Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues.

Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues. Edited by Torn Brass and Marcel van der Linden (New York: Peter Lang AG, 1997. 602pp. $78.95).

This volume is a collection of papers delivered at a conference on free and unfree labor organized by the International Institute of Social History in 1995. In addition to introductory and concluding essays authored by the editors, twenty-two essays are presented. They include both theoretical discussions of free and unfree labor and case studies of unfree labor across the globe.

While the majority of the essays focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some reach back as far as the sixteenth century. The articles focus for the most part on "unfree" rather than "free" labor; within the former category, the authors dedicate considerably less attention to chattel slavery than to other coercive systems. Nonetheless, the case studies investigate a wide array of coercive regimes, ranging from convict labor in Australia to concentration camp and prison camp labor in Germany and the Soviet Union; from bonded labor in India to undocumented labor in California's agricultural sector; from legally sanctioned indigenous debt peonage in Guatemala to illegal forms of peonage practiced in the Amazonian regions of contemporary Brazil. Taken as a group, the contributions to this volume refute visions of unfree labor as a peripheral, colonial or marginal phenomenon. They substantiate the existence of widespread systems of coerced labor up to the present, and demonstrate the coexistence and even compatibility of systems of free and unfree labor in diverse periods and places.

While recognizing the longevity of "unfree" forms of labor, several authors (Lucassen, McCreery, van der Linden) nonetheless seem to make the case for an historical movement from unfree labor to progressively "freer" forms of labor, often in connection with the introduction and development of industrial or commercial capitalism. Other authors, however, argue that there is no necessary relation between capitalist economic expansion and the decline of unfree labor. The latter include Brass, Grossman, Krissman, and De Souza Martins, who show that unfree labor has re-emerged insistently within capitalist societies with developed industries and labor markets, and often in times of capitalist expansion (as is shown by Kerr in a discussion of railway construction labor in nineteenth century India). Markey, and most notably Kobben, support Nieboer's arguments regarding the predominance of unfree labor in "open resource" societies--that is, in societies in which the general availability of land and other resources gi ves working populations the option of supporting themselves rather than working for others. Others reject this argument, including Brass, who discusses processes of "deproletarianization" in which unfree forms of labor are instituted precisely to prevent the emergence of a labor force that behaves in "proletarian" ways (demanding higher wages, migrating, forming unions, etc.). Several of the case studies (such as Roth's study of unfree labor in Germany during and before the Nazi period, Angelo's examination of sharecropping in the southern U.S. after emancipation, as well as the essays by Krissman, Johnson and De Souza Martins) support Brass' position and provide abundant evidence of the existence of unfree or even slave-like labor in societies of "closed resources," and sometimes even in urban contexts. There is some disagreement among the authors on the relationship between free labor markets and "free" conditions of labor. Shlomowitz strongly links the two, while other authors, like Johnson and Markey, pro vide evidence of the circulation and mobilization of unfree labor in free labor markets.

Several of the authors credit the advent and gradual dominance of "free" labor to global processes and forces that have little to do with the workplace and workers, such as the "closing" of resources, the unprofitability of forced labor (MCCreery), the transformation of law and the state (Steinfeld and Engerman), or the "normalization" of a universalizing bourgeois morality that rejected slavery (van der Linden). Other authors, however, argue that given the desirability of unfree labor in the eyes of many capitalists, the transition to juridically free labor was driven by the historical and political struggles of workers to transform the conditions under which they worked and lived. Particularly instructive examples are Kerr's essay and Casanovas' discussion of abolitionism in the Cuban labor movement, as well as Grossman's discussion of workers' attempts to assert collectivist demands in post-apartheid South Africa. The question of worker agency within systems of unfree labor is particularly contentious. Mc Creery's examination of debt peonage in Guatemala demonstrates how debt became desirable for workers, given the potential costs of not being indebted, which included conscription, forced labor, imprisonment under vagrancy laws, and direct physical violence. Both McCreery and Baak (in his discussion of contract and "coolie" labor in southwest India) point to the importance of subsistence guarantees for workers, and not just repressive force, in sustaining unfree laboring relationships. Brass, however, perceives arguments for even limited worker agency within unfree forms of labor as apologies for the labor systems within which workers are exploited. A wide range of the contributors question the assumption of a dichotomous opposition between "free" and "unfree" forms of labor (Steinfeld and Engerman, Olsen, Kerr, Baak, etc.). Such arguments are similarly rejected by Brass, who sees them as "revisionist" or "postmodern" attempts to prove the benign and reciprocal nature of coerced labor systems.

There are several serious lacunae in what is otherwise an expansive collection. One is a lack of attention to domestic servitude, and to coerced sex-work--one of the largest (and fastest growing) areas of unfree labor in the global economy. The exception is Olsen's examination of "corporate female bondage" in India. While her call for a "gendered theory of bonded labouring" is dismissed in Brass' introductory essay (which claims that analysts already examine systematically the roles of family, kinship, and patriarchy in unfree labor), the almost complete absence of such issues in this volume seems to support Olsen's position. In addition, there is little attempt to pose questions about the meaning of "free" or "unfree" labor through the perspectives of workers (whether through oral history, ethnographic fieldwork, or culturally sensitive interpretation of archival materials). While Baak contends that oral history could contribute much to theoretical debates over the meaning of "free" and "unfree," Brass dism isses such methods as unrigorous distractions from serious analysis. [1]

These reservations aside, this continued debate over free and unfree labor is an important contribution to the field and will be a useful resource for students of comparative labor history. Even in the absence of such debate, the collection would be an important reminder of the enduring presence and vitality of systems of unfree labor in the global economy.

ENDNOTE 

(1.) The potential of such methods is demonstrated by a number of recent works that investigate the meaning of freedom and "free" labor in emancipation and post-emancipation contexts. See for instance Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (Princeton, 1985); Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, 1985); Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore, 1992); and Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860-1870 (Cambridge, 1994). See also Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt and Rebecca J. Scott, eds., Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Post-Emancipation Societies (Chapel Hill, 2000).