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Social Organization of Work and Labour Conflicts in Proto-Industrial Iron Production in Sweden, Belgium and Russia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 February 2009
Extract
There exists no such thing as a single mode for the social organization of proto-industrial iron production, but a number of alternative ways. In the following article the dominance of one or another mode is viewed as dependent on its societal context, and not least on the social relations of the rural world. Each mode of organization had its own peculiarities and generated its own contradictions and conflicts.
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- Research Article
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- International Review of Social History , Volume 39 , supplement S2: Before the Unions. Wage earners and collective action in Europe, 1300–1850 , August 1994 , pp. 83 - 113
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- Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1994
References
1 The comparison between Russia and Sweden is mainly based on discussions within a comparative project with Swedish and Russian historians. This means that many of the references are made to manuscripts which are so far unpublished. A conclusive Volume is, however, under preparation.
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27 M. Caulier-Mathy, “Les maîtres de forges wallons contre la loi impe'riale sur les mines, première phase”, in La siddrurgie, p. 38. The pits were holes with a diameter of some 3 or 4 feet, which during bad weather were covered. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a French mining engineer remarked that the sight of the mining areas most of all reminded him of a military camp filled with tents. Damin, A.-M., “La métallurgie dans le Namurois 1764–1814. Etude économique et sodale” (unpublished dissertation, Université Catholique de Louvain, 1967), p. 263Google Scholar.
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35 Masoin, “Les privilèges”, pp. 49, 56. This caused problems of demarcation with the ordinary jurisdiction. In 1614 it was complained that the workers committed crimes and excesses but refused to submit to ordinary justice, proclaiming their medieval corporate Privileges. See Lahaye, P., Inventaire analythique de pièces et documents contenus dans la correspondence du conseil provincial (Namur, 1892), p. 221Google Scholar.
36 Such a central administration was first organized during the French rule over the Belgian territory in the beginning of the nineteenth century and it must be underlined that the creation of the Bureau des Artes et Manufactures also was a novelty for the French iron industry. Woronoff, L'industrie sidérurgique, p. 40. On the industrial policy and iron production in France during the earlier period, see P. Léon, “Réflexions sur la sidérurgie Française à I'époque ante-colbertienne (1500–1650)”, in Kellenbenz, Schwerpunkte der Eisengewinnung. For the policy in Walloonia see Hasquin, H., “Les intendants et la centralisation administrative dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles”, Anciens Pays et Assemblées d'Etats, vol. XVII (Brussels, 1968)Google Scholar; Moureaux, P., Les Préoccupations Statistiques du Gouvernement des Pays-Bas Autrichiens (Brussels, 1971), pp. 41ff.Google Scholar; Soly, H., “Social Aspects of Structural Changes in the Urban Industries of Eighteenth-Century Brabant and Flanders”, in van der Wee, H. (ed.), The Rise and Decline of Urban Industries in Italy and in the Low Countries (Louvain, 1989), p. 243Google Scholar.
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42 The Swedish traveller Daniel Tilas gave a colourful description of the immense works at Systerbeck in Russian Ingermanland with its seventeen workshops among which the establishment for the production of sword-blades alone took up eighteen hearths in a line. According to Tilas the plant daily employed 500 workers; however, he also remarked that the works were only activated when the Tsar wanted to show the establishment to foreign visitors in order to “prove to foreigners that Russia also owned such establishments”. D. Tilas, “Kort beskrivning om en inom ryska gränsen gjord resa 4/2–6/4 1738”, unpublished manuscript in the archives of the Board of Mines, at the Royal Archives in Stockholm.
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61 Karlsson, Järnbruken, ch. VI.
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64 Floren and Rydèn, Arbete hushàll och region, pp. 76–77.
65 Florèn, A., “Patterns of Crime, Protest and Conflict in the Nora and Linde Mining Region 1650–1720”, paper presented at the third meeting on iron making in Russia and Sweden before the twentieth century, Yekaterinenburg, 1993Google Scholar. The picture that John Rule and John Styles have given of the dominance of these type of tensions and conflicts in the eighteenth-century English putting-out industries and proto-factories then holds true also for the Swedish iron industry. Styles, “Embezzlement”; Rule, J., The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-century Industry (London, 1981), p. 125Google Scholar.
