Grenzenüberchreitende ArbeiterInnengeschichte: Konzepte und Erkundungen
Abstracts
(in der Sprache, in der die Referate gehalten werden)
Rana P. Behal (Deshbandhu
College, University of Delhi & Association of Indian Labour Historians,
India)
Writing Labour History – Changing Paradigms
of South Asian Labour Historiography
Recent years have witnessed a renewed scholarly interest in the historical
studies of labour in India and other parts of the world. There has been
a slow but steady revival of interest in labour and labour history. This
revival is different both in its location as also in its central concerns.
It has emerged from the countries of the South and its concerns are not
confined to the traditional working class alone. Apart from the study of
the industrial workforce, labour history has been enriched by the scholarly
attention to migratory, mobile labour, lives of artisans, women and peasant
migrants to plantations in the colonial world. Earlier the major emphasis
of labour history research was on the core countries such as US, Canada,
W. Europe and Japan. Now research on the labour history of the capitalist
peripheries is growing and is increasingly attracting international scholarship.
In a critical review of Indian labour historiography Prof. Sumit Sarkar
commented that ‘an important renewal of labour history has begun after
years of neglect and marginalisation’. This paper will provide an
introduction to the Indian Labour Historiography from the colonial period
to the contemporary times and also analyse the nature of its paradigm shifts
in the context of the globalising world.
The earliest writings on issues of labour in the colonial context appeared
towards the end of nineteenth century in India. The commentators were some
of the members of the contemporary urban educated intelligentsia and foreign
Christian missionaries who assumed an adversarial role in relation to capital
and colonial state power. However the early nationalist intelligentsia and
the nationalist political parties voiced their concern mostly in support
of workers employed in foreign capital enterprises. Their attitude towards
the workers employed in the indigenous capitalist enterprises was generally
ambivalent or indifference.
The spurt in the working class political activities during the 1920s and
1930s in the India and the World Depression in the early half of the 1930s
catapulted studies in the condition and history of labour to public attention.
The appointment of a Royal Commission on Labour in India which published
a multi-volume report in 1930-31, and the focusing of bureaucratic attention
on the task of coping with the Depression, impacted on professional social
science disciplines and produced academic research for the first time.
The late colonial and immediate post-colonial historiography began to focus
on organised industrial working class which formed a part of a larger study
of modern capitalist industrialisation. The historical experience of the
West formed the conceptual framework for the study of Indian labour history.
The dominance of European categories of thought often blocked the recognition
of specificities of the South Asian economy and the persistence of pre-capitalist
labour forms, especially in Marxist writings. The study of Indian proletariat
was placed within the classical Marxist lines overlooking their specificities.
Marxists historians shared many of the modernists assumptions.
From the 1970s onward detailed empirical research on social composition
of workforce, the regional and ethnic background of workers revealed the
complexities that had defied comprehension in the older paradigm. The emerging
histories of workers in coal and gold mines, plantations, jute, steel industry,
textile and Indian expatriate labour in the British overseas colonies raised
questions on the ‘old histories’ based on the Weberian sociological
assumptions and on theoretical framework of classical Marxism with implicit
faith in the teleology of modernization and working class formation. A number
of important trends emerged from the new social history writings in this
period. The arguments of modernizing theories were no longer found creditable
and sociological factors of rural and caste ties were subjected to re-examination.
Secondly, under the influence of Thompsonion critique of economism historians
began to question the economic assumptions fashionable in many of the existing
writings on working class protests.
During the mid-1990s the scholars of labour history as well others who were
interested in the subject founded the Association of Indian Labour Historians
(AILH, Jawaharlal University in New Delhi, 15-16 December 1996). The Chairperson,
Prof. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, reminded the gathering that while it represnted
the culmination of some two decades of scholarship of South Asian labour
history, focussed work in the subject was lacking and was at a low ebb.
Since then the Association has had the privilege of attracting a strong
and active membership from among the distinguish scholars in the country
as well as the fraternity of international scholars working on labour history
and contemporary labour studies. AILH organised a series of international
labour history conferences since then. The labour history writing, it was
felt, needed to adopt broader conceptual approach to take account of the
complexities which characterised the emergence of modern industrial work
and the difficulites involved in applying cut and dried theoratical models
to colonial history. Apart from continuing the study of modern industrial
working class it was also recognised that the scholarly attention was needed
on the neglectted areas of informal sector labour, lives of artisans, women
and children and peasent migrants.
