Coercion and Wage Labour

Front matter

Work Around the World International Institute { } of social history

Studies in Global Labour History

COERCION AND

Contents

List offigures xi List ofdiagrams xiii List ofcontributors Xv Acknowledgements xxi Introduction 1 Coercion and wage labour in history and art 1 Anamarija Batista, Viola Franziska Miiller and Corinna Peres

Part I: Binding the workforce Chapter frontispieces - collages © Tim Robinson, 2021

2 In the name of order: (im)mobilising wage labour for the Ottoman naval industry in the nineteenth century 22 Akın Sefer

3 Contracts under duress: work documents as a matter and means of conflict in the Habsburg Monarchy/Austria in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries 47 Sigrid Wadauer

4 Working for the enemy: civil servants in occupied Serbia, 1941-1944 79 Natasa Milicevié and Ljubinka Skodrié

5 Exploitation and care: public health aspirations and the construction of the working-class body in the Budapest Museum of Social Health, 1901-1945 107 Eszter Öze

Part II: Confronting coercion

Chapter frontispieces - digital drawings with watercolours © Dariia Kuzmych, 2021

CONTENTS vii

Subdued wage workers: textile production in Western and Islamic sources (ninth to twelfth centuries) Colin Arnaud

‘One gets rich, one hundred more work for nothing’: German miners in Medici Tuscany Gabriele Marcon

Entangled dependencies: the case of the runaway domestic worker Emine in late Ottoman Istanbul, 1910 Miige Özbek

The dilemma of being a ‘good worker’: cultural discourse, coercion and resistance in Bangladesh's garment factories

Mohammad Tareq Hasan

Border plants: globalisation as shown to us by the women living at its leading edge Eva Kuhn

Part III: Manipulating labour relations Chapter frontispieces — graphic novel © Monika Lang, 2021-2022

Negotiating the terms of wage(less) labour: free and freed workers as contractual parties in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro

Marjorie Carvalho de Souza

Constructing debt: discursive and material strategies of labour coercion in the US South, 1903-1964 Nico Pizzolato

Obligatory contributions to society: student foreign-language guides as seasonal wage workers in socialist Bulgaria, 1970s-1980s

Ivanka Petrova

To put a human face on the question of labour: photographic portraiture and the Australian-Pacific indentured labour trade

Paolo Magagnoli viii COERCION AND WAGE LABOUR

Afterword

15 Word and image in communication: ‘translation loop’ as a means of historiographical research 397 Anamarija Batista

Chapter endpieces — graphic novel O Monika Lang, 2021

Index 377

CONTENTS

List of figures

5.1

5.2

5.3

10.1

10.2

10.3

10.4

10.5

11.1

14.1

Poster of the First International Exhibition of

Occupational Safety and Labour Welfare of 1907.

Leaflet of the Museum of Social Health used in propaganda against emigration from the villages after

1928: 'Don't emigrate to the cities, don't leave your home.” Exhibition poster on the topic of social health protection of the year 1932.

Factory worker Carmen Durán in the film Maquilápolis: City of Factories, directed by Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre, 2006.

Factory workers in the film Maquilápolis: City of Factories, directed by Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre, 2006. Teresa Loyola and other factory workers display the components they assemble, in Maquilápolis: City of Factories, directed by Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre, 2006.

Lupita Castafieda films a video diary as part of the film Maquilápolis: City of Factories, directed by Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre, 2006.

The toxic waste site left behind by Metales y Derivados, a battery recycling factory; from the film Maquilapolis: City of Factories, directed by Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre, 2006.

Philippe Benoist and Jean-Victor Frond, Encaissage et pesage du sucre, 1861. Lithograph on paper,

63.5 x 47.9 cm. Frond's photograph engraved by Benoist portrays slave and freed workers weighing and boxing sugar in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, distinguished by the use or lack of shoes, an iconographic sign of social distinction. Public domain, reproduced courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional Digital of Brazil.

Dylan Mooney, Stop and Stare, 2018 (showing one of the two images forming the artwork). Pencil and charcoal on paper.

