Global History of Agrarian Labor Regimes, 1750-2000 April 25-27, 2013

Labor Force Demographics in Commercializing Agriculture: France and the Philippines, c. 1800-1940. Paul Vauthier Adams, Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania Regional populations in Mediterranean France and the Philippines responded to commercialization of agriculture and the concomitant increase in labor demand by growing dramatically. The mechanisms of growth were quite different, however. Southern France drew labor from overpopulated highland regions to the coastal lowlands, effectively a geographical redistribution of population that in national aggregates show little or no growth. Philippine plantation labor demands were met partly by migration but also by dramatic increases in fertility rates and family sizes. These created a cultural expectation of large families and high fertility that lasted for decades after the plantation boom ended. These phenomena suggest serious inadequacies in theories of demographic transition that invoke traditional versus modern mentalities

Shaping subsistence agriculture: Politics, religion, and the rural/urban divide in an indigenous village in Oaxaca, Mexico, 1940-2000. Iván Sandoval-Cervantes, University of Oregon This project seeks to explore the intricate connections that shaped the role of subsistence agriculture in the rural indigenous community of Zegache in the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Subsistence agriculture has remained a fundamental element of Zegache’s economy despite the fact that Zegacheños’ and Zegacheñas’ relation to land has been transformed since the implementation of the Mexican post-revolutionary agrarian reform and the increased in Zegacheños’ and Zegacheñas’ involvement with urban and global economies. In this article I will analyze how Zegache’s agrarian labor regime has been reshaped by the Mexican post-revolutionary land reform, local politics in relation to civic-religious hierarchies and political parties, and the increased economic diversification that resulted in migratory patterns and daily commutes to urban centers by Zegacheños and Zegacheñas. This project is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Zegache for a period of five months (during the summers of 2011 and 2012), and on archival work conducted in Oaxaca City in 2011.  

The “coolie” and the “creole”: Post-emancipation labor regimes and identarian invocations in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. Amitava Chowdhury, Queen's University, Canada

After emancipation of slavery in the British Empire, an acute shortage of labor and little success in obtaining alternative sources resulted in massive emigration of laborers from British India and China in the colonial cash crop plantations. The laborers from British India vastly outnumbered others, and in the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, approximately 1.33 million indentured laborers from India dispersed globally. The emigrating laborers identified with their own local caste, religious, tribal, and linguistic affiliations and did not see or describe themselves as “Indians.” Out of the plurality of identities, a singular “Indian” labor diasporic identity emerged in the plantation colonies. This paper explores the historical processes of that becoming within the global imperial project, and reveals the central place of identarian constructions in the shifting labor regimes of the 19th century colonial plantations. The paper challenges the notion of an immutable ethnic identity—a “reified Indian culture”—and, demonstrates the manifold possibilities and avenues that the indentured laborers did and did not take in the plantation settings within the larger frame of the imperial apparatus. In so doing, it brings together legal, economic, administrative and political dimensions within the arena of identity formations within the global agrarian setting. The identarian articulations associated with the changing labor fabric in the colonial plantations, I argue, is symptomatic of the larger global arc of empire that found expression in the nineteenth century colonial narratives of nation, selfhood, and history. Hunger Games: Landlords, Tenants, and the Evolution of Agricultural Policy in Japan, 1897-1910 Christopher Craig, Columbia University Hunger held a central place in the Meiji government's approach to agricultural villages, conceived of by planners as the engine that would drive agricultural labor and power the development of farming. In the 1870s and 1880s, rural populations figured into government planning as an undifferentiated whole, united in their exclusion from the protections and promotions increasingly offered to urban residents, the challenges they faced in encroaching and unmoderated capitalism, and in the blood and taxes drawn from them and funneled into industrial and military development. Amidst growing concerns over rural poverty and looming food shortages, government officials in the 1890s enacted a series of laws that brought rural landlords under government protection and provided them with the security and funding to oversee the development and modernization of agriculture. Facing still-hungry village populations of tenant farmers and smallholders, landlords used their new positions of power to promote forms of improved agricultural production that directed profits to themselves while increasing the demands upon and decreasing the rewards offered to their tenants and neighbors. This paper examines the consequences of this brand of development, exploring the stresses that the continuing use of hunger as a motivating force on excluded populations of farmers