Claudio H. M. Batalha (State
University of Campinas – UNICAMP, Brazil)
Labour History in Brazil: history, recent trends
and major challenges
As in many other cases, Brazilian labour history was at first produced by
militants, labour leaders and those politically situated on the left. By
the nineteen-sixties the field attracted sociologists, concerned mostly
with general explanations based on modernization theories, in which labour
history itself entered only as part of the demonstration of the adopted
models. Proper historical analysis of labour, focused especially on the
formative years of the working class during the Brazilian First Republic
(1889-1930), began in the following decade. Major strikes in the late nineteen-seventies
and early nineteen-eighties provoked interest in labour in general and labour
history in particular; therefore a number of important studies were published
during those years. This first labour history boom came to an end abruptly
in the second half of the eighties following the decrease of labour activity,
the increasing criticism of Marxist oriented historiography and finally
the collapse of the Soviet Union and shortly afterward of the states of
so-called real socialism in Eastern Europe. Although it is difficult to
evaluate how far such political changes affected labour history research
in Brazil, certainly these phenomena coincided. As the turn of the century
approached, labour history began slowly but steadily to regain force. In
many respects this new production continued themes and concerns of the previous
period, but it also introduced new subjects and different approaches. If
reconstructing the trajectory of labour history in Brazil, from its birth
to the present day, is part of what this paper intends to do, its main objective
is to offer an overview of present trends in labour studies and the major
challenges faced.
Dick Geary (University
of Nottingham)
The Benefits and Pitfalls of Comparative Labour
History across National Boundaries
There are two principal kinds of labour history which seek to cross national
boundaries. The first recognises the multiple entanglements of economies
and different forms of labour across the globe and has recently been the
focus of the ‘Global Labour History’ initiatives of the International
Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. The second seeks primarily to
compare the history of labour – economic, social, political and cultural
– in different countries; and it is this, which is the focus of this
paper.
The paper contends that post-modern and post-structural currents, which
denigrate all meta-narratives, elevate culture and discourse to primacy
and stress contingency and diversity, have not obviated the need for comparative
labour history and in fact sees in such comparative history a rejoinder
to post-structuralism. For comparison reveals cross-cultural similarities
that at least in part have their roots in the complexity of changing economic
and social circumstances, which also in many cases provide a key to the
very diversity that culturalists wish to stress. This point is made firstly
in the context of the emergence of a discourse of class amongst some sections
of European labour between 1820 and 1850; and secondly with reference to
the massive and fruitful cross national comparison of the behaviour of different
occupational groups, at least in terms of their industrial behaviour. (Comparing
political allegiances requires much more complex strategies and does identify
a dominant diversity).
This said, similarities have often been posited, which require greater understanding
of local or national difference; and the paper concludes by questioning
the widely deployed concept of an ‘Atlantic Revolution’, in
which political and social movements in the New World have been seen as
a transatlantic arm of a predominantly European revolutionary discourse.
It does so by contrasting the aims of European and Brazilian artisans in
1848.
Andrea Komlosy (Institut
für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, Universität Wien)
Die Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen: Arbeitsverhältnisse
und Standortkombinationen in der Textilindustrie, 1700-2000
Die Erzeugung von Textilien war seit dem 17./18. Jh.
in Form einer räumlichen Arbeitsteilung organisiert, die Standorte
mit unterschiedlichen Unternehmensformen, Arbeitsverhältnissen, politischen
Regulierungsweisen und Techniken miteinander verband. Auch örtliche
Produzenten, die für Eigenbedarf und lokale Märkte arbeiteten,
wurden zunehmend in Zulieferbeziehungen mit jenen Großhändlern
und Verlegern einbezogen, die Produktion und Absatz als überregionales
Unternehmen organisierten und auf der Basis der regionalen Ungleichheit
Kapitalakkumulation im Weltmaßstab betrieben.
Der Beitrag stellt überregionale Systeme der Unternehmensorganisation
(Verlagssystem, Fabriksystem, Neue Internationale Arbeitsteilung, Postindustrie)
aus verschiedenen europäischen und asiatischen Exportgewerberegionen
vor und fragt nach den globalen Wechselwirkungen und Schnittstellen und
dem Wandel von Wettbewerbsvorteilen und Marktbeherrschung. Besonderes Augenmerk
wird in jeder zeit-räumlichen Konstellation auf die unterschiedlichen
Arbeitsverhältnisse gelegt, die freie und unfreie, bezahlte und unbezahlte,
geregelte und ungeregelte, formelle und informelle Formen in unterschiedlichen
Zusammensetzungen beinhalteten.
