² A number of important issues relating to the theorization of unfreedom in different historical/geographical contexts cannot be covered here. These include questions of methodology (the nature of the written and/or historical record, the methodological accessibility of coercion, the enforcement of debt-servicing labour obligations by means of indirect pressure exercised through actual/fictive kinship and caste networks, etc.) and theory (non-economic concepts of unfreedom, defined in terms of fraud/deception/trickery, maltreatment), all of which are addressed elsewhere. Brass, Tom, “Coffee and Rural Proletarianization: A Comment on Bergad”, Journal of Latin American Studies, 16 (1984), pp. 143–152CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Free and Unfree Rural Labour in Puerto Rico during the Nineteenth Century”, Journal of Latin American Studies, 18 (1986), pp. 181–193; “The Elementary Strictures of Kinship: Unfree Relations and the Production of Commodities', Social Analysis, 20 (1986), pp. 56–68; “Unfree Labour and Capitalist Restructuring in the Agrarian Sector: Peru and India”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 14 (1986), pp. 50–77; “Slavery Now: Unfree Labour and Modern Capitalism”, Slavery and Abolition, 9 (1988), pp. 183–197; “The Latin American Enganche System: Some Revisionist Reinterpretations Revisited”, Slavery and Abolition, 11 (1990), pp. 74–103; “Class Struggle and the Deproletarianization of Agricultural Labour in Haryana (India)”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 18 (1990), pp. 36–67; “Market Essentialism and the Impermissibility of Unfree Labour”, Slavery and Abolition, 12 (1991), pp. 225–244; and Brass, Tom and Bernstein, Henry, “Proletarianization and Deproletarianization on the Colonial Plantation”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 19 (1992), pp. 1–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Needless to say, the conceptual extension of unfreedom to include labour relations other than slavery is controversial, and the subject of much debate. For more recent attempts to define unfree labour, see Miles, Robert, Capitalism and Unfree Labour: Anomaly or Necessity? (London, 1987)Google Scholar; and Ramachandran, V. K., Wage Labour and Unfreedom in Agriculture: An Indian Case Study (Oxford, 1990), ch. 8Google Scholar.

⁴ It is important to distinguish between a free market in labour, in which both free and unfree labour-power can circulate, and a free labour market, in which only free wage labour circulates. A result of the failure to make this distinction is market essentialism (see below), a theoretical effect of which is the conflation of two relationally distinct transactions: on the one hand a direct exchange between worker and employer (labour-power as the private property of the individual subject), and on the other an indirect transaction involving only employers (or the latter and contractors), one of whom transfers an unfree worker to the other (private property in the labour-power of the individual subject). In the antebellum American South, for example, plantation slaves were no less such for being hired out by their owners, either to other planters or to manufacturing employers in local towns. Starobin, Robert S., Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York, 1970), pp. 128–137Google Scholar.

⁵ On this point, see Marx, Karl, Capital – Volume I (London, 1976), pp. 271–272Google Scholar.

⁶ On the pre-colonial/pre-capitalist presence and extent of landless labour in South India, see Kumar, Dharma, Land and Caste in South India: Agricultural Labour in Madras Presidency in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hjejle, Benedicte, “Slavery and Agricultural Bondage in South India in the Nineteenth Century”, The Scandinavian Economic History Review, 15 (1967), pp. 71–126CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Asia generally, see Breman, Jan, Labour Migration and Rural Transformation in Colonial Asia (Amsterdam, 1990)Google Scholar. For the presence of an extensive “ambulatory” migrant workforce, composed of landless labour, in the Central Valley region of Chile from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, see Bauer, Arnold J., Chilean Rural Society from the Spanish Conquest to 1930 (Cambridge, 1975)Google Scholar.

