Abstracts
(in the language of the papers)
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.