Sven Beckert (Harvard University)
Labor Regimes after Emancipation: The Case of
Cotton
Labor regimes in cotton growing agriculture changed dramatically
in the course of the nineteenth century. Until 1865, most cotton traded
on world markets was grown by slaves. After emancipation in the United States,
it was unclear what kind of labor regimes, if any, would replace slavery
and would continue to guarantee a plentiful supply of cheap cotton. Planters,
colonial bureaucrats and cotton capitalists experimented with various forms
of labor mobilization. While there was a clear trend, globally, towards
the proletarianization of cotton growers, there were also great regional
variations as to what labor regime emerged. This paper will trace the transition
from slavery to other forms of labor in cotton agriculture, and explain
the emergence of a diversity of new forms of labor in the post emanicipation
period.
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk
(International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam & Leiden University)
Covering the world. Textile workers in an international
perspective, 1650-2000
Textile production has an ancient history of international
relations and global integration. Not surprisingly, textile production and
textile workers have received ample attention from social and economic historians.
However, despite this international character, the focus of most textile
histories remains rather restricted in terms of geographical and temporal
comparison. When it comes to covering a long period of time and/or reaching
a considerable spatial diversity, nowadays textile history usually becomes
teamwork.
In 2003, the International Institute of Social History (IISH, Amsterdam,
The Netherlands) started a a joint project, aiming to make a comparative
analysis of the history of textile workers in an international and long-term
perspective. To realize this broad comparison, the project consisted of
two stages. In the first stage around twenty specialists were asked to write
national histories on textile work around the world covering the period
1650-2000. In order to reach a satisfactory degree of comparability, the
project organizers provided a list of topics and questions to be studied
in each overview. The second part consisted of comparative studies, written
on the basis of these national histories. Several experts in the field were
requested to make a comparative analysis of specific themes relevant to
the global history of textile workers, such as international trade, gender,
workers’ organizations, or ethnicity and migration. In November 2004,
these comparative papers were vividly discussed at a conference by all the
authors of the national and comparative overviews.
This paper addresses the workings of this particular collective research
method, its pros and cons, and some substantive conclusions that could be
drawn from this collaborative project.
Michele Ford (Department of Indonesian Studies,
University of Sydney)
Constructing Legality – Defining Irregular
Labour Migration in Thailand and Malaysia
Labour migration is an integral part of the history and contemporary experiences
of Southeast Asia, where national boundaries cut across pre-colonial and
colonial migration flows. Even where such flows did not exist, economic
disparities – and in some cases, civil war or persecution –
create pressures for labour migration in the region. It is not surprising,
then, that, as in Singapore, successive governments in both Malaysia and
Thailand have constructed labour migration as an economic and security issue,
establishing complicated regimes for the regulation of migrant labour. Perhaps
more remarkable, however, is the fact that they regularly turn a blind eye
when it comes to the irregular migrants whose labour supports their economies.
This paper examines the ways in which legal status is created and used by
the Thai and Malaysian governments in their management of labour migration
and how these processes affect the experiences of irregular labour migrants.
Abdoulaye Kane (Dept. of Anthropology, University
of Florida & Center for African Studies)
Senegalese Migrants in Europe and the United States,
and Home Connections: Remittances and Social Change in the Senegal River
Valley
The Senegalese migrants (known as the Haapulaar) coming from the border
area between Mali, Mauritania and Senegal are found in all corners of the
globe. In the Senegalese capital, Dakar, in Central Africa, in France and
in the United States, the Haalpulaar have managed to reconstruct a sense
of home away from their villages of origin. One of major characteristics
of Haalpulaar migration is the maintenance of strong connections with their
rural homes. They engage in several transnational practices marked by flows
of commodities, money, material culture, ideas and images from their host
countries to their communities of origin. These transnational practices
have transformed the local culture into a culture of migration where young
men are expected to go to faraway places to realize their dream of being
successful and become “someone.”
My presentation will examine the evolution of the ways in which Haalpulaar
migrants in Dakar and abroad maintained connection with the people they
left behind. I will point out the revolution in communication technologies
and the way it dramatically change the relation that Haalpulaar have with
their families in the Senegal River Valley villages and small towns. I will
argue that the Haalpulaar villages have all become “remotely global”
in the sense that are connected through their diasporas to Global cities
which are transferring to their home communities new ways of being, thinking
and behaving associated with modernity. I will conclude my paper by pointing
out the fact that migration has become in this part of Africa the engine
of social change.
