Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955 (review)

This collection investigates the laws regarding servants in all parts of the British Empire during almost five centuries. The approach is regional; sixteen essays of uniformly high quality examine such places as Kenya, Hong Kong, South Africa, North America, the Caribbean, and India. The servants under study include indentured laborers, slaves, domestic workers, and a host of others who were subject to servant statutes in particular places at particular times. The volume offers an excellent starting point for those interested in the laws governing servants, their history, their transmission, and their application. The essays, moreover, illustrate themes of general importance in labor, legal, colonial, and imperial history.

The English state had a longstanding interest in regulating labor, and in 1562, the different laws concerning servants were codified in the Statute of Artificers, which established the main categories of service. The editors take this law as their starting point and explore statutes regarding servants in their regional and temporal variants. For example, they compiled a database comprising 2,000 of these laws, and analyzed this data to trace the connections between laws in different places and at different times. The result is a unique vantage on the ways in which English laws were exported and adapted to particular colonial settings, to new categories of laborers, and to complex and heterogeneous populations; the connivance of imperial and colonial governments with the interests of employers; and the importance of servant law in defining colonial subjects.

Almost everywhere, the state was deeply invested in supporting the labor market. As the editors observe, "Everywhere the policy of master and servant reflected its medieval genesis in the plague years: it was predicated on labor shortage, and in particular on defeating the tendency of the market to bid up wages" (33). Thus, workers could be punished harshly for failing to do what their masters or employers wished. In 1834, one newly freed slave in Guiana was executed for allegedly challenging the conditions of apprenticeship, and labor action everywhere could be defined as treasonous. But at times, the imperial administration and local governments acted in opposition, as was the case when Parliament abolished slavery despite the resistance of sugar planters in the West Indies. Labor laws enabled colonial and imperial governments to bind workers to their employers, but they also served to sharpen racial, ethnic, and cultural difference.

The individual essays raise questions central to understanding the nature of colonial societies. Who or what, for example, was a servant? Racial and cultural identities, colonial hierarchies, and status were defined within the context of labor laws. In Hong Kong, all Chinese engaged in a range of laboring pursuits were defined as servants, as were non-Chinese people in ten other categories, including Amah and coachman. The essays similarly point to the ways in which laws codified racial and cultural categories. In Kenya, African workers, but not other laborers, remained subject to corporal punishment into the 1930s. In India, Michael Anderson argues, the colonial state infantilized Indian workers, depicting them as "immature, recalcitrant, and incapable of enjoying full 'freedom'" (422). The collection's point of departure centers on statutes concerning laborers, and the authors employ these laws to address fundamental questions about the structures and cultures of colonial societies within the British Empire.