Foundations of Modern Slavery

Profiles of Unfree and Coerced Labor Through the Ages

Caf Dowlah

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000407396
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Economia
• Sous-sujet: Economia del lavoro

This is an academic inquiry into how labor power has been dehumanized and commodified around the world through the ages for capital accumulation and industrialization, and colonial and post-colonial economic transformation. The study explores all major episodes of slaveries beginning from the ancient civilizations to the end of Transatlantic Slave Trade in the eighteenth century; the worlds of serfdoms in the context of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Russia; the worlds of feudalisms in the context of Latin America, Japan, China, and India; the worlds of indentured servitudes in the context of the Europeans, the Indians, and the Chinese; the worlds of guestworkers in the contexts of the United States and Western Europe; the worlds of migrant labor programs in the context of the Gulf States; and the contemporary world of neoslavery focusing on human trafficking in both developing and developed countries, and forced labor in global value chains.

The book is designed not only for students and academia in labor economics, labor history, and global socio-economic and political transformations, but also for the intelligent and inquiring policy makers, reformers, and general readers across the disciplinary pursuits of Economics, Political Science, History, Sociology, Anthropology, and Law.

1 Introduction

The world of coerced labor

DOI: 10.4324/9781003160182-1

Some of the most enduring questions of intellectual inquiry into human labor center around the terms and arrangements under which the labor-power—the physical and mental capacities of a natural person required for production of goods and services—has been deployed, and how the fruits/outputs of labor have been split between laborers—the owners of labor-power, and the entrepreneurs—the owners of capital.

This book addresses the first question—the terms and arrangements under which labor-power has been extracted throughout the history, and it does so by focusing on coerced labor—the labor-power obtained without workers’ consent, that is, by restraining the freedom of mobility of workers and inflicting physical and/or psychological coercion on them.

Historical records suggest that coerced labor has been the most dominant mode of labor transaction all the world over and in all ages. Conversely, free labor—labor-power obtained through free consent of the laborer, without involving psychological or physical coercion—has been the road less traveled. Slavery, the most extreme of coerced labor, had indeed not been ‘the peculiar institution,’¹ it was free wage-labor that had rather been unusual in the world history (Engerman 1986, 318).

Coerced labor and human civilizations have indeed advanced hand-in-hand, and the predominance of such labor not only has increased further with almost all watershed episodes in the human history, but also thrived the most in those areas where conventional wisdom would have expected them the least (Davis 2006; Patterson 1982, xi).

Much of the prolonged saga of coerced labor has to do with the freedom of human being itself. More than 95 percent of the global population was in shackles even at the time of the American Revolution (1776). Out of the 775 million people on the face of the earth in 1772, only 33 million, less than four percent, were free (Young 1772).² All peoples across all of Asia and Africa and most of the Americas, and Southern and Eastern Europe, barring only those who lived in Western Europe, were considered unfree (Drescher 1987, 17).

As a result, until the end of the eighteenth century, most of the workers throughout the world had to surrender their personal freedom either temporarily or permanently to make a living (Potts 1990), and deliver unfree, involuntary, and coerced labor-power as slaves, serfs, coolies, raiyats, fiefs, bonded labor, indentured labor, and so on (Dowlah 2019).

A Panoramas of coerced labor

Among the various forms of coerced labor that had coiled the surface of the earth, slavery involved the most extreme form of coercion, dehumanization, and commodification of human labor, and worse still, such abominable deployment of labor has been around since the ancient times. All ancient civilizations—the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Indians, and the Chinese—practiced slavery extensively. Some of the great wonders of the ancient civilizations, such as the Great Pyramids and the Great China Wall, were also built with slave labor.

All medieval empires and kingdoms—no matter European, African, Asian, Ottoman, Chinese, or Japanese—also used slave labor quite expansively. Many of the panoramic medieval churches, cathedrals, mosques, and synagogues were built with slave labor as well. Indeed, all major religions—no matter Islam, Christianity, or Judaism—validated, even harbored, slavery in one form or another, at one stage or another (Davis 2006, 55–56).

Slave-labor has also received ringing philosophical validation throughout history. Greek philosopher Aristotle viewed the relationship between a master and a slave as natural as the relationship between body and soul, and his mentor, Plato, viewed slavery as a part of a vast cosmic scheme of irrational nature ordered and controlled by an intelligent and purposeful authority (Davis 2006, 55; Lord 2013).

Similar views were expressed by many philosophers of Renaissance—from David Hume (1711–1776) to Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) to Montesquieu (1689–1755). Even John Locke (1632–1704), the father of Liberal Democracy, who championed ‘inalienable rights of man to life, liberty, and property,’ was a staunch defender of slavery—he was actually an investor in the Royal African Company that sponsored the Transatlantic Slave Trade that brought more than 12 million African slaves to the American shores (Fogel and Engerman 1974, 5–6).

The African slavery that flourished in the Americas during the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries had been the most powerful manifestation of institutionalized and commodified slave labor in the world history (Blackburn 1988, 20–31; Fogel 1989). Thousands of books and papers have been written on the African slavery, and many more are on the pipeline at any given moment in time.

The African slavery brought together four continents across the Atlantic—European colonizers procured and shipped African slaves to deploy in North and South American plantations in a scale and magnitude that the world had never seen before. The system not only involved awfully arduous transoceanic navigations of millions of slaves, but also required massive coordination of activities involving numerous populations, governments, and transnational businesses across several continents (Drescher 1987).