Dirk Hoerder (Dept. of History, Arizona State
University & North American Center for Borderland Studies)
Capitalization of Agriculture, 1850s to 1960s:
Rural Migrations in a Global Perspective
In this essay, I first discuss factors mobilizing people in the rural world/
agrarian economic sector in cultural and economic terms from mid-19th century
to the agricultural crisis of the 1880s. I will then concentrate in sequence
on the intra-European and transatlantic migrations and expand coverage to
the late 20th-century transcontinental south-north labor migrants from Turkey
and Mexico. I argue that with the capitalization of agriculture family farms
lost their viability and induced/ forced mass migrations to wage-labor in
cities and mines nearby or a continent off. Next I will discuss developments
in the rural emigrant-sending regions in South Asia under the Rule of the
British Empire and add brief references to other major Asian societies.
In conclusion I will review traditional perception of rural in-migrants
by locally-born and unionized workers, preconceptions that have been reflected
by labor historians concerned with industrial development in a single nation-state
only. I argue that peasant families could select between options and tried
to combine traditional ways of life with income diversification. This process
turned them, often temporarily, into proletarians and the development of
the working classes across the globe need to be related to this fusion of
lifestyles and practices of resistance.
Minjie Zhang (College of Public Administration,
Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, China)
Urbanization and Rural Migrant Workers in Yiwu,
China
The paper focuses on rural labour migration within recent three decades
in Yiwu, China, and its impact to rural development, linked to longer run
patterns of urbanization.
The word of urbanization is characterized by the increase of urban population
through the movement of rural people from the countryside. It refers to
a redistribution of population as a demographic phenomenon. The scale and
scope of Chinese cities were strictly controlled by the government before
1980. Due to the regulations of intra-country migration and controls over
the labor market, rural people were not able to change their occupations
and residences freely.
Since the introduction of economic reform in late 1978, rural China has
undergone an impressive economic transformation, and rural laborers have
migrated into off-farm works in urban areas. From 1978 to 1987, more than
10 million rural residents obtained urban jobs following legal procedures.
During 1987-1990, experts believe that of the 420 million rural farming
laborers, at least 160 million are floating.
Yiwu is a rural county, located in the central part of East China's Zhejiang
Province and neighbors Shanghai Economic Zone to the north with a total
land area of 1,105 square kilometers. As a traditional agricultural small
county before urbanization, agricultural planting is the basic economy,
infrastructural investment is far from enough. The facilities are outdated
and peasants live a miserable life. So that it is difficult to improve one's
standard of living beyond basic sustenance. Farm living is dependent on
unpredictable environmental conditions. However, brown sugar was a local
specialty, and many farmer families had a small workshop to made brown sugar.
One of the ways to make money was to barter brown sugar made during slow
economic times, commerce and petty commodity production were old economic
practices in historical Yiwu.
In this paper, three phases of urbanization process in Yiwu from 1978 to
present will presented: The first phase of urbanization of Yiwu, i.e., from
1978 to 1988, refers to the period of market motivation, and the local farmers
moved from home village to city. The second phase of urbanization, i.e.
from 1988 to 1998, refers to the period of industry motivation, and the
migrants outside Yiwu jointed the process of urbanization. The third phase,
i.e. since 1998, refers to the period when a new urbanization path was explored
and established, and accelerated the process toward urbanization.
With a rapid urbanization and economic and social development, more and
more rural residents are flowing into cities, greatly accelerating China's
pace of urbanization. In Yiwu, its 1,000,000 person migrant population is
surpassing the official resident population of 700,000. The urbanization
not only has boomed economic development, but let the migrants entirely
on their own, free from the fields. Mobility of the migrants show following
basic characteristics:
Yiwu is playing three specialized roles in China’s urbanization. The
first was a national free market. It was no longer just a regional trading
center, but was oriented toward the whole of China, and people from all
over the country came to Yiwu’s market towns to trade. From the point
of this meaning, Yiwu attract a lot of migrate laborers arriving for their
business and find their jobs. Yiwu’s second role was as a link between
Yiwu and other places in China, and even in the world, by thousands and
thousands local migrated laborers. The third role is that Yiwu had become
a model, took unique rural development path of urbanization, play demonstration's
role to China's small and medium-sized town cities and rural areas.
Juliana Ströbele-Gregor (Lateinamerika-Institut
der Freien Universität Berlin)
Soziale Krise und Ausbreitung des evangelikalen
Fundamentalismus in Lateinamerika
Seit Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts findet in Lateinamerika eine zunehmend starke
Ausbreitung evangelikaler fundamentalistischer Religionsgemeinschaften statt.