66 Karlsson, Järnbruken, p. 152; Florèn, “Patterns of Crime”, p. 12.
67 Florèn, “Patterns of Crime”, p. 4.
68 Even if the courts thus were not able to act as proto-trade unions, they obviously could fulfil other functions for the corporation of master forgemen. In the courts a system of poor relief for the masters and their widows was built up. The control of the masters' skill and competence was, beside being in the interest of the state and ironmaster as a form of quality control, also in the interest of the masters as a token of their exclusive position in the hierarchy of workers.
69 Quoted from Florèn, “Klasskamp utan fackförening”, p. 109.
70 Florén, A., Disciplinering och konflikt. Den sodala organiseringen av arbetet, Jäders Bruk 1640–1750 (Uppsala, 1987), p. 134Google Scholar.
71 Florèn, “Klasskamp utan fackförening”, pp. 14–16.
72 Disciplinering och konflikt, pp. 205–209.
73 ibid., p. 104.
74 Ibid., pp. 180–183.
75 Pirotte, La terre de Durby, pp. 195–215; Dorban, M., “Trois siécles de consommation forestiére dans le duchè de Luxembourg 1500–1830”, in Woronoff, D. (ed.), Rèvolution et Espace Forestiers (Paris, 1987), pp. 110–112. The same sort of conflicts were evident in the iron districts in France and was further complicated by the competition between the ironworks and the urban centres, notably Paris. Paris was, unlike the urban centres in Holland and the northern part of the Netherlands, unwilling to change its fuel technology from wood to coal. J. Bosstère, “La consommation parisienne de bois et les sidèrurgies pèriphèriques: essai de mise en paralléle (milieu XVe-milieu XIXe siécles)”, in Woronoff, Forges et Fôrets, p. 29. Complaints over the ironmasters' acquisition of wood and charcoal also was a common theme in the cahiers de doèance during the French Revolution. A. Brosselin et al., “Les dolèances contre l'industrie”, in Woronoff, Forges et Fôrets, p. 11Google Scholar.
76 Piret, “Fortunes et Groupes Sodaux”, p. 150.
77 Hansotte, La métallurgie, p. 71.
78 Dorban, M., “Le dénombrement du Luxembourg en 1766. Essai critique historique et statistique: le cas du décanat d'Yvoix-Carignan”, Pays Gaumais (1971–1972), p. 62Google Scholar. That master forgemen were active on the market for land is also apparent in Backlund, Sweden. J., Rusthållarna i Felingsbro 1684–1748, Indelningsverket och den sociala differenderingen av det svenska agrarsamhället (Uppsala, 1993), p. 157Google Scholar.
79 Dorban, “La sidérurgie Luxembourgeoise”, pp. 31–32.
80 The exception being the problem that Abbot Nicolas Spirlet had with the workers at his furnace, forge and foundry in St Hubert. Evrard, Dotn Nicolas Spirlet, p. 29.
81 Woronoff, L'industrie sidérurgique, p. 192.
82 Maybe this problem could have been solved by the workers' constituting family groups inside the factory organization. Sons often followed their fathers' choice of profession, thus, as in Sweden, creating a sort of hereditary aristocracy of skilled workers at the ironworks (Piret, “Fortunes et Groupes Sociaux”, p. 206; Leboutte, La Grosse Forge Wallonne, p. 50). As the Swedish historian Göran Rydén has clearly shown, the household of the master forgeman was the basic element for establishing the work crew in the Swedish forge (Rydén, “Iron Production and the Household”, pp. 18–23). Denis Woronoff has discussed the same type of phenomena in late eighteenth-century France. The influence °f the workers' household over the composition of the crews, he underlines, sharply restricted the ironmasters' possibility to direct the employment of personnel in the work-shops; the family functioned as a “véritable bureau de placements” (Woronoff, L'industrie sidérurgique, p. 161).
83 Damin, La métallurgie dans le Namurois, pp. 151–152.
84 LeBrun, P., L'industrie de la laine a Verviers (Liège, 1948), p. 285Google Scholar. See also Soly, “Social Aspects”, p. 247; C. M. Truant, “Independent and Insolent: Journeymen and Their Rites in the Old Regime Workplace”, in Kaplan and Koepp, Work in France, p. 132.