LIST OF FIGURES xi xii

14.2

14.3

14.4

14.5

14.6

14.7

14.8

Jasmine Togo-Brisby, South Sea Islanders with sugar plantation owner, from the series The Past is Ahead, Don't Look Back, 2019. Collodion on glass. This work was one of three photographs by the artist displayed in the exhibition Plantation Voices at the State Library of Queensland,

16 February-8 September 2019.

Harriett Pettifore Brims (1864-1939), untitled,

late 1890s, negative glass. Taken in Ingham, north Queensland, this portrait shows an anonymous South Sea Islander wearing a pearl necklace, feathers and other traditional ornaments.

F. C. Wills, ‘Kanakas Planting Cane (Bingera)’, Queensland Agricultural Journal, 1 September 1897, 248. The photograph depicts a gang of Melanesian workers

in a sugar cane field. While those in the background

are inactive, those in the foreground seem to have been instructed by the operator to ignore the cameraman.

D. McFarlane, ‘South Sea Islanders’, North Queensland Register, 21 December 1892, 41. This double portrait depicts a South Sea Islander man and woman wearing Western clothing and posing for the camera.

D. McFarlane, ‘South Sea Islanders', North Queensland Register, 21 December 1892, 44. These portraits show the same Melanesian couple as in Figure 14.5, this time dressed in their ‘authentic’ traditional costumes.

“Before the Exodus: A Kanaka Wedding”, The Sydney Mail, 31 October 1906, 563. Part of a feature narrating the experience of a Christian wedding among South

Sea Islanders, the article includes various portraits of assimilated Melanesians accompanied by sneering captions.

“The Evolution of the Plantation Kanaka’, The Queenslander, 23 March 1901, 563. Drawing on the photographs published by the North Queensland Register a decade earlier, the article arranges collective and individual portraits of Melanesians in a sequential manner to suggest the benign effects of coerced labour.

List of diagrams

3.1 Matters of dispute at trade courts in Vienna, 1898-1914 58 3.2 Workers” concerns brought forward to trade inspectors, 1894-1900 59

LIST OF DIAGRAMS xiii

List of contributors

Colin Arnaud is a lecturer at the University of Münster. He studied history and literature at the universities of Bielefeld, Germany; Paris 7 Denis Diderot, France; and Bologna, Italy. He wrote his doctoral thesis at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, about the social topography of Bologna and Strasbourg around 1400. He is now working on a research project about male weavers in the Middle Ages in Europe and the Middle East.

Anamarija Batista is an experienced interdisciplinary researcher and curator working at the intersection of art, architecture and economics. As Assistant Professor at the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, she has been exploring socialist perspectives on leisure time within the project “Collective Utopias of Post-War Modernism: The Adriatic Coast as a Leisure and Defence Paradise”, funded by the PEEK programme of the Austrian Science Fund. She coedited the book Rethinking Density: Art, Culture and Urban Practices, published in 2017 by Sternberg Press in the series of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She is also the editor of the anthology Notions of Temporalities in Artistic Practice (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2022). She teaches at the University Mozarteum in Salzburg.

Marjorie Carvalho de Souza is a PhD candidate in Global History and Governance at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale, Italy. She holds a graduate degree in Labour Law from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, a master's degree in Global History from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, and a bachelor's degree in Law from the same institution.

Mohammad Tareq Hasan is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. After initial training in Anthropology from the University of Dhaka, he pursued an MPhil in Anthropology of Development (2014) and a PhD in Social Anthropology (2018) from the University of Bergen (UiB), Norway. He also completed a postdoctoral research fellowship (2021) at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden University, the Netherlands.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

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His research interests include the anthropology of work, state formation, political economy and egalitarianism. He is the author of Everyday Life of Ready-made Garment Kormi in Bangladesh: An Ethnography of Neoliberalism (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

Eva Kuhn is an art and film scholar, currently working as a research associate at the Faculty of Humanities at the Leuphana University Lüneburg (Professorship for Contemporary Art). Previously, she was a visiting professor at the University of the Arts, Berlin, and a research associate at the Institute of Art History at the University of Basel. Her fields of research are the intersection of arts and cinema, (queer-) feminist and postcolonial criticism and experimental film. She is currently working on a guest edition of Frauen und Film: 'Feminist economies and temporalities’, and on a book project entitled ‘Maintenance (Art-) Work and the Production of Presence”.