Die Missionierung erfolgt vor allem bei den unteren Bevölkerungsschichten,
d.h. den Armen in den Randzonen der Metropolen sowie indianische oder schwarze
Landbevölkerung. In dem Vortrag wird es darum gehen, die Ursachen und
Folgen der Konversion von Subalternen auf verschiedenen Ebenen näher
zu betrachten. Ich gehe davon aus, dass die Konversion als ein Zusammenspiel
von sozio-ökonomischen, psycho-sozialen, lebensgeschichtlichen und
– in gewissem Maße – persönlichkeitsstrukturellen
Ursachen erfolgt. Sie impliziert zugleich eine Kritik an den gesellschaftlichen
Zuständen, in denen Marginalisierung, Rassismus – und im Kontext
der kapitalistischen Weltwirtschaft – soziale und ökonomische
Wandlungsprozesse erfolgen, die zur Destrukturierung vormaliger sozialer
Lebenswelten führen. Der Chiliasmus, der Gleichheitsgrundsatz und die
z.T. demokratischen Formen des Gemeindelebens, spirituelle Erfahrungen und
sinngebende Welterklärung, strikte religiös begründete Werte
und Normen, die die individuelle Verantwortung und persönliche Beziehung
zu Gott ins Zentrum stellen, bieten alternative Leitlinien des Zusammenlebens
und Wirtschaftens. Die Konversion hat ebenfalls Konsequenzen für das
politische Handeln, die hier näher betrachtet werden sollen.
Lex Heerma van Voss (International Institute
of Social History, Amsterdam & Utrecht University)
Competing identities: religion and working class
formation
Neither religious identities, nor class identities are clear per se. Within
local communities, while differences in denomination, in religious activity,
and in social status will have been visible in all but the most egalitarian
communities, this did not need necessarily to specific identities. In communities
with one denomination, this was not a way to distinguish between people.
The awareness of both religious and class differences was strongly enhanced
by the spread of industrial working conditions. Both socialists themselves,
and their political opponents, expected the coming of the factory to lead
to misery and to the creation and spread of class consciousness. Socialist
organizations prepared themselves to this, but so did opponents, including
the churches. It was not necessary for industrialization to actually spread
first: socialist organizations could reach a community before actual industries
had been established, and in anticipation of the coming of either industry
or socialists, others might want to strengthen alternative identities. The
churches were prominent among the latter. Class consciousness and competing
religious identities often became intertwined. In the simplest form, politically
organized workers would be opposed by the church which wanted its flock
to abstain. But there were many more possibilities. Groups within the church
might stimulate the creation of a specific religious working class identity.
Workers themselves might develop specific religious identities that suited
them.
The paper will start by describing the Dutch case from about the 1870s.
The Netherlands were in many ways an average European country, neither very
early, nor very late in industrializing. The Dutch case was complicated
religiously, because of the existence of three large denominational groups:
Roman Catholics, the mainstream Dutch Reformed Church, and a breakaway orthodox
Protestant church, whose followers were mainly lower middle class and working
class. This led to intricate patterns of religious and class identity formation,
which we can follow well as class formation and the formation of religious
identities (and even formal churches) took place at the same time.
Secondly, having identified a number of patterns at the local level, the
paper will pose the question where elsewhere in Europe these patterns could
be found. Do earlier or late industrializers have other relations between
religion and class? What is the influence of religious pluriformity?
Djallal G. Heuzé (National Centre
for Scientific Research, Anthropology Centre –
LISST, Toulouse)
Labour and the Shiv Sena in Mumbai: A complicated
story
Shiv Sena arose in 1966 in Bombay (presently Mumbai). It took shape in a
workers' district of an industrial city. There were large movements of developing
statas of white collar workers. Textile industry was at its apex with 250
000 employees. Port was prominent. So were the more recent metal and chemical
based industries. The contribution will describe this scene. It will precisely
focus on the different stories and the multiple practices construed about
the Mumbai workers after the birth of the Shiv Sena and during its more
than 40 years of existence. Shiv Sena and the Shiv Sainiks were constantly
interested in labour issues. Yet they promoted the image of a 'loyal', hard
working, marathi-speaking employee. Its influence was more important in
the living places than on the work site. I will describe the encounter with
communists and class representations, the role of the new industries in
the development of the Shiv Sena, the limits of the workers' trust in the
Shiv Sainik leadership and the importance of the rising 'informalisation'
of the labour scene.