country’s modern national political system has resulted in persisting legacies evident throughout modern Trinidadian society. I focus on the island of Trinidad (while still making occasional reference to Tobago) and argue that Trinidadian national unity has been hampered by the foundations laid by the plantation system and consolidated by the modern political system.

Transforming Foodways: Changes in Diet, Procurement, Consumption, and Access for Laborers on the Stono Plantation, James Island, South Carolina

ABSTRACT The Stono Plantation cultivated produce and cotton for the city of Charleston. The plantation’s labor force was originally comprised primarily of enslaved Africans working on a task system. After emancipation, the plantation continued its operations using a “free” primarily African American labor force based upon a sharecropping and/or tenant system. The foodways of plantation laborers changed little over time. Those shifts that did occur between enslavement and emancipation related to increased reliance upon mass-produced foodstuffs and mass-produced goods associated with cooking and eating. This transition involved increased access by laborers to formal and/or illicit markets and reflects the industrialization of the South Carolina Lowcountry during the late nineteenth century.

The poverty and survival strategy of sugar cane plantation laborers in Bondowoso

This study aims to describe the poverty and survival strategies of sugar cane plantation laborers in Bondowoso. Descriptive qualitative research methodwas used to describe the poverty conditions of sugar cane plantation laborers in Bondowoso and the survival strategies of the laborers. The method used to determine the subject was the snowball method. Data collection methods used were interviews. Qualitative data analysis was used a data analysis method. The results of this study indicate the poverty of sugar cane plantation communities in Bondowoso was related to the dependence of laborers on landowners. Sugar cane plantation laborers in Bondowoso were able to fulfill their daily needs with various survival strategies. The most dominant survival strategy was to do worked as a worker in the fields who requires of labor and become cattle breeders of others. Suggestions were given to the Bondowoso local government to pay more attention to the welfare of sugar cane plantation laborers, expand employment and increase economic potential in the area around sugar cane plantations by developing sugar-based commodity industries, so as to absorb labor from sugar cane plantation laborers and increase their income.

Imagining a Better Future: Anti-colonial Protest and Social Debates in Santo Antão, Cabo Verde, 1945–1975

AbstractHow did the populations of a remote Cape Verdean island—Santo Antão—construct and formulate their goals of emancipation and social reform in the late colonial period? This article revisits the experiences of anti-colonial mobilisation in the island in the late 1960s, bringing them together with other narratives of social needs formulated by Santo Antão's populations. Those include the fears of being recruited for plantation labour in São Tomé e Príncipe, the objective of obtaining the improvement of social infrastructure, and the local struggles for water that became again more acute between 1945 and independence. The article shows that local experiences of Cape Verdean populations, of both the islands’ elite and local peasants, sharecroppers and fishermen, were much more complex than a simple, straightforward narrative of nationalist sympathies and activity. The internal conflicts outlined here also point to the numerous struggles that would shake Santo Antão's society after independence.

"Once we owned slaves". Labour and coercion in 20th century American plantations

Drawing on three cases of rural labour in the US plantation economy between the 1930s and the 1960s, this article intervenes in the debate on free and unfree labour interrogating these categories in a twentieth century context. In the beginning of the century the legacy of slavery was evident in the “cotton belt” where Afro-Americans sharecroppers and common labourers continued working in coercive conditions and scarce mobility until the 1940s. With their Great Migration northward, the changes of the Second World War and the expansion of agro-business in the West and East coast, there was a demographic shift in the rural workforce which increasingly incorporated migrants from Central America and the Caribbean, often recruited as guestworkers or working without documents. Through various forms of pressure, fraud and exploitation, growers often constrained these migrants in unfree forms of labour that echoed those inflicted earlier on Afro-Americans. At the same time, their legal status, which excluded them from the privileges of citizenship, the opportunity to acquire it, together with state policies, employers’ new forms of exploitation and the tactics of migrants themselves, transformed the mechanics of coercion and eventually what “free” and “unfree” labour meant in the 20th century.