Dariia Kuzmych is a Ukrainian artist. She currently lives and works in Kyiv and Berlin. After finishing her bachelor's degree in monumental painting at the Fine Art Academy in Kyiv, Kuzmych completed the master's programme in media art at the Berlin University of Arts. She works in various techniques, such as installation, drawing, video and text. A central point that connects these multimedia practices is that they capture times of transition in a society and explore how these impact individuals. In her current projects, she is engaged with various aspects of experiencing trauma and the perception of time. https://dariiakuz mych.com/

Monika Lang graduated from the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade, Department of Illustration and Book Design. She works as an independent illustrator and graphic designer, chiefly on culture-related projects and publishing. Lang is cofounder and member of the ‘Turbotomorrow’ designer group established in 2006. In addition to illustration and print design, she also researches screen printing techniques, mural painting and other media of visual expression. http://www.behance. net/monikalang; http://monikalang.com/

Paolo Magagnoli is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Queensland. He holds a PhD in Art History from UCL, and he was previously an honorary associate in the Department of Art History at the University of Sydney. His research is focused on the history and theory of photography and artists’ cinema. His essays have appeared in the Oxford Art Journal,

Third Text, Photography and Culture and Philosophy of Photography. He is the author of Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Documentary (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2015).

Gabriele Marcon is Lecturer in European History (1450-1750) at Durham University, UK. His research lies at the intersection of labour history and the history of science, and currently focuses on mining activities in Europe and the Iberian world. He recently received his PhD in History from the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) with a thesis titled “The Movements of Mining: German Miners in Renaissance Italy (1450-1560)’. Marcon is the co-convenor of the European Labour History Network working group ‘Labour in Mining’ and editor of the online series ‘The Young Mining Historians’ Corner”.

Natasa Milicevié is a research associate at the Institute for Recent History of Serbia. Her main field of interest is the social history of Serbia and Yugoslavia in the twentieth century, with a special focus on the history ofthe Serbian middle class, the intelligentsia, relations between the authorities and social groups, and everyday life, as well as the history of historiography. She has recently focused particularly on the history of Serbian society in occupied Serbia during the Second World War. Milićević has coedited two books (2011, 2020) and she is the author of the monograph Yugoslav Authority and Serbian Middle Class 1944-1950 (originally Jyeocnosencka exacm u cpncko epalaucmeo 1944-1950, Beorpan: MHUC, 2009), for which she received an award from the Ministry of Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia for a special contribution in the field of the Social Sciences and Humanities for the year 2009.

Viola Franziska Müller is a historian and postdoctoral researcher at the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany. She is the author of Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022) and coeditor of Moving Workers: Historical Perspectives on Labour, Coercion and Im/Mobilities (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2023).

Miige Ozbek is Assistant Professor in the Core Program at Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey. Ózbek completed her PhD at Bogaziçi University in 2018 with a dissertation entitled 'Single, Poor Women in Istanbul, 1850-1915: Prostitution, Sexuality, and Female Labor. Her research focuses on the themes of the everyday lives of lower-class women, urban life, labour and im/mobility in the late Ottoman Empire.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xvii xviii

Eszter Óze is an art historian and a research fellow in the Historical Avant-garde Research Program at the Museum of Fine Arts — Central European Research Institute for Art History Budapest. She completed her PhD in Philosophy, Film, Media and Cultural Theory at Eótvós Loránd University, Budapest. Her research field is museology in the interwar period: she analyses public health and social museums in Europe and the workers' culture in Central and Eastern Europe. Since 2020 she has taught in the Department of Art Theory and Curatorial Studies at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, before which she was a lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University.

Corinna Peres is a PhD candidate and university assistant at the Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna, Austria. She received her Master of Arts degree with distinction in History and Romance Philology (Italian) from Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. In 2022, she held a research grant from the German Historical Institute in Rome, Italy. Her research interests lie in the history of labour, slavery and the slave trade in the Mediterranean, with a special focus on Tuscan merchant networks in the late Middle Ages.

Ivanka Petrova is Associate Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Since 1998 she has worked in the Department of Ethnology of Socialism and Post-socialism. Her major fields of research are the culture of labour, entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial culture, everyday culture in socialism and post-socialism, cultural heritage and urban culture. Petrova has published over 70 articles on these topics in national and international journals and books. She has worked on 15 research projects and published the book World of Labor and Ethnology (Sofia, 2010).

