Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long Nineteenth Century by Andrew Urban (review)

Andrew Urban's Brokering Servitude provides a well-researched historical perspective of the role of intermediaries in supplying and leveraging domestic labor in U.S. households during the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Far from ignoring a labor sector that has been traditionally excluded or elided from labor history, Urban explores the ways in which this class created a support system so that men, and some women, had the relative freedom to earn compensation for their work. He asserts that these domestic servants were the oil that kept the primary labor machine moving.

In a nuanced argument that accounts for the complexities of race and gender, Urban traces how the supplies of domestic labor were manipulated to serve growing middle-class wealth across the country. He focuses on four primary groups of migratory workers in structuring his study: Irish immigrants during the mid-nineteenth century, black refugees after the Civil War, white women émigrés, and Chinese servants before and after exclusion. As he highlights these groups, he also reveals how disparate types of organizations and agents, from employment and travel agencies to missionaries and federal officials, sought to leverage a mostly unregulated domestic labor market, but did so in ways shaped by race and gender. The result is a fully synthesized, complex argument that describes the drivers of the market and the discourse of labor in the nineteenth century.

Some of the most compelling moments in the text are those that include narrative, humanizing the effects of U.S. immigration policy during the period. When relevant and possible, Urban attempts to recover the voices of immigrants. He begins his study with a summary of the death of Chinese immigrant Ye Gon Lun, pointing out a historical "anomaly": Ye, who died of tuberculosis, was not buried in a segregated portion of the cemetery. Tracing the reason for this fact leads the reader into Urban's discussion of Nathaniel Greene Curtis and how Ye became a servant in Curtis's home in Sacramento, California. Later, when he discusses Irish immigration in the mid-nineteenth century, Urban uses a letter from a domestic servant to anchor his discussion of how Irish labor was brokered. In his chapter about black refugee labor after the Civil War, he begins with a white farmer from Nebraska, who proposed to employ female ex-slaves. He explains how such a plan was doomed to fail due to various local and regional racist policies that would affect living conditions and, thus, the plan's sustainability. Urban connects other analytic points to individuals as well, developing a scholarly text that is both intellectually significant and readable.

Urban's argument is comprehensive, but his strongest and most relevant chapters to scholars of Asian American studies are about Chinese servants after the Civil War and into the twentieth century. In keeping with the general narrative method in the book, Urban describes a cartoon that encapsulates the complexity of the relationship between Irish and Chinese labor, including the racial stereotypes that infuse them and how those ideas were leveraged to affect politics. He also provides a counterbalance: the Chinese were not merely complacent and servile, despite the jobs they might hold. In chapter 3, Urban argues that the economic demands of white employers were in tension with the anti-Chinese sentiments of politicians. Moreover, the reality was that the "coolie" class of laborers became a category that revealed the "colonial fantasies of household employers" (103), namely that the Chinese were less human laborers and more machines. Specifically, Urban delineates the ways in which the Chinese labor class was created and confined through federal and state immigration policy, which was driven both by racist sentiment and by market demand.

Chapter 5, about bonded Chinese servants, further clarifies the continued racial regulation of domestic labor. Beginning with an...