\u201cWho will stand up for us?\u201d the social determinants of health of women tea plantation workers in India

IntroductionThe tea estate sector of India is one of the oldest and largest formal private employers. Workers are dependent on plantation estates for a range of basic services under the 1951 Plantation Labour Act and have been subject to human rights violations. Ad hoc reports related to poor health outcomes exist, yet their determinants have not been systematically studied. This study in Assam, situated in Northeast India, sought to understand the Social Determinants of Health (SDH) of women plantation workers with an aim to offer directions for policy action.MethodsAs part of a larger qualitative study, 16 FGDs were carried out with women workers in three plantations of Jorhat district covering permanent and non-permanent workers. Informed consent procedures were carried out with all participants individually. Data were analyzed thematically using Ritchie and Spencer’s framework based on an adapted conceptual framework drawing from existing global conceptual models and frameworks related to the SDH.ResultsDeterminants at structural, intermediary and individual levels were associated with health. Poverty and poor labour conditions, compounded by the low social position of women in their communities, precluded their ability to improve their economic situation. The poor quality of housing and sanitation, inadequate food and rations, all hampered daily living. Health services were found wanting and social networks were strained even as women were a critical support to each other. These factors impinged on use of health services, diet and nutrition as well as psychosocial stress at the individual level.ConclusionYears of subjugation of workers have led to their deep distrust in the system of which they are part. Acting on SDH will take time, deeper understanding of their relative and/or synergistic contribution, and require the building of stakeholdership. Notwithstanding this, to have heard from women workers themselves has been an important step in visibilizing and building accountability for action on the health and SDH of women in plantation estates.

Upaya Meningkatkan Perekonomian Masyarakat Desa Tegalharjo Melalui Inovasi Pemanfaatan Pepaya Menjadi Abon

Tegalharjo village is a village in Glenmore sub-district, Banyuwangi district, which has a very large plantation area with a variety of plants. One of the plants that thrives on plantations and people's homes is the papaya tree. But the use of papaya as a village's potential to improve the economy of citizens is less than optimal. Papaya is generally left to rot in the trees, sometimes sold cheaply with a maximum price of Rp1,500.00 a kilo gram and even ironically it is only used as animal feed. Meanwhile the majority of housewives only depend on the family economy for their husbands' work as farmers, farm laborers, very few who are self-employed and plantation labour majority. Seeing this, there needs to be innovations that can increase the economic value of papaya fruit. One of them by processing papaya fruit into shredded. After being processed into shredded, the selling value automatically increases from a kilo of Rp 1,500.00 to Rp 5,000.00 in 150 grams. This innovation was carried out by the service team through mentoring activities and training in making shredded papaya fruit.

Agrarian Marxism and the proletariat: a palm oil manifesto

ABSTRACT This article attempts to re-integrate a Marxist perspective of the collective agency of the proletariat into the analysis of the corporate food regime. The article first summarises Marx’s key ideas on the proletariat and then discusses their relevance for capitalist agriculture today, arguing that labour makes up an important part of the contested social relations of production in contemporary agrarian capitalism. Drawing on ongoing empirical research with plantation workers and labour activists in Indonesia and Malaysia, it then appraises the current state of class struggle in the palm oil sector, arguing that it is characterised by everyday class struggles and an emerging trade union movement. The article concludes – and this is the ‘manifesto’ element – by suggesting that a reorientation towards labour in the ‘agrarian question’ could overcome some of the limitations of the food sovereignty movement and open up new perspectives for the social-ecological transformation of capitalist agriculture.

Accounting Discoveries from Archival Research: The Mobile and Ohio, an Antebellum Southern Railroad

This paper details discoveries relating to the accounting transactions that chronicle the circumstances of the Mobile and Ohio (M&O) Railroad's 1850s and 1860s asset ledgers. There were accounting differences between railroads overall because the northern lines used foreign construction workers, while the southern lines used slaves. ‘Personal Property’ was the title given to the account used by the M&O to record the acquisition of slaves—with the accountant using the term ‘slaves’ in a journal entry description. Moreover, this research provides information regarding the construction labour for the M&O that was supplied by planters from plantation labour pools composed of the slave population. Because of the availability of this plantation labour pool, the M&O did not have to rely on immigrant labour and accept the risk of controlling their behaviour. The coming of the American Civil War changed labour market conditions, and the M&O became a slave‐holding organization to maintain itself during the War. At the War's end the accounting records detail the M&O's disposition of the wartime slave acquisitions with the comment ‘… emancipated by force of circumstances’. This paper contributes to the literature by providing discoveries from original archival records documenting how a large major American corporation accounted for labour costs, initial construction, and beginning operations.

