Labor Systems

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521812894.008

6 - Labor Systems

from Part II - Natural Resources and Factor Endowments

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

John Monteiro

Edited by

Victor Bulmer-Thomas ,

John Coatsworth and

Roberto Cortes-Conde

Show author details

John Monteiro: Affiliation:
Universidade Estadual de Campinas

Book contents

Get access

Summary

Historians have long recognized that the development and transformation of labor systems played a key role in Iberian expansion to the New World, with long-term effects on postcolonial Latin American economies, societies, and cultures. Much of the modern analytical literature hinges on particular understandings of the nexus between labor supply and colonial extraction, often underscoring the importance of extraeconomic coercion as a necessary condition for the large-scale transfer of economic surplus from the Americas to Europe. Over the past quarter century, however, serious challenges to earlier dependency, modes-of-production, and world-systems approaches have introduced a considerable shift in focus, revealing an increasingly diverse agenda of issues and evidence. The new composite picture that emerges, although far from denying the significance of colonial extraction or of extraeconomic coercion in shaping labor arrangements, sheds light on complex regional systems enveloping distinct practices and institutions, whose overlapping and interconnected existence lays to rest the conventional schema of a linear, evolutionary sequence from early forms of compulsory service to a full-fledged wage labor market.

In redirecting attention to local, regional, and interregional labor and commodity markets, current historiographical trends have introduced important new perspectives on the factors determining patterns of labor recruitment and management. Differences in indigenous social structures, political institutions, and cultural practices constitute an important staring point. Not only did precolonial institutions in many cases play a central role in shaping distinct outcomes, but also postconquest transformations within indigenous polities and societies placed constraints on entrepreneurial options and influenced colonial institutional development. Population change was an important part of this panorama, first through the more obvious effects that the demographic collapse had on the labor supply, and subsequently through patterns of forced and voluntary migration, which have been the subject of a growing number of studies.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America , pp. 185 - 234

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521812894.008 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Abercrombie, Thomas, Pathways of Memory and Power (Madison, WI, 1998).Google Scholar

Alencastro, Luiz Felipe, O Trato dos Viventes (São Paulo, 2000).Google Scholar

Arrom, Silvia, The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857 (Stanford, CA, 1985).Google Scholar

Bauer, Arnold, “Rural Workers in Spanish America: Problems of Peonage and Oppression,” Hispanic American Historical Review 59, 1 (1979).CrossRef Google Scholar

Bergad, Laird, García, Fe Iglesias, and Barcia, María del Carmen, The Cuban Slave Market, 1790-1880 (Cambridge, 1995).CrossRef Google Scholar

Berlin, Ira and Morgan, Philip, eds., The Slave Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas (London, 1991).Google Scholar

Cole, Jeffrey, The Potosí Mita, 1500–1700 (Stanford, CA, 1985).Google Scholar

Cope, R. Douglas, The Limits of Racial Domination (Madison, WI, 1994).Google Scholar

Florescano, Enrique, “La formación de los trabajadores en la época colonial, 1521–1750,” in Florescano, E. et al., eds., La clase obrera en la historia de México: De la Colonia al Imperio (Mexico City, 1980)Google Scholar

Galenson, David, Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America (Cambridge, 1986)CrossRef Google Scholar

Garner, Richard, “Prices and Wages in Eighteenth-Century Mexico,” in Johnson, Lyman and Tandeter, Enrique, eds., Essays on the Price History of Eighteenth-Century Latin America (Albuquerque, NM, 1990).Google Scholar

Gibson, Charles, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule (Stanford, CA, 1964).Google Scholar

Hünefeldt, Christine, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima’s Slaves, 1800-1854 (Berkeley, CA, 1994).Google Scholar

Jacobsen, Nils, Mirages of Transition: The Peruvian Altiplano, 1780–1930 (Berkeley, CA, 1993).Google Scholar

Johnson, Lyman, “Slave and Free Labor in Buenos Aires, 1770–1815,” International Review of Social History 40 (1995).CrossRef Google Scholar

Klein, Herbert, Haciendas and Ayllus (Stanford, CA, 1993).Google Scholar

Knight, Franklin, “Slavery and Lagging Capitalism in the Spanish and Portuguese American Empires, 1492–1713,” in Solow, B., ed., Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge, 1991).Google Scholar

Langer, Erick, “The Barriers to Proletarianization: Bolivian Mine Labour, 1826–1918,” International Review of Social History 41 (1996).CrossRef Google Scholar

Langue, Frédérique, “Trabajadores y formas de trabajo en las minas zacatecanas del siglo XVIII,” Historia Mexicana 40, 3 (1991).Google Scholar

Larson, Brooke, “Introduction,” in Larson, Brooke and Harris, Olivia, eds., Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes (Durham, NC, 1995).Google Scholar

Nickel, Herbert J., Relaciones de trabajo en las haciendas de Puebla y Tlaxcala (1740–1914) (Mexico City, 1987).Google Scholar

Reis, João José, “‘The Revolution of the Ganhadores’: Urban Labour, Ethnicity and the African Strike of 1857 in Bahia, Brazil,” Journal of Latin American Studies 29 (1997).CrossRef Google Scholar

Schlomovitz, Ralph, “Forced Labor: An Overview,” in Drescher, Seymour and Engerman, Stanley, eds., A Historical Guide to World Slavery (Oxford, 1998).Google Scholar

Simpson, Lesley B., The Encomienda in New Spain, rev. ed. (Berkeley, CA, 1966).Google Scholar

Stern, Steve, “Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean,” in Cooper, Frederick et al., eds., Confronting Historical Paradigms (Madison, WI, 1993).Google Scholar

Stern, Steve, Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest, rev. ed. (Madison, WI, 1993).Google Scholar

Wightman, Ann, Indigenous Migration and Social Change (Durham, NC, 1990).CrossRef Google Scholar

Wright, Gavin, The Political Economy of the Cotton South (New York, 1978).Google Scholar

Young, Eric, “The Age of Paradox: Mexican Agriculture at the End of the Colonial Period, 1750–1810,” in Jacobsen, N. and Puhle, H.-J., eds., The Economies of Mexico and Peru during the Late Colonial Period, 1760–1810 (Berlin, 1986).Google Scholar

Zulawski, Ann, They Eat from Their Labor: Work and Social Change in Colonial Bolivia (Pittsburgh, PA, 1995)Google Scholar