⁷ On this point, see texts by, inter alia, Kloosterboer, W., Involuntary Labour since the Abolition of Slavery (Leiden, 1960)Google Scholar; Aufhauser, Keith R., “Slavery and Scientific Management”, Journal of Economic History, 33 (1973), pp. 811–824CrossRefGoogle Scholar; van Onselen, Charles, Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia 1900–1933 (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Corrigan, Phillip, “Feudal Relics or Capitalist Monuments? Notes on the Sociology of Unfree Labour”, Sociology, 11 (1977), pp. 435–463CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Legassick, Martin, “Gold, Agriculture, and Secondary Industry in South Africa, 1885–1970; From Periphery to Sub-Metropole as a Forced Labour System”, in Palmer, R. and Parsons, N. (eds), The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and Southern Africa (London, 1977), pp. 175–200Google Scholar; Mundle, Sudipto, Backwardness and Bondage: Agrarian Relations in a South Bihar District (New Delhi, 1979)Google Scholar; Meillassoux, Claude, Maidens, Meal and Money (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 91ffGoogle Scholar.; Patnaik, Utsa, “Introduction”, in Patnaik, and Dingwaney, , Chains of Servitude: Bondage and Slavery in India (Madras, 1985)Google Scholar; Brass, “Unfree Labour and Capitalist Restructuring”, and “Slavery Now”; Miles, Capitalism and Unfree Labour; Cohen, Robin, The New Helots: Migrants in the New International Division of Labour (Aldershot, 1987)Google Scholar; Zegeye, A. and Ishemo, S. (eds), Forced Labour and Migration: Patterns of Movement within Africa (London, 1989)Google Scholar.

⁸ This applied in the case of the antebellum American South, for example, where the debates on slavery taking place during the 1840s were structured by an underlying fear of a threat to property relations. Concerned that an emergent rural proletariat would ultimately demand the expropriation of the Southern landowning class, therefore, anti-abolitionists such as Cardozo and Dew advocated ruling class unity between Northern property owners and Southern planters in defence of slavery in order to counter a potential working-class challenge to existing property rights. Kaufman, Allen, Capitalism, Slavery, and Republican Values: Antebellum Political Economists 1819–1848 (Austin, 1982), pp. 121ffGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Texts which subscribe to this view include, inter alia, Miers, Suzanne and Kopytoff, Igor (eds), Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison, 1977)Google Scholar; Bauer, Arnold, “Rural Workers in Spanish America: Problems of Peonage and Oppression”, Hispanic American Historical Review, 59 (1979), pp. 34–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daniel Cotlear, El sistema del Enganche del Siglo XX: una versión diferente, Bachelor's, Thesis in Economics, Universidad Cató1ica del Perú (Lima, 1979)Google Scholar; Cross, Harry E., “Debt Peonage Reconsidered: A Case Study in Nineteenth Century Zacatecas, Mexico”, Business History Review, 53 (1979), pp. 473–495CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reid, Anthony (ed.), Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia (St' Lucia, 1983)Google Scholar; Bardhan, Pranab, Land, Labor, and Rural Poverty (Delhi, 1984)Google Scholar; Breman, Jan, Of Peasants, Migrants and Paupers: Rural Labour Circulation and Capitalist Production in Western India (Delhi, 1985)Google Scholar; Hart, Gillian, Power, Labor, and Livelihood: Processes of Change in Rural Java (Berkeley, 1986)Google Scholar; Hart, Gillian, “Exclusionary Labour Arrangements: Interpreting Evidence on Employment Trends in Rural Java”, Journal of Development Studies, 22 (1986), pp. 681–696CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Knight, Alan, “Mexican Peonage: What Was It and Why Was It?”, Journal of Latin American Studies, 18 (1986), pp. 41–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, Lewis, “Earning a Living in Hualgayoc, 1870–1900”, in Miller, Rory (ed.), Region and Class in Modern Peruvian History (Liverpool, 1987), pp. 103–124Google Scholar; Knight, Alan, “Debt Bondage in Latin America”, in Archer, Léonie (ed.), Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour (London, 1988), pp. 102–117Google Scholar. For the way in which pro-slavery ideology in the antebellum American South projected unfreedom as beneficial to its subject (“positive good”) and cast planter/slave relations in terms of “reciprocity”, see Glickstein, J. A., Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (New Haven, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tise, L. E., Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens, Georgia, 1987)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Among those who interpret unfreedom as a form of “subsistence guarantee”, “employment insurance”, and/or “patronage” are Breman, Peasants, Migrants, pp. 127ff; Bardhan, Land, Labor, pp. 175–176; Bauer, “Rural Workers”, pp. 44, 56, 62; Cotlear, El Sistema, pp. 37–39; Cross, “Debt Peonage”, pp. 488, 490; Taylor, “Earning a Living”, p. 112; and Ramachandran, Wage Labour, p. 254.