Freedom-Seeking Slaves in England and Scotland, 1700–1780

Abstract This will appear online only.This essay explores the experiences of enslaved people who sought to escape their bondage in England and Scotland during the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century. It argues that, while the conditions of their servitude in Britain may appear closer to those of white British servants than those of enslaved plantation labourers in the colonies, the experiences of these people were conditioned by the experiences of and the threat of return to colonial enslavement. For some successful Britons an enslaved serving boy was a visible symbol of success, and a great many enslaved men, women, youths and children were brought to Great Britain during the eighteenth century. Some accompanied visiting colonists and ships’ officers, while others came to Britain with merchants, planters, clergymen and physicians who were returning home. Some of the enslaved sought to seize freedom by escaping. Utilising newspaper advertisements placed by owners seeking the capture and return of these runaways (as well as advertisements offering enslaved people for sale), the essay demonstrates that many such people were regarded by their masters and mistresses as enslaved chattel property. Runaways were often traumatised by New World enslavement, and all too aware that they might easily be sold or returned to the horrors of Caribbean and American slavery: improved work conditions in Britain did not lessen the psychological and physical effects of enslavement from which they sought to escape.

A Corporate Plantation Reading Public: Labor, Literacy, and Diaspora in the Global Black South

Abstract This essay reconstructs the history of the Cotton Farmer, a rare African American newspaper edited and published by black tenant farmers employed by the Delta and Pine Land Company, once the world’s largest corporate cotton plantation located in the Mississippi delta. The Cotton Farmer ran from 1919 to circa 1927 and was mainly confined to the company’s properties. However, in 1926, three copies of the paper circulated to Bocas del Toro, Panama, to a Garveyite and West Indian migrant laborer employed on the infamous United Fruit Company’s vast banana and fruit plantations. Tracing the Cotton Farmer’s hemispheric circulation from the Mississippi delta to Panama, this essay explores the intersections of labor, literacy, and diaspora in the global black south. What do we make of a reading public among black tenant farmers on a corporate cotton plantation in the Mississippi delta at the height of Jim Crow? How did the entanglements of labor and literacy at once challenge and correspond with conventional accounts of sharecropping in the Jim Crow South? Further, in light of the Cotton Farmer’s circulation from Mississippi’s cotton fields to Panama’s banana fields, this essay establishes the corporate plantation as a heuristic for exploring the imperial logics and practices tying the US South to the larger project of colonial domination in the Caribbean and Latin America, and ultimately reexamines black transnationalism and diaspora from the position of corporate plantation laborers as they negotiated ever-evolving modes of domination and social control on corporate plantations in the global black south. In so doing, it establishes black agricultural and corporate plantation laborers as architects of black geographic thought and diasporic practice alongside their urban, cosmopolitan contemporaries.

Labour Migration in the Tea Plantations: Colonial and Neo-Liberal Trajectories of Plantation Labour in the Dooars Tea Belt of West Bengal

Labour Migration in the Tea Plantations: Colonial and Neo-Liberal Trajectories of Plantation Labour in the Dooars Tea Belt of West Bengal

Slave Trade Syndicates: Contestation of Slavery in Timor between Local Rulers, Europeans, and Pirates in the 19th century

This article analyses the contestation of slavery activities in Timor during 19th century. The slave trade cannot be separated from contestation between three forces, namely the local authority (rajah), colonial entities residing in Timor, and pirates from Bugis, Ende, and Sulu. The rajah fought each other on the battlefield to decide which of them worthy of a “gift” of the war, which were women and children as merchandise for sale. Meanwhile, colonial complaints about the limited human labor to be employed in various types of work not only encouraged increased slave raiding and the purchase of slaves in distant places, but at the same time fostered slave trading activities, both were sponsored by the Dutch and Portuguese. One of the main causes of the ongoing slave trade was piracy at sea, three actors were pioneering slave raiding, namely Balanini/Ilanun, Bugis and Makassar pirate, and Ende pirate. By applying historical method, this research questioned why locals, Europeans, and pirate rulers contested to obtain slaves in Timor? The rise of capitalism was marked by the demand for cheap labor in 19th century. Therefore, slave commodities were mobilized to meet the need for labour in plantations or companies owned by the colonial government.