introduced into village society and agricultural administration. Inconsistencies in the means and the goals of agricultural development centered on the linking of hunger to food production and dependency to autarky, as well as the power to resist that tenants found in their dispossession and desperation, introduced tensions into landlord-led development, leading to its abandonment at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century in the face of opposition from above and below and bringing to an end the centrality of hunger to government agricultural policy. A National Market in Progress. Traditional and Modern Agrarian Labor Regimes in Argentina, 1860s-1930s. Julio Djenderedjian and Gustavo L. Paz, University of Buenos Aires/Conicet In the second half of the nineteenth century, Argentina emerged as a unified nation where markets for factors were established and an export-oriented agrarian economy developed. Capitalist relationships permeated rural labor agreements in the major agricultural provinces of the pampas, but old labor relations did not disappear in the rest of Argentina. On the contrary, the rapid expansion of capitalist labor relations in the pampas (monetary wages, fixed working hours, specialized tasks, hierarchical organization of production) was paralleled by the relative revival of traditional labor forms (lower wages partly paid in goods, debt peonage, paternalistic relations between employers and workers) in the interior regions of the country. Furthermore, differences between regions not only remained but deepened over time. In this paper we advance an interpretation as to why some old labor relations were reinforced even when they were increasingly engulfed by new market ones. Also, we seek to elucidate how capitalist economy took advantage of the traditional labor relations in place, and which pathways of resistance or integration to this trend were developed by the workers.

The Gendered Serfdom of African Women: The Colonial Agricultural Labor Regime and the Rise of Capitalism Keith Griffler, SUNY Buffalo

The predicament of the African women consigned to subsistence production in the absence of men caught up in migrant labor offers a different lens through which to view the rise of capitalism in early twentieth century sub-Saharan Africa. The experience of African women locates questions of gender as essential to the process of capitalist class formation, and makes women central to the history of capitalism beyond those who made up an early factory proletariat in the West. The colonial production of raw materials for the world market drew men into wage labor only in the same measure that it reorganized subsistence production around the labor of women. Through a combination of the law, tribal organization, and the structure of production, the encroachment of capitalism in Africa tied women to the land across much of the continent

even in the absence of migrating men, bearing a striking resemblance to a peculiar gender-specific quasi-serfdom in some parts. This process simultaneously reveals unexpected parallels to such divergent processes in the history of the black world as the plantation slavery of the Americas and the sharecropping that replaced it—as well as systems of the indentured labor of Indians and Chinese in the Caribbean. Those parallels pose significant challenges for conceptions of forced labor and the capitalist organization of agriculture.

Unfree labor, unpaid work, low-paid salaries and poorest citizens: Agrarian labor world throughout French West Africa Omar Gueye, Cheikh Anta Diop University, Senegal From slavery to the new city life, people of the agrarian world kept being poorest and citizens of second zone, jumping from one non-valuable situation to another. Discussing the Labor Code for the French Oversea’ territories, voted on December 1952, one of the most controversial points was to consider “who is a worker?” In the colonial context of economic exploitation, mostly based on “Forced labor” and “Travail obligatoire” in the name of “Public interest”, the focus was less on human rights or duties than the economic performance of millions of people. By the way, changes did not impacted more the agrarian labor regimes, because the issued Labor Code considered essentially the minority of paid workers in industries instead of the majority of the agrarian world. Using more than 70% of the population, generally employed as laborers in all fields of general economy and enrolled in the army forces, was the key for the success of French colonial system which defended unfree labor and/or low wages, keeping agrarian world to the backside of every economic or social improvement. The generalization of French citizenship to the populations of the territories, among the changes issued from World War II to the time of independence, did not mean a real improvement or radical change in labor regime. The status of the people of agrarian world were still connected to the spatial and social spread of French capitalism in Africa, interested in unfree labor, in colonial area, and low wages, in the area of so-called “neocolonialism”. Economically exploited and politically manipulated, the “new citizens” became a new political strength because of the potential number of voters they represented for politicians interested in conquering the political power. Indeed, that led also to the strength of the one who controlled the agrarian space and its members: the “marabout” or “king of the bush”, a religious guide to whom they were entirely devoted and who became consequently a real businessman and “political entrepreneur”. Therefore, the agrarian world in former French West Africa societies, from the colonial ideology to the Islamic framework, were hardly able to survive the capitalist system, their religious mentor’s authority, the low prices for main products (peanuts, coffee, etc.), the assignments of the Bretton Woods’ institutions and the unrealistic agrarian policies of new governments.

