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Volume 3, Number 1, 1997
Paul E. Lovejoy and Nicholas Rogers, eds. Reviewed by William Canak Unfree Labour in the Development of the Atlantic World(ULITDOTAW) deserves an acronym twice over. First, it was birthed by a conference held at York University in April 1993. Second, as the awkward and vague title suggests the wit and wisdom of committee work, it merits a bureaucratic moniker. And as with many committee products, this one patches together the good, the bad, and the ugly. Lack of coherent focus is seldom a virtue. Many of the chapters, however, are examples of good writing and sound scholarship. These save the day. ULITDOTAW draws us to consider the ways in which capitalism is marked by patterned legal and cultural definitions that shape labor contracts, define social groups available for exploitation, and chart the possibilities for social mobilization and resistance. As I read the chapters I recognized the American South, Finnish miners in the Northern Range, and a myriad of other labor systems and forms of organized social resistance common to capitalist relations based on extensive manual labor and a shortage of capital. Only now, these familiar faces were transformed into Amerindians, Africans, Brazilian slaves, and British workers. [Page 220] The editors propose central themes found in Philip D. Curtin's comparative historical approach to European expansion, destruction of Amerindian societies, and creation of an Atlantic economy based on unfree labor of various types. Further, they propose a theoretical perspective that addresses the possible co-existence of different modes of production and labor relations within different social formations. None of this seems to matter much when one reads the chapters. What actually draws the authors together is a concern with labor relations in the age of European colonial expansion. It's a loose theme and produced a set of papers that range widely across Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. There is little comparative method here, but the informed reader will find wonderful material for understanding the common patterns of domination and subordination, repression and resistance that characterize colonial capitalism. There is some revisionist history here, particularly with regard to the devastating population declines of Central America (Bolland) and the response of Amerindians to market relations (Melville and Radding). Michael Taussig's The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in Latin America will need a thorough rereading after one finishes ULITDOTAW. As is common among our historian colleagues, Wallerstein and dependency research are slammed by the editors for "over-simplifying." But there is no slam dunk. The chapter authors generally ignore Wallerstein's work and dependency theories. The editors' call for an integration of Annalist and world-systems perspectives may strike some readers as naive and others as bold. However, this call seems to have been made after the conference; none of the chapter authors address the issue. Rather, they do solid narrative history focusing on a host of varied topics linked to systems of labor control. Out of these narratives I gained new understanding of how law and regulatory structures have defined the structure and practice of coercion in capitalist labor relations. In addition, these histories compel one to consider the similarities of slaves, indentured servants, and bondsmen. These groups' identity is defined in relation to property-owners and legal structures, not derived from innate constituent characteristics. This common relational identity creates a socio-legal basis for alliances between Irish, African, and Indian laborers in specific contexts. Finally, these chapters richly describe the resources and identity brought to the "unfree labor" relationship by peoples who were once free and know the difference through their memories, social institutions, and habits of the heart, as Robert Bellah and his associates would describe them. [Page 221] ULITDOTAW is organized into three parts that express the editors' efforts to cobble a logic uniting these papers. Part I, "Frontiers," consists of four chapters which analyze labor, property and market relations in colonial Mesoamerica and the Caribbean. Part II, "Old Worlds, New Worlds," contains four chapters, three of which are linked by a common concern with legislation and criminal codes. Part III, "Aftermath of Abolition," has four chapters which consider post-slavery labor relations in Brazil, in African Yoruba society, in Victorian Britain, and in a broad international comparison. The best chapters are rich with narrative detail identifying the objective social relations, legal institutions, and social policies within which slavery and other labor control systems were meaningful. The worst chapters vaguely sketch the behaviors of capitalists, conquerors, British, Spanish, landowners, slaveholders, and slaves devoid of context, substance, and meaning. These latter chapters assert a mechanistic logic of the sort usually found in bad modernization, dependency, and world-systems theory. In contrast to the old adage about good families being the same while miserable ones are unhappy in their own distinct ways, here we find that good comparative historical research always strikes one as fresh. Slapdash broadsides, whatever their intellectual home, seem to be cut from the same cloth. Once history is devoid of real historical actors, all things may be asserted. One wishes the editors had felt themselves licensed to exercise the scalpel a bit more liberally. Bolland ("Colonization and Slavery in Central America") precisely documents aspects of the American holocaust's impact on slave exports from Central America to Peru, the Caribbean, and Panama and subsequent demand for African slaves. Bolland follows the alternate paths of Spanish and British Central American colonial economies. Slaveholding and resistance patterns were linked to particular extractive enterprises on one hand, and opportunities afforded by work relations and the possibilities for escape on the other. Bolland demonstrates that David