The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition by Katherine Paugh

Reviewed by: The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition by Katherine Paugh Brooke N. Newman (bio) The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition. By Katherine Paugh. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 304. $99.00 cloth; $57.77 ebook) In the final decades of the eighteenth century, as abolitionists in Britain campaigned for an end to the Atlantic slave trade, the ability of the slave population in the Caribbean colonies to reproduce itself through natural increase assumed crucial significance. Although the development of a plantation labor force capable of sustaining the British imperial economy hinged on enslaved women's reproductive capacity, the political and economic importance of Afro-Caribbean women's fertility during the abolition era has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. Katherine Paugh's new book, The Politics of Reproduction, attempts to rectify this oversight by placing reproductive policy squarely at the center of political abolitionism. Paugh contends that abolishing the Atlantic slave trade was not designed to disrupt the Atlantic plantation system but rather to ensure the reliable, economical reproduction of a homegrown Afro-Caribbean labor force. In doing so, she offers a fresh perspective on the economic motivations for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, challenging arguments put forward by proponents of the "Williams thesis," particularly Seymour Drescher, that abolitionism was driven by humanitarian ideology and economically irrational. Instead, Paugh shows how abolitionists' promotion of slave breeding and monogamous Christian marriage was bound up with the development of global capitalism. Focusing on the overlap between abolitionists' evangelical worldview and pronatal plantation management policies designed to encourage slave increase, Paugh demonstrates how Afro-Caribbean women's reproductive potential underpinned the economic aspirations of British abolitionists, politicians, planters, and doctors. Chapter one provides a comparative analysis of concerns about slave demography in the West Indies and the American South in the decades prior to and immediately after the American Revolution. In contrast to fears of slave hyperfertility and overpopulation in North [End Page 104] America, which prompted calls to suppress the Atlantic slave trade, Paugh shows how in the Caribbean colonies the supply disruptions wrought by the American Revolution led to a new emphasis on Afro-Caribbean women's fertility as a means of easing planters' reliance on the slave trade. In chapter two, Paugh analyzes the little-known case of Mary Hylas, whose uncertain legal status as a married slave revealed the conflict between the law of slavery and the law of marriage. Shedding new light on the infamous Somerset trial of 1772, Paugh argues that the contractual nature of marriage posed problems for abolitionists seeking to at once promote marriage and condemn slavery. Chapter three focuses on attempts by abolitionists and British doctors to deploy Afro-Caribbean women's bodies as tools to reproduce the West Indian slave population. Micro-level power struggles between mixed-race women and white male plantation staff are the subject of chapter four. As Paugh reveals, both groups vied for control at the local level in response to broader political developments and geopolitical ruptures in the Atlantic world. Chapter five is concerned with plans to govern and reform Afro-Caribbean women's sexuality and reproductive practices to the benefit of the plantation economy during the age of abolition. The final chapter explores the role of missionaries on the ground in promoting Christian marriage as an alternative to concubinage that would maximize the Afro-Caribbean labor force at the expense of white men's sexual prerogatives and enslaved women's customary paths to material security. Paugh's attention to the medicalized bodies, lived experiences, and reproductive practices of enslaved women at the heart of the debate over the Atlantic slave trade brings Afro-Caribbean women and the politics of reproduction to the forefront of political abolitionism. Through analysis of a wide range of sources—plantation records, abolitionist texts and correspondence, legal cases, and medical tracts—Paugh connects local Caribbean case studies to broader political and economic developments in Britain and the Atlantic world. In sum, Paugh's book is well written, deeply researched, and compelling. [End Page 105] It makes an original contribution to the...

Maximizing Crude Palm Oil Production in Malaysia: A Search for an Optimal Policy Using System Dynamics and Genetic Algorithm Approach

Palm oil industry in Malaysia is experiencing a stagnant crude palm oil (CPO) production and has been lagging as compared to Indonesia. This situation can jeopardize Malaysia’s position in world palm oil marker since Malaysia needed to secure its export revenue and fulfilling increasing demand of palm oil both locally and globally in the future. The factors that influence the CPO production are many. Among others are the scarcity of plantation area, labour shortage, and demand from palm-based biodiesel industry. This study presents an integrated of system dynamics (SD) and genetic algorithm (GA) (SD-GA) model to find the optimal policy to improve CPO production in Malaysian palm oil industry. SD offers the platform to evaluate and to test policy while GA facilitate the process of searching the best solutions to achieve the maximum CPO production in 2050. The proposed model has produced five optimal values for five policy variables namely average replanting rate, mechanization adoption rate, and biodiesel mandate in transportation, industrial and other sectors respectively. The best solution suggested that CPO replanting rate need to be increased to 251743.5 hectares per year to decrease the accumulation of ageing area by optimizing all these policy variables. This study is expected to help policy makers in designing related policies and drawing the road map towards improving CPO production in Malaysian palm oil industry.