This paper will focus more in a case study of Senegal, a country where almost 80% of the population are non-wage-earning, and deals with 4 hypotheses: (1) Agrarian labor regimes were always tied to slavery conditions; (2) The colonial system could not survive without unfree labor; (3) Because of labor needs, the agrarian labor world, while weakened, remained the key life in African societies, either in colonial or postcolonial areas; (4) Rehabilitating agrarian labor and environmental system is one of the main challenges for needed Africa’ changes for development. Iran’s Changing Agricultural Labor and Production Regimes Eric Hooglund, Professor of Iranian Studies, Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), Lund University, Sweden This paper analyzes how Iran’s production of agriculture has changed from the Qajar dynasty (ca. 1786 to 1925) to the present (Islamic republic). Part I will provide an historical overview of land ownership and the prevalence of sharecropping regimes to manage all phases of cultivation. Part II will examine the extensive land reform program implemented between 1962 and 1971, a policy that aimed to transform the country’s system of agricultural production from one based on sharecropping to one based on capitalism by compelling large landowners to sell part of their holdings to their sharecroppers, who then, in theory, would cease to be subsistence peasants and become profit-seeking farmers. The ideas of James Scott, especially his ‘hidden transcripts of resistance’ among peasants, will provide an overarching theoretical framework for the analysis of agricultural laborers’ responses to the changes in the production regimes that impacted them negatively from the late 18th to the mid-20th centuries. The 1978-79 Revolution that culminated in the creation of the Islamic Republic significantly affected rural Iran, and the diverse impacts will be the focus of Part III. The objective here is to use data gathered during several summers of field research (1996-2005) in villages of Fars province to demonstrate general patterns in the agricultural regime that have emerged as a consequence of deliberate government programs aimed at making Iran self-sufficient in food crops by improving both the quality of rural life—to encourage people to stay in the villages and work in agriculture--and the yield per/hectare of agricultural production. In particular, the paper will assess the degree to which the policies have been successful in raising incomes from agriculture, preserving cultivated land from non-agricultural development, and encouraging innovation in agriculture. Finally, a Conclusion will provide an overall assessment of Iran’s changing agriculture regimes and also draw comparisons with agricultural trends in other Asian countries.

Gendered labour and agrarian reforms: an overview Susie Jacobs, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom This paper focuses on the gendered nature of agrarian labour in the context of land and agrarian reforms of the 20th Century. The tendency to see smallholders and farm workers as male, carries over into agrarian reform programmes despite recent calls for women’s land rights. The paper compares and contrasts land /agrarian reforms carried out within the individual household or family ‘model’ with those allocating land to collective agricultural units. These models are usually compared with reference to their results in terms of agricultural productivity. Collectives have generally [although not always] failed – sometimes disastrously so – whereas smallscale /peasant farming is often cited as increasing, or potentially increasing productivity and alleviating food insecurity. However, these have also had profoundly differing implications for women and for gender relations. Nearly all household model land reforms grant land titles or land permits to the household ‘head’ – almost invariably a male as husband or father. A review of a number of case studies from Africa, Asia, eastern Europe and Latin America indicates that this tends to increase control by the husband, contrary to the democratic aims of redistributionist land reforms. Meanwhile, collective models of agrarian reform took the power to allocate and control family labour from the household and household head to another individual or body and may treat all members, including women, as quasi wage labourers. The paper suggests that women’s labour within smallscale as well as collective agriculture be acknowledged and studied as part of global labour history. The two tea countries: agrarian labor in coastal China and eastern India in the nineteenth century Andrew Liu, History Department, Columbia University My presentation will provide an abbreviated analysis of two agrarian labor regimes that were pitted into direct competition throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the tea industry of eastern India and the tea trade of coastal China. I first provide an explanation for how agrarian labor in the two locales diverged into two radically distinct social arrangements: the paternalistic plantation form in India and the peasant-merchant networks of China. Together, they constituted a theoretical challenge to the classic paradigm of doubly-free labor in Euro-American histories. The core of my paper will explore the emergence of specific labor practices and the attendant key concepts that came to define the two tea countries, as they were dubbed by British capitalists. In the 1880s and nineties, Calcutta writers traveling to Assam treated the plantations as a battleground over “freedom” for the abject coolie, a symbol that helped articulate an