¹¹ For an example of a revisionist text which regards unfreedom as evidence of the enhanced bargaining power of agricultural labour (= worker “self-empowerment”), see Bauer, “Rural Workers”, pp. 46–47, 54. A variant of this position is the postmodern view of Prakash (see below), whereby unfree workers symbolically “win” battles in the ideological domain which in economic terms they either lose or do not fight.

¹² It is not without significance that neoclassical economic theory, which emerged in the 1870s, was an explicitly anti-marxist response to the development of the labour movement. In politico-ideological terms, it constituted a project of innateness, or the dehistoricizing and reconstituting as immutable of what had been regarded by classical economic theory as terrain changed by conflict; in neoclassical analysis, such terrain became an unchanging and thus a “natural” socio-economic order.

¹³ For the application of a neoclassical economic framework to unfree labour, see inter alia, Evans, Robert, “Some Notes on Coerced Labor”, Journal of Economic History, 30 (1970), pp. 861–866CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, W. W. and Reynolds, M. O., “Debt Peonage Re-examined”, Journal of Economic History, 33 (1973), pp. 862–871CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fogel, R. W. and Engerman, S. L., Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (London, 1974)Google Scholar; Galenson, David, White Servitude in Colonial America (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar; Higgs, Robert, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865–1914 (Cambridge, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cotlear, El sistema; Shlomowitz, R., “Markets for Indentured and Time-expired Melanesian Labour in Queensland, 1863–1906”, Journal of Pacific History, 16 (1981), pp. 70–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bardhan, Land, Labour, pp. 61, 67, 71–72, 83–84, 86, 124–126, 157, 175; Engerman, S. L., “Servants to Slaves to Servants: Contract Labour and European Expansion”, in Emmer, P. C (ed.), Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour Before and After Slavery (Dordrecht, 1986), pp. 263–294CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jagannathan, N. V., Informal Markets in Developing Countries (New York, 1987), pp. 38ffGoogle Scholar; Srinivasan, T. N., “On Choice among Creditors and Bonded Labour Contracts”, in Bardhan, Pranab (ed.), The Economic Theory of Agrarian Institutions (Oxford, 1989), pp. 203–220Google Scholar; Lal, Deepak, The Hindu Equilibrium: II Aspects of Indian Labour (Oxford, 1989), pp. 120–126Google Scholar. For critiques from different theoretical viewpoints of the methods utilized in this process, see Gutman, H. G., Slavery and the Numbers Game (Chicago, 1975)Google Scholar; Sutch, Richard, “The Treatment Received by American Slaves: A Critical Review of the Evidence Presented in Time on the Cross”, Explorations in Economic History, 12 (1975), pp. 335–438CrossRefGoogle Scholar; David, P. A. et al. , Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; Greenberg, Michael, “The New Economic History and the Understanding of Slavery: A Methodological Critique”, Dialectical Anthopology, 2 (1977), pp. 131–141CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mandle, Jay R., The Roots of Black Poverty: The Southern Plantation Economy after the Civil War (Durham, NC, 1978), pp. 22–27Google Scholar; Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth and Genovese, Eugene D., Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York, 1983), pp. 91ffGoogle Scholar; Graves, Adrian, “The Nature and Origins of Pacific Islands Labour Migration to Queensland”, in Marks, Shula and Richardson, Peter (eds), International Labour Migration: Historical Perspectives (London, 1984), pp. 113–115Google Scholar; and Brass, “Market Essentialism”, pp. 225ff.