85 Hansotte, La clouterie liégeoise, p. 16.
86 Lindström, D., Skrå Stad och Stat. Stockholm, Malmö och Bergen ca 1350–1622 (Uppsala, 1991), p. 23Google Scholar.
87 Hansotte, La clouterie liégeoise, p. 57.
88 Ibid., p. 73.
89 The role played by rebellious or revolutionary trends in the surrounding society seems important also in order to comprehend the workers' strikes at the late eighteenth-century French ironworks. That these workers had maintained their contacts with the surrounding rural society and that the patriarchal ironwork society did not take the form of an enclosed monad, was, following Woronoff, crucial for their capability to perceive and take part in these general political occurrences. Woronoff, L'indtutrie sidérurgique, p. 201.
90 Portal, L'Oural, pp. 46, 271.
91 Shkerin, V. A., “The Process of Adoption and Social Conflicts at the Mining and Ironworks in the Urals during the Feudal Period”, unpublished paper at the snd meeting on iron making in Russia and Sweden before the twentieth century, Uppsala, 1992, p. 4Google Scholar. V. A. Shkerin, “Rebellious Crowds in Social Conflicts at the Ural Private Works in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century”, in Metallurgical Works, pp. 266–270.
92 Minenko, N. A. and Pobereznikov, I. V., “The Interaction of Industry and Agricultural Environment”, unpublished paper at the third meeting on iron making in Russia and Sweden before the twentieth century, Yekaterinenburg, 1993, p. 3Google Scholar.
93 The document is published in Dmytryshyn, B. (ed.), Imperial Russia: A Source Book, 1700–1917 (Portland, 1974), p. 96Google Scholar. The opposition during the eighteenth century also found its expressions in popular culture. One song, for example, described the prison-like conditions at the Demidov works.
A l'usine Demidov
Le travail est pénible
Ah! oui, le travail est pénible!
Hélas! nos dos nous font mal!
On nous met dans une usine, un bagne
Et on ne nous laisse pas sortir […]
(Quoted from Portal, L'Oural, p. 289)
94 Portal, R., “Manufactures et classes sociales en Russie au XVIIIe siécle”, Revue historique (1949), p. 349Google Scholar
95 Portal, R., “The Industrialisation of Russia”, in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. VI–2 (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 812–814Google Scholar. However, Thomas Esper also points to the positive economic effects that the abolition of serfdom had for the ironworks by nullifying the costs of the patriarchal cares. Esper, “The Incomes of Russian Serf Ironworkers”, p. 156.
96 Portal, L'Oural, pp. 294–295.
97 For a similar development in Bohemia see Myska, “Pre-industrial Iron Making”, p. 53.
98 Woolf, S., “Introduction”, in Woolf, S. (ed.), Domestic Strategies: Work and Family in France and Italy 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
99 Levine, D. and Wrightson, K., The Making of an Industrial Society, Whickham 1560–1765 (Oxford, 1991), p. 110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
100 Kriedte, P., “Proto-industrialization between Industrialization and De-industrialization”, in Kriedte, P., Medick, H. and Schlumbohm, J., Industrialization before Industrialization (Cambridge, 1981), p. 136Google Scholar. Or perhaps rather with D. C. Coleman's quite ironical reformulation of the concept, the deproto-industrialization. Coleman, D. C., “Proto-industrialization: A Concept To o Many”, Journal of Economic History, 36 (1976), p. 443Google Scholar.
101 Medick, H., “The Proto-industrial Family Economy: The Structural Function of House-hold and Family during the Transition from Peasant Society to Industrial Capitalism”, Social History, 1 (1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Randall, A., Before the Luddites (Cambridge, 1991), ch. 1Google Scholar. The Belgian historian Paul Servais has, in accordance with this discussion, found that the proto-industrialized textile workers in the Verviers-Liége area used their cash income to defend or expand their landed property. When the industry was centralized during the nineteenth century this strategy failed and as a result a large part of the landed property was transferred to the urban bourgeoisie. Servais, P., “Les structures agraires du Limbourg et du pays d'outre Meuse du XVIIe au XIXe siécle”, Annales E.S.C., 37 (1982)Google Scholar.
102 Levine and Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Society, pp. 118–120.
103 Randall, Before the Luddites, p. 33. See also LeBrun, L'industrie de la laine, p. 268.
104 Portal, L'Oural, p. 19; Raeff, M., The Well-ordered Police State. Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Cermanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven, 1983), p. 213Google Scholar.
105 David Levine and Keith Wrightson have demonstrated that when the class of copy-holders in Whickham socially and economically became more diversified, the resistance against the coal mine withered away. Levine and Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Society, p. 138.
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