The World Wide Web of Work

Front matter

Work Around the World { } ee EE Studies in Global Labour History of social history ee Sh z, Ti wo $

4 ra

7 7 E d

Part IV: Conflicts

14. Walking fish: how conservative behaviour generates and processes radical change

15. Mass exits: who, why, how? 16. Workers and revolutions: a historical paradox

Epilogue: global labour history and the crisis of workers’ movements

References Index

283 306

328 380

List of figures

1.1 The gathering and drying of Cinchona bark in a Peruvian forest. Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/werf33s3. 22 1.2 Gathering Cinchona bark. Date unknown.

Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/ works/m6bwbxes. 27 2.1 An image of San Precario carried at a demonstration in Milan on Mayday, 2011. © Samuele Ghilardi. 32

5.1 ‘The Destruction of Roehampton Estate in the Parish of St. James’s in January 1832’. Wikimedia Commons.

https://bit.ly/3ymJstb. 81 6.1 Forms of entry into a coerced labour relationship. Source: Author. 89

6.2 ‘Gang of captives met at Mbame’s on their way to Tette’. Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/ works/u3whmggk/items. 91 6.3 Koreans forced to labour at a mine in Hokkaido, Japan, during World War II. Published courtesy of the National Memorial Museum of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Occupation, under the Korea Open Government

License Type 4 (equivalent to CC BY-NC-ND). 93 6.4 Forms of labour extraction. Source: Author. 97 6.5 Forms of labour relationship termination (exit).

8.1 Italian immigrants posing in the central courtyard of

the Hospedaria dos Immigrantes, Sao Paolo,

c. 1890. Photographer: Guilherme Gaensly (1843-1928).

https://bit.ly/3yn4qrE. 131 8.2 Estimated number of enslaved people who made the

Atlantic crossing between 1501 and 1875.

Source: http://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates. 137 8.3 Haddington Hiring Fair, early-1900s. Published courtesy

of the John Gray Centre Library, Museum & Archive. 140

LIST OF FIGURES

9.1

9.2 9.3

9.4

10.1

10.2

12.1

14.1

14.2

15.1

Pepper harvest in Coilum, Southern India.

© Archives Charmet / Bridgeman Images.

‘Triangulation’ of agrarian production. Source: Author. Workers in front of a greenhouse at the Botanical Garden in Bogor (Buitenzorg). https://bit.ly/3CDLEPo.

‘Planting the sugar-cane’, a depiction of a large-scale sugarcane plantation in Haiti, c. 1820. British Library, public domain, https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/ cutting-the-sugar-cane-antigua.

‘Prospect of the European Factorys, at Xavier or Sabee’. Engraving by Nathaniel Parr in A New and General Collection of Voyages by Thomas Astley.

‘Négres au Travail’. Men and women in a field gang

at work, guarded by overseers. Source: Alcide Dessalines d’Orbigny, Voyage pittoresque dans les deux Amériques (Paris, 1836), facing p. 22, fig. 4. http://www. slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/1148.

Sailor removing the manacle from a newly freed slave. Published courtesy of the National Museum of the Royal Navy, Portsmouth, UK.

‘Importing Chinese labourers to work in the gold mines of South Africa in 1904’. © Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images.

‘The chain gang, Thomasville, Georgia’. Black convicts forced to work, c. 1884-91. Photograph by Joseph John Kirkbride. Library of Congress, LC-USZ6-1848. https://www.loc.gov/item/00652806/.

French socialist reformer Albert Thomas (1878-1932), 1910. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Albert_Thomas_LCCN2014700210.tif.

Postcard commemorating the discovery of the coelacanth by Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer in December 1938. South African Institute for Aquatic Biology, public domain, https://bit.ly/3ryaQR9.

‘Duck-billed platypus’, engraving, 1809. George Shaw (1751-1813). New York Public Library, public domain, https://on.nypl.org/3EkUrdlI.

Brass and steel instrument used for tattooing the initial ‘D’ for ‘deserter’ on the face or armpit, c. 1850.

© National Army Museum/Bridgeman Images.

153 156

15.2

16.1

16.2

Maroon village by the Cottica river near Moengo, Suriname. Photograph: C. R. Singh. Courtesy of Allard Pierson, Universiteit van Amsterdam (ref. VARO266).

Late handcrafted Jingdezhen porcelain production.

Photographer: Thomas M. Mueller © Shirley Maloney Mueller/Thomas M. Mueller, with permission.

The ‘transition dip’. Source: Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy, p. 177.

M8 Greyhounds (armoured vehicles) at the Zócalo (main square) of Mexico City, 28 August 1968.

Photographer: Cel-li. Public domain, https://bit.ly/3rDT8vz.

LIST OF FIGURES xii

List of tables

8.1

9.1

9.2 9.3

9.4

11.1

11.2

12.1

17.1

17.2

Four types of labour-power exchange (examples).

Source: Author.

The Columbian and Magellan exchanges of crop species. Sources: Wouter van der Weijden, Rob Leewis and Pieter Bol, Biological Globalisation: Bio-Invasions and

Their Impacts on Nature, the Economy and Public Health

(Utrecht: KNNV Publishing, 2007), p. 26; Stanley B. Alpern,

‘The European Introduction of Crops into West Africa in Precolonial Times’, History in Africa, 19 (1992), pp. 13-43, at 24-31.

Types of (sub)tropical cash crops. Source: Author.

Some botanical gardens that played a role in long-distance plant transfer, sixteenth—nineteenth centuries. Source: Author.