¹⁴ See, for example, Lieten, G. K., Nieuwenhuys, O. and Schenk-Sandbergen, L., Women, Migrants and Tribals: Survival Strategies in Asia (New Delhi, 1989)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ For just such a positive theorization of “survival” by female indentured labour on plantations in Fiji, see Lal, B. V., “Kunti's Cry: Indentured Women on Fiji Plantations”, in Krishnamurty, J. (ed.), Women in Colonial India: Essays on Survival, Work and the State (Delhi, 1989), p. 179Google Scholar.

¹⁶ For more recent examples of the ubiquitous “resistance” theory, see Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985)Google Scholar, Colburn, Forrest D. (ed.), Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New York, 1989)Google Scholar, and Haynes, Douglas and Prakash, Gyan (eds), Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia (Delhi, 1991)Google Scholar. For the application by Scott of his “resistance” framework to chattel slavery, see “Domination, Acting, and Fantasy”, in Nordstrom, Carolyn and Martin, JoAnn (eds), The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror (Berkeley, 1992), pp. 55–84Google Scholar.

¹⁷ For the economic self-improvement and achievement of black slaves on the plantation in the American South, see Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, pp. 108–109, 127. For examples from the other end of the political spectrum of a “culturalist” defence of slaves (not slavery), see James, C. L. R., Spheres of Existence (London, 1980), pp. 173–190Google Scholar; and Genovese, Eugene, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (London, 1975)Google Scholar. In part, the defence of slave economic life on the plantation by those on the political right and of slave culture by those on the political left were both attempts to rescue black slaves from the negative image associated with the passive, docile “sambo” stereotype projected by Elkins, Stanley, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Taussig, Michael, “Culture of Terror – Space of Death: Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (1984), pp. 467–497CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taussig, Michael, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (Chicago, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ At some points Taussig maintains that in the Upper Amazon region a market for labour-power was absent, and is therefore correspondingly dismissive of Casement's attribution of terror/unfreedom to a scarcity of workers; elsewhere, however, Taussig appears t o accept not merely the existence of labour shortages but also the economic irrationality of destroying scarce workers and that the object of terror was in fact to increase rubber production. “Culture”, pp. 475–477, 488; Wild Man, pp. 46, 52ff. For Casement's account of Putumayo, see Singleton-Gates, Peter and Girodias, Maurice, The Black Diaries: An Account of Roger Casement's Life and Times with a Collection of his Diaries and Public Writings (London, 1959), pp. 201–315Google Scholar. In other words, terror combined with unfreedom possessed a twofold economic object: to intensify output on the one hand, and on the other to warn potential absconders of the consequences of flight/disobedience. As in the case of the tobacco plantations in the Dutch colony of Sumatra, therefore, executions and floggings of tribal workers in the Putumayo region took place in the labour process itself. Breman, Jan, Taming the Coolie Beast: Plantation Society and the Colonial Order in Southeast Asia (New Delhi, 1989)Google Scholar; Taussig, “Culture”, pp. 475–477.

²⁰ Ibid., pp. 491, 495; Wild Man, pp. 27, 69, 442–443.