The slavery of black Africans in the New World had also been epitomized as ‘chattel slavery’—the ultimate form of human degradation designed

to creating wealth for their masters. Not only the chattel slaves were personal property of their masters, but the ownership rights extended to the slaves’ descendants as well (Finley 1968, 307), and the masters’ domination over the slaves’ lives resulted in ‘social and cultural death’ and ‘perpetual condition of dishonor’ of the slaves from which the slaves had no legitimate exit (Patterson 1982, 106–107).

At the time of the American Revolution, at least 20 percent of America’s population were black and at least 90 percent of them were slaves (Archdeacon 1983, 25), and manifold more were in shackles in Latin America and the Caribbean (Castles and Davidson 2000).

The overriding intellectual focus on the African slavery for many decades, although well-deserved, has resulted in overshadowing of another large-scale slavery that occurred in the post-Columbian world—that of the indigenous populations that inhabited the New World when Christopher Columbus set his foot on the soils of the Bahamas. The exact number of the Amerindian population of that time is still unknown, but a ‘consensus estimate’ puts the number at around 54 million, which shrunk to 1.5 million by 1850 (Denevan 1992; Stannard 1993).³

Such a catastrophic decline of the Amerindian population had traditionally been attributed to ‘virgin soil pandemic’—European diseases such as smallpox, influenza, and malaria—but recent research suggests that such claims may be grossly exaggerated, and slavery and subjugation might have played a significant role in the debacle (Resendez 2016; Wright 2017).

Although the scale and magnitude of the Amerindian slavery and subjugation still remains controversial, there is no dispute that the servitude of the nomadic Amerindians was the first large-scale exploitation of foreign workers for capitalistic accumulation by the European colonial powers outside Europe (Blackburn 1988, 5–31). Studies also suggest that the episode not only far exceeded that of the black Africans in terms of both scale and magnitude (Churchill 1994), but also served as the preliminary stage in the development of the Transatlantic Slave Trade that followed (Potts 1990, 16).

More importantly, the saga had not only powerfully impacted the lives of the Amerindians, but also shaped the very nature of European colonialization, empire building, and capitalistic developments of the world economy since the fifteenth century (Gallay 2009, 2–3).

Serfdoms/feudalisms

Feudalism, another prominent variant of coerced labor that generally involved less inhuman treatment of labor than in slavery and owed its origin to the ancient Greek state of Sparta, staged a comeback in Western Europe in the third century after the decline of the Roman Empire. Mitigating some of the harsher traits of slavery, the system known in Europe as serfdom, manifested in various forms of manorialism and seignorialism, entailing conditions of debt bondage, indentured servitude, or outright servitude or subjection of peasants (Fogel 1989).

Serfdom eventually emerged as the base of economic and political superstructures throughout Western Europe before succumbing to the forces of the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and the Napoleonic Invasion in the mid-eighteenth century (Rostovtzeff 1926). Under this system, peasants were personally and legally free, while they tilled the land at the pleasure of their landlords whose rights were well-protected by the state. Peasants were, however, neither slaves nor personal possessions of their landlords, and serfs were hardly sold apart from their land (Kolchin 1997).

Coinciding with the demise of serfdom in the Western Europe, a ‘second serfdom’ emerged in the Eastern Europe and the Imperial Russia during the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, which survived until the 1860s. In contrast to Western Europe, where serfdom spread due to the policies of individual overlords, in Eastern Europe and Russia, serfdom resulted from a series of governmental decrees that forbade peasants from leaving the jurisdiction or territory of their landlords, and some of these decrees granted landlords legal, juridical, executive, and police powers over the peasants (Anderson 1974, 258–263; Blum 1957, 814–815).

As a result, in many parts of Eastern Europe and Russia, peasants lost their freedom almost completely—even they could be bought and sold like slaves. By the second half of the eighteenth century, serf-masters’ power in Eastern Europe and Russia hardly differed from that of the slave-masters in the antebellum South, and material lives of serfs were barely different from that of the chattel slaves in the Americas (Engerman 1986).

Some Asiatic societies, such as Japan, China, and India, also had some variants of feudalism, often described as semi-feudalism, which entailed a land-tenure system under which monarchs/rulers granted an expanse of land to landlords, nobles, or vassals, under the condition of their loyalty and service to the rulers. Among the Asian variants of feudalism, only the case of Japanese shogunate is widely considered to be a mirror image of Western European serfdom (Anderson 1974).

Just as Western European serfdom emerged from the wreckage of the land-tenure system of the Roman Empire, the Japanese system also emerged from the land-tenure system left by the Chinese Empire (Reischauer and Jansen 1995), and like the Western European feudalism, Japanese feudalism also was characterized by vassalage, fiefs, fragmentation of political authority, and remarkable transformation of predominantly agrarian economy toward urbanization, commercialization, and protoindustrialization under the feudal system (Coulborn 1956; Hall 1970).

The Chinese variant of feudalism—known as fengjian—however, remains highly controversial. Some scholars trace the origin of the syste...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: the world of coerced labor
• Part I The world of slaveries
• Part II The world of serfdoms
• Part III The world of Asian and Latin American feudalisms
• Part IV The world of indentured servitudes
• Part V The world of guestworkers
• Part VI Neoslavery in the twenty-first century
• Index