Development of agricultural productivity on a

world scale. Source: www.fao.org/faostat/.

Slave exports from Africa, 1400-1900. Sources: for 1400-1900: Nunn, ‘Long-term effects’, Table II; for 1800-1900: Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, Table 7.1.

Major colonies importing Indian indentured labour, 1834-1921. Source: Lal, Girmitiyas.

Adoption of ILO Conventions by decade, 1919-2019.

Source: ILO normlex.

Average per capita gross national product in different world regions (in international dollars, 1990) fora total of 56 countries, 1950-73. Source: Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy, pp. 23-4.

Average participation of relevant age groups in primary, secondary, and tertiary education, 1950-70.

Source: Meyer et al., ‘World Educational Revolution’, p. 244.

154 157

17.3 Formal independence of colonies, 1946-70.

Source: Abernethy, Dynamics of Global Dominance,

pp. 140-1. 310 18.1 Average parliamentary electoral results of Social

Democratic and Labour Parties, 1920-2019.

LIST OF TABLES xiii xiv

Provenance of the texts

Chapter 1 was originally published as ‘Geheimgeschichten der Baumrinde: Ein Plädoyer gegen die Verdrängung von Arbeitsprozessen aus der Geschichte’. In Solidargemeinschaft und Erinnerungskultur im 20. Jahrhundert. Beiträge zu Gewerkschaften, Nationalsozialismus und Geschichtspolitik, edited by Ursula Bitzegeio, Anja Kruke, and Meik Woyke, 119-26. Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 2009.

Chapter 2 was originally published in NLI Research Study 125/2017, V. V. Giri National Labour Institute, Noida, India.

Chapter 3 is an adaptation of ‘Refuting labour history’s occidentalism’. In Work and Social Change in Asia: Essays in honour of Jan Breman, edited by Arvind N. Das and Marcel van der Linden, 249-61. New Delhi: Manohar, 2002.

Chapter 4: an earlier version was originally published as ‘Final thoughts’. In Capitalism: The reemergence of a historical concept, edited by Jiirgen Kocka and Marcel van der Linden, 251-66. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Reproduced by courtesy of Bloomsbury Academic.

Chapter 5 was originally published as ‘Who is the working class? Wage earners and other labourers’. In Workers and Labour in a Globalised Capitalism: Contemporary themes and theoretical issues, edited by Maurizio Atzeni, 70-84. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Reproduced by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 6 is a part of ‘Dissecting coerced labor’, originally published in On Coerced Labor: Work and compulsion after chattel slavery, edited by Marcel van der Linden and Magaly Rodriguez Garcia, 293-322. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016. Reproduced by permission of Koninklijke Brill N. V.

Chapter 7 is a revised combination of ‘Introduction’ and ‘Conclusion’. In Rebellious Families: Household strategies and collective action in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, edited by Jan Kok, 1-23 and 230-42.

Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2002. Reproduced by permission of Berghahn Books.

Chapter 8 was originally published in In Search of the Global Labour Market, edited by Ursula Mense-Petermann, Thomas Welskopp and Anna Zarieva, 18-49. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022. Reproduced by permission of Koninklijke Brill N. V.

Chapter 9 is a much-abbreviated version of ‘Globalization’s agricultural roots: Some final considerations’. In Embedding Agricultural Commodities: Using historical evidence, 1840s—1940s, edited by Willem van Schendel, 146-89. London: Routledge, 2016. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group.

Chapter 10: an earlier version appeared as ‘Unfree labour: A training ground for modern labour management’. In NLI Research Study 125/2017, V. V. Giri National Labour Institute, Noida, India. An even earlier version was published in Labor History 51 (2010): 509-22.

Chapter 11 is a heavily abbreviated version of ‘Introduction’. In Humanitarian Intervention and Changing Labor Relations: The long-term consequences of the abolition of the slave trade, edited by Marcel van der Linden, 1-54. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011. Reproduced by permission of Koninklijke Brill N. V.

Chapter 12 was originally published in Labor: Studies in working-class history 16 (2019): 11-41. Copyright 2019, Labor and Working-Class History Association. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Duke University Press.

Chapter 13 appeared originally in REVLATT: Revista Latinoamericana de Trabajo y Trabajadores 1 (November 2020-April 2021): 223-39.

Chapter 14 is an adaptation of my valedictory lecture, given at the University of Amsterdam, 27 October 2017. An earlier version was published in the International Social History Association’s Newsletter, December 2017, 9-14.

Chapter 15 was originally published in Desertion in the Early Modern World: A comparative history, edited by Jeannette Kamp and Matthias van Rossum, 31-45. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Reproduced by permission of Bloomsbury Academic.

Chapter 16 was originally published in Worlds of Labour Turned Upside Down: Revolutions and labour relations in global historical perspective,

PROVENANCE OF THE TEXTS

XV xvi edited by Pepijn Brandon, Peyman Jafari and Stefan Müller, 19-49. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020. Reproduced by permission of Koninklijke Brill N. V.

Chapter 17 was originally published as ‘1968: Das Rätsel der Gleichzeitigkeit’. In Weltwende 1968? Ein Jahr aus globalgeschichtlicher Perspektive, edited by David Mayer and Jens Kastner, 23-34. Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2008.

The Epilogue integrates parts of ‘Why the global labor movement is in crisis’, Journal of Labor and Society 24 (2021): 375-400. Reproduced by permission of Koninklijke Brill N. V., Leiden.