²¹ “Culture”, pp. 470, 494; Wild Man, pp. 27–28, 29. This equivocation on the part of Taussig is prefigured in the similarly postmodern ambiguity of de Man, who notes: “It is always possible to face up to any experience (to excuse any guilt), because the experience always exists simultaneously as fictional discourse and as empirical event and it is never possible to decide which one of the two possibilities is the right one. The indecision makes it possible to excuse the bleakest of crimes because, as a fiction, it escapes from the constraints of guilt and innocence.” de Man, Paul, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, 1979), p. 293Google Scholar. The outcome of this framework, in which language is decoupled from material reality, is ethical relativism, which in turn naturalizes horror/terror/(unfreedom). That such a position licenses complicity with fascism is confirmed by the cases not only of de Man himself but also of Heidegger, Blanchot and Derrida.

²² For Taussig's views on the “lazy native”, see “Culture”, p. 490. Other revisionist endorsements of the “lazy native” myth are noted in Brass, “Revisionist Reinterpretations”, pp. 90–91. For Taussig's questioning of the actuality of terror/unfreedom, see “Culture”, p. 494; Wild Man, pp. 60, 65–66.

²³ Prakash, G., “Bonded Labour in South Bihar: A Contestatory History”, in Bose, S. (ed.), South Asia and World Capitalism (Delhi, 1990), pp. 178–205Google Scholar; Prakash, G., Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Becoming a Bhuinya: Oral Traditions and Contested Domination in Eastern India”, in Haynes and Prakash (eds), Contesting Power, pp. 145–174; and “The History and Historiography of Rural Labourers in Colonial India” and “Reproducing Inequality: Spirit Cults and Labour Relations in Colonial Eastern India”, in Prakash, G. (ed.), The World of the Rural Labourer in Colonial India (Delhi, 1992), pp. 1–46Google Scholar, 282–304.

²⁴ Prakash, “Bonded Labour”, pp. 197–198. Not the least of the many difficulties which confront the postmodern framework of Prakash is its refusal to countenance any alternative to a specifically bourgeois/individualist concept of freedom, thereby ignoring completely the socialist approach in which unfreedom is negated by collective freedom based on class.

²⁵ For an instance of the application of an idealized/“culturalist” approach to the more general question of rural labour in Colonial India, see Prakash, “History and Historiography”.

²⁶ Prakash, “Becoming a Bhuinya”, p. 170. Much the same can be said of his attempt to inscribe “resistance” into spirit cults in south Bihar. Prakash, “Reproducing Inequality”.

²⁷ Part of the difficulty here is that the concept “false” consciousness is itself epistemologically impermissible within a postmodern framework. Since Prakash not merely accepts but celebrates the plurality o f the ideological, by definition no form of consciousness can be categorized as “false”. Generally speaking, postmodernism rejects consciousness of class as a Eurocentric concept that involves an “outsider” unacceptably imputing a politically appropriate, logically consistent and historically necessary set of universalistic beliefs to particular socio-economic agents. However, without a concept of consciousness that discriminates between notions of “true” and “false” (which in turn entails the theorization of a politics that transcends the randomness of non-specific, amorphous conflictive practices), it becomes possible to identify each and every single component of behaviour/activity (or existence) as yet another form of “resistance”.

²⁸ McCreery, David, “Hegemony and Repression in Rural Guatemala, 1871–1914”, Peasant Studies, 17 (1990), pp. 161Google Scholar, 164, 166, 168. For earlier, non-revisionist, accounts by the same author of unfreedom in Guatemala, see McCreery, , “Debt Servitude in Rural Guatemala, 1876–1936”, Hispanic American Historical Review, 63 (1983), pp. 735–759CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “‘An Odious Feudalism’: Mandamiento Labor and Commercial Agriculture in Guatemala, 1858–1920”, Latin American Perspectives, 48 (1986), pp. 99–117.

²⁹ McCreery, “Hegemony and Repression”, pp. 167, 169, 172.

³⁰ The reasons for this are examined more fully in Brass, “Revisionist Reinterpretations”, pp. 88ff, and “Deproletarianization”, pp. 37ff.

³¹ Taylor, “Earning a Living”, p. 120; and Albert, Bill, “The Creation o f a Proletariat on