E. Stannard's American Holocaust (1992) has far from exhausted this rich vein of revisionist history. [Page 222] Elinor G.K. Melville presents a very brief but tightly argued revisionist history of sixteenth century labor relations. She revises our understanding of the hacienda-wage labor system by demonstrating that wage labor appeared in the pre-hacienda era on other agricultural units. She argues that demographic decline and range deterioration in the late sixteenth century undermined small holdings and common range grazing systems. Drawing on the work of Gibson, Taylor, Zeitlin, Riley, and others, she asserts that "...Indians were actively engaged in the formation of land-labour relations in rural areas, rather than simply responding to Spanish initiatives" (p. 32). We are left with a new view of Indians' active manipulation of the evolving colonial political economy, their capacity in many circumstances to hold on to their land and dominate regional production at the expense of Spanish landowners. Hilary McD. Beckles' "The Colours of Property: Brown, White and Black Chattels and their Responses on the Caribbean Frontier" is, as the title suggests, a horse of a different color. This is the epitome of the Aristotelian project, "We know it if we can define it." Beckles' aim is to evaluate the pattern of slave revolts by responding to Orlando Patterson's direction that we study the everyday lives of bonded labor to learn what they thought of their reality. Here English and French, labor market forces, cultural and ideological factors, and masters and servants are juggled in a whirlwind of supposedly comparative profiles. The result is a set of stages and types, the stages chart the development of plantation agriculture (construction, mature functioning, crisis) and the types describe slave resistance struggles (day to day, unsuccessful plots, and successful rebellions). This exercise leads us to the vague and useless conclusions common to such enterprises, "They rebelled when they could, and in ways peculiar to their specific social consciousness and circumstances" (p. 49). [Page 223] A very different analysis explaining resistance patterns in northwest Mexico, one rooted in a close analysis of the peasant attitudes toward work and market exchange, marketing systems developing in the Sonoran area, and native peasants' rationality as a defense of subsistence. Here we find the social ecology of resistance inextricably linked in the subsistence patterns characterizing Amerindian communities in a historically specific time and place. Again we find revealed the ambiguity of control, submission, and freedom within colonial society. We find concrete evidence that as community traditions kept Amerindians close to the land, shifts from communal values to commodity relations defined a major transformation over a long period of colonial rule. In Part II, "Old Worlds, New Worlds," Lovejoy and Rogers group three chapters on laws and regulations governing labor relations with a fourth, "Background to Rebellion: The Origins of Muslim Slaves in Bahia," where Lovejoy himself argues there are strong parallels between slave revolts in Bahia and the jihad (religious war) occurring in Sudan during these same years, linked by the fact that many prisoners of war were sold into slavery. The first of the three chapters on legal studies summarizes a larger project constructing a quantitative analysis of laws governing employment relations in "common law" contexts, meaning the British empire. Craven and Hay conclude that master/servant laws were not rooted in English common law, but developed penalties and restrictions in similar colonial contexts through various diffusion professes. Roger's chapter reviews vagrancy legislation in England and the practice of impressment. He explores the complex linkages of government manpower needs and employers' concerns with sustaining a moral order legitimating traditional master/employee relations. Elbourne's chapter reviews the changing legal status of free "Hottentot" labor during colonization and the subsequent debate in Britain and the Cape Colony over the legal obligations of Khoi labor. [Page 224] Part III, "Aftermath of Abolition," contains four chapters. The first, by Nancy Pricilla Naro, examines nineteenth century Brazilian slavery after the 1850s decline of Atlantic slave trading. Domestic slave markets developed in response to the growing coffee economy, but faced the problem of a declining slave population and a growth of multigenerational slave family units. Naro charts the complex interactions of traditional social relations, the evolving and highly unstable plantation system, and, finally, the response of slave owners, slaves, and free laborers to the historical contingencies of Brazil's social hierarchy as slavery was abolished. Martin Klein presents comparative data to support the claim that abolition movements developed while slavery was still profitable and thus capitalists elaborated various alternatives to recruit and control unskilled labor that was needed for plantation systems. Slave owners never voluntarily rejected the system and abolition was usually forced on colonial societies by "center" interest groups, but usually against the resistance of colonial administrators. Tonyin Falola analyzes the role of slaves and "pawns" in nineteenth century Yoruba estates. Most slaves derived from warfare, raids, kidnapping, or other types of violence. Pawns were free-born individuals whose contracts were linked to loans and who were required to provide labor themselves (or that of a child) in lieu of interest. Child-pawns were usually girls and creditors had rights to their entire labor. Powerful households commanded large numbers of slaves and pawns, thus demonstrating that servile institutions were well developed in the African domestic economy. Finally, James Walvin offers a very brief essay suggesting that within Victorian Britain there developed a popular self-image that the British were a freedom-loving people with an obligation to export their freedoms much as they had exported Chistianity along with their colonial conquests. [Page 225] |
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