Nico Pizzolato is Associate Professor in Global Labour Studies at Middlesex University, London, UK. He is the author of Challenging Global Capitalism: Labor Migration, Radical Struggle and Urban Change in Detroit and Turin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and of numerous articles that focus on the interplay between labour migration, race and ethnic relations, working-class self-activity and social movements. His work has appeared in journals such as the American Historical Review, the International Review of Social History and Labor History. He has coedited Antonio Gramsci: A Pedagogy to Change the World (Cham: Springer, 2017). His most recent work is on unfree and precarious labour in the twentieth-century United States.

Tim Robinson is a conceptual collage artist who uses traditional elements along with digital imagery to produce evocative editorial illustration. He first had his work published when working for Milton Glaser's design studio in New York City. Since then, his illustrations have been reproduced in books, magazines and newspapers worldwide. Clients include the New York Times, The Nation, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, NPR, Conde Nast, the Boston Globe and many more. http:// timrobinsonstudio.blogspot.com/

Akın Sefer is a postdoctoral research fellow at Koc University’s Department of History in Istanbul, Turkey. He received his PhD in History in 2018 from Northeastern University. Currently (between 2021 and 2024), he is the principal investigator of a research project on shipbuilding and labour migration in the Black Sea Coast and Istanbul in the nineteenth century. His research focuses on labour, migration and modernisation in the late Ottoman Empire.

Ljubinka Skodrié is a senior research associate at the Institute of Contemporary History in Belgrade. She earned her PhD in Yugoslav history at Belgrade University. She is the author of the monographs Ministry of Education and Religion in Serbia 1941-1944: The Fate of the Institution under Occupation (originally Ministarstvo prosvete i vera u Srbiji 1941-1944: Sudbina institucije pod okupacijom; Beograd: Arhiv Srbije, 2009) and Women in Occupied Serbia 1941-1944 (originally Zena u okupiranoj Srbiji 1941-1944; Beograd: Institut za savremenu istoriju, Arhipelag, 2020). Her research areas are the gender and social history of Serbia, the history of education and the history of the Serbian archival service.

Sigrid Wadauer is a historian at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her publications deal with topics such as work, livelihood and mobility, crafts and trades, autobiography and the life course, and street level bureaucracy from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, with a regional focus on Central Europe. She has worked as a researcher and taught at the universities of Salzburg and Vienna. Wadauer has held various grants and fellowships in Austria, Germany and the USA, including an ERC Starting Grant (‘The Production of Work’). Currently she is working in the Austrian Science Fund project ‘Co-Producing and Using Identity Documents”.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xix

This publication is based upon work from the COST Action “Worlds of Related Coercions in Work’ (WORCK), CA18205 (2019-2024), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). WORCK is a European network of labour historians and social scientists, led by Juliane Schiel and Johan Heinsen. The network is committed to recontextualising work in history with the aim of more deeply understanding the mechanisms of coercion in all work relations throughout history’ (see www.worck.eu). The idea for this book emerged in the aftermath of WORCK's virtual conference Reconceptualising Wage Labour, hosted by the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, in September 2020. Additional financial support for the publication of this book was kindly provided by the Mozarteum Salzburg, as well as by the Doctoral School and Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies, both at the University of Vienna.

The editors would like to thank the illustrators Dariia Kuzmych, Monika Lang and Tim Robinson for their collaboration and the stunning artwork they created for this book. We extend our gratitude to Juliane Schiel for her support and encouragement in the preparation of this project and throughout its course. Laura Sukarov-Eischer, grant holder manager of the COST Action, impressively manoeuvred this project through several challenges. At UCL Press, we were lucky in being able to count on Pat Gordon-Smith and her team for their fantastic work. Jillian Bowie deserves special mention for her exceptional copy-editing work. We are grateful to the blind reviewers of the book proposal and to the reviewer of the manuscript for their valuable critique and suggestions. Thanks also go to Christine Brocks for her rigorous language editing. David de Boer, Christian De Vito and Johan Heinsen provided important feedback on earlier drafts of the introduction, which is very much appreciated. Lastly, we thank the contributors to this book, whose patience, reliability and commitment within a tight schedule have made this project possible.

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