Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues (review)

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 Köbben, 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 gives 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, provide 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...