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.
Ivn 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 Zegaches economy
despite the fact that Zegacheos and Zegacheas relation to land has been transformed since
the implementation of the Mexican post-revolutionary agrarian reform and the increased in
Zegacheos and Zegacheas involvement with urban and global economies. In this article I
will analyze how Zegaches agrarian labor regime has been reshaped by the Mexican postrevolutionary 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 Zegacheos and Zegacheas. 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 identitya reified Indian cultureand, 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 genderspecific 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 itas 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
mentors 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.

Irans 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 Irans 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 countrys 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 lifeto 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 Irans
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 womens 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 womens 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 EuroAmerican 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 So Paulo: the Global Crisis of Slavery and the Reconfiguration of the
Coffee World Market, c.1860-1900
Rafael de Bivar Marquese, University of So 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
So 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--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 Dazs 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 Mexicos 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 (19171921), 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 Canadas 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
connected histories 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 Toksz, Boazii 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, sharecropping 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 agroindustrial spheres in locally distinct ways.