emerging consensus for liberal political and economic rights among nationalist critics. At the same time, Chinese bureaucrats placed the merchant tea trade against the industrial plantation and began to view their own society with new eyes, through the terms of “development” and modernization. Finally, I argue that such concepts aided to obscure analysis of the peasant farm as a social form comparable to the plantation, as an instance of agrarian labor brought under the same world market impulses and demand for tea.

From Veneto to São Paulo: the Global Crisis of Slavery and the Reconfiguration of the Coffee World Market, c.1860-1900 Rafael de Bivar Marquese, University of São Paulo, Brazil

The paper deals with the reconfiguration of the world coffee world market in the second half of the Nineteenth Century. It examines the transformation of the Brazilian agrarian labor regime in the context of the global crisis of slavery that followed the American Civil War. This event was crucial not only to the crisis of slavery in the Western hemisphere, but also for the reorganization of the world coffee market and the beginnings of Italian mass migration to Brazil from the 1880s onward. I examine the patterns of landscape management and labor management employed in the Brazilian coffee plantations under slavery; the impact of the sharecropping experience during the US Reconstruction on Brazilian slave owners; the failure of the project to attract Chinese coolies to Brazilian coffee plantations; the global origins of the Veneto agricultural breakdown in the 1870s and 1880s; finally, the changes in landscape and labor management practices in the São Paulo coffee plantations, under the new colonato labor regime employing Italian laborers.

Subtexts of Servitude: Indentured Indian Labor Regime in British Plantation Colonies Amit Mishra, University of Hyderabad, India For the development of the capitalist order in the nineteenth century and to meet the ever increasing demand for labourers, one critical agrarian labour regime which was initiated through the emigration of Indian labourers under contract to Mauritius, Malaysia, the Caribbean islands, Fiji etc. is known as ‘indentured labour’. This paper will attempt to critically evaluate three intrinsic domains of the indentured Indian labour regime – formation, regulation and transformation in order to explicate how this labour regime contributed in expansion and consolidation of the British colonial hegemony and capitalist economic interests in several parts of the world during 19th and early 20th century. By portraying the big picture of the indentured Indian labour regime, this paper makes an attempt to modify the static mould of analysis so to capture the dynamic arrays in making, managing and make over of these agrarian labour regimes after abolition of slavery. In terms of larger reflective deliberation, this paper attempts to address the intriguing complexities of global circulation of labour, capital and commodities which were regulated by

urges and ambitions of the colonial capitalist order. This intends to problematize the uneven global integration of predominantly colonial rural economies into colonial capitalist plantation economies vis-à-vis the industrialised, capitalist metropolis through the ambit of indentured labour regime.

Land Tenure Practices, Cash-Crops Cultivation and Transformations in Agrarian Labor Regimes in the Countryside: A Case-Study of Rural South-Western Nigeria 1880-1990 Remijius Friday Obinta, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. Nigeria The thesis of this research was that there were transformations in the agrarian labor regimes in the countryside of South-western Nigeria beginning from about 1880. It equally held that these transformations, which emanated from the introduction of cash crops, further resulted in the changes and modifications in the pre-colonial land-tenure practices in the study area. It finally held that the introduction and growth of cash crops in the area was a response to the demands of the global capitalist market which resulted from the industrial revolution. The findings of the study were that: the transformations in the agrarian labor regimes in South-western Nigeria were not peculiar or isolated developments but local variants of a global phenomenon. South-western Nigeria had a land-surplus economy in the pre-colonial times. Land had no commercial value before cash crops were introduced. Land was communally owned and each member had access to a parcel of it for tillage on demand. Any allocated but unused land reverted to the community for reallocation. With the introduction of cash crops, agrarian labor regimes became transformed or modified. Two categories of modifications obtained. Ife and Ibadan cash-cropping villages introduced the options of leasing, share-cropping, wage labor, pawning, but refused land alienation or propertied farming. All the above options equally obtained in Ondo rural communities (an area in South-western Nigeria), but in addition, the option of sale of land or propertied farming existed. This served as a pull factor in labor migration. Ife and Ibadan farmers migrated to Ondo and many of them became propertied farmers. The study concluded that South-western Nigeria was not left behind in the global transformations of the agrarian labor regimes over the past 250 years. It further concluded that the introduction of cash crops into the countryside of South-western Nigeria transformed agrarian labor regime in the area and integrated it into the global capitalist market and its overwhelming influences. Continental Contract Labor Regimes: The Formation and Indispensability of Agricultural Contract Labor Across Canada, Mexico, and the United States (1909 to 2000) Luis F.B. Plascencia, Arizona State University Presidents William H. Taft and Porfirio Díaz’s meeting in 1909 is not only important because of its foreign relations value as the first meeting of the two executives, it also marks the start of a

continental agricultural labor regime that emerged and remains in place. Over the past century the labor needs of Canada and the United States have been linked to Mexico’s ability to supply those needs. The essay examines the institutionalization of the continental agricultural labor regime through a discussion of the 1909 agreement, the World War I “Bracero Program” (1917-1921), the World War II “Bracero Program” (1942-1965), the temporary migrant agricultural contract labor that began in 1952 and continues to the present (first as the H-2 program, and later as the H-2A program), and the 1974 Canada-Mexico agreement under Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Famine and the Transition from Slave Labor to Free Labor in Northern Nilotic Sudan, 1898-1930 Steven Serels, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University Famine and food insecurity played a crucial role in the expansion and, ultimate, collapse of plantation slavery in Northern Nilotic Sudan under Anglo-Egyptian rule in early twentieth century. Conventional histories of slavery and abolition in twentieth century Sudan assert that British imperial agents, working through the Anglo-Egyptian state, were committed to ending the slave trade from the outset but only began to make a concerted effort to end slavery in the late 1920s. However, this study reveals that, during the formative early years of Anglo-Egyptian rule, officials were complicit in both the maintenance of slavery and the slave trade. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Anglo-Egyptian officials sought to address persistent food insecurity by working with indigenous cultivators to rebuild the slave plantation system that had collapsed during the Mahdist Rebellion (1883-1898). Between 1897 and 1913, procedures and protocols established by senior Anglo-Egyptian officials allowed Sudanese cultivators to increase the size of the male agricultural slave population in Northern Nilotic Sudan by an estimated 80,000 men. Nonetheless, food insecurity persisted. Certain early twentieth century innovations in the Sudanese economy, notably the increased availability of high interest loans and the expanding consumption of imported luxury goods such as sugar, reduced cultivators’ profits and increased vulnerability to food crises. Though conventional accounts link the decline of slavery in Sudan to abolitionist policies adopted by the Anglo-Egyptian government in the late 1920s, this study demonstrates that food insecurity played a crucial role in ending the widespread use of agricultural slaves in Northern Nilotic Sudan. During devastating famines in 1914 and 1918-9 slave owners were unable to feed their slaves and thousands of slaves self-manumitted by fleeing to the south. The loss of this labor prevented Sudanese cultivators from recovering after the famines had abated. In the years that followed, poor cultivators remained unable to provide for their slaves and, as a result, the slave exodus continued. Cultivators replaced lost slave labor with free family labor, which proved insufficient to maintain the intensity of cultivation. By the time Anglo-Egyptian officials turned their attention to ending Sudanese slavery in the late 1920s,

Northern Nilotic Sudan had ceased to be a major supplier of grain to Sudanese markets and slave labor had ceased to be a factor in agricultural production in the region. Law, Resistance and Pathways of Exit from Agrarian Labor Regimes Adrian A Smith, Carleton University, Canada The global transformation of agrarian labor regimes is often recounted without due consideration of the impact of the forces of law. What can critical socio-legal analysis teach us about the role of labor controls within agrarian regimes? How might this inform a wider understanding of the ʻconnected historiesʼ of nineteenth and twentieth century regimes (and regime change) in the Americas? The paper engages the role of law, the state and resistance in changes within labor regimes within global agriculture. Taking a case studies approach, the piece examines nineteenth-century sugar production in Trinidad, with a view toward the transition between slavery and indentureship, and middle to late twentieth century migrant horticultural production in Canada. It uses the analytic of pathways or processes of exit to characterize how the state deploys law to organize worker resistance struggles. Organized through processes of exit, the state seeks to channel resistance in ways that legitimate certain behaviors over others. While this insight fills out our understanding, the account must be widened to confront the socio-spatial development of capitalism as it transformed the global countryside. I attempt to do so in the context of socio-legal historical analysis. Nomadism, Migration and Seasonal Labor: Ottoman Anatolian Cotton Production in the Age of Industrialization Meltem Toksöz, Boğaziçi University, Turkey

This paper compares labor regimes in Ottoman Anatolian cotton producing regions at the end of the 19th century. In the age of textile industry, one such region, Cilicia radically transforms into a major cotton producer, not uncomparable to Egypt, and leads Ottoman exports. My research reveals that this success of Cilicia stems from its complicated regional history: One of the most interesting elements of the making of one such Ottoman region, is the multiplicity of labor regimes that emerged through commercial cotton production at a major scale: wage labor, share-cropping and two waves of temporally and spatially (eastern tribal and Armenian seasonal migration) distinct seasonal labors. This came as a result of a complex and uneven network of people shaped by multiple arrangements among international, Ottoman central, regional and local agendas of the evolving political, social and economic circuits they managed. At the center was the patterns and types of labor that reflect socio-agrarian systems in such rural landscapes in comparison to other regions of Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean, as well as to the rest of the cotton producing world.

Into their labors: peasant frontiers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Towards a comparative and global perspective Eric Vanhaute, University of Ghent, Belgium The gradual incorporation of vast rural zones in the last few centuries has subjugated, transformed, and sometimes (re)created peasantries. It has put increasing pressure on their base of existence through the alteration of peasant access to their essential means of production, land, labor, and capital. However, we cannot understand the position of the rural zones in the modern world in a singular manner. Peasantries over the world have followed different trajectories of change and have developed divergent repertoires of adaptation and resistance. This paper proposes a comparative and global model that aims to understand the divergent paths of peasant transformation in modern world history. It develops the notion of peasant frontiers, zones of action and interaction that have fuelled the diversification of work and income strategies that always have been part of peasant survival strategies. This research framework, based on four interrelated research projects, allows us to interpret divergent ways of peasant transformation and labor organization, related to different patterns of internal social structures and different patterns of external incorporation. The paper evaluates, rethinks and discusses the huge transformation processes that have reshaped the former and existing rural worlds; how the modern world has entered ‘into their labors’. Agrarian Labor? Contrasting Indigo Production in Colonial India and Indonesia Willem van Schendel, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands This paper interrogates the usefulness of the category of ‘agrarian labor’ in understanding historical trajectories of rural production. Where does agricultural production end and crop processing begin? Does it make sense to call rural agro-industrial labor ‘agrarian’? How does our conceptualisation of ‘agrarian regimes’ affect our understanding of connected historical change in the global countryside? The paper explores these questions by contrasting two successful attempts to embed export-oriented production systems into agrarian regimes in Asia: indigo production in Bengal (British India, 1790s to 1910s) and Java (Netherlands East Indies, 1820s to 1910s). Both production systems had to adapt to pre-existing rural labor regimes because colonial state policies blocked outright dispossession of peasant producers and the creation of capitalist enclaves. This resulted in labor relations that straddled the agricultural and agro-industrial spheres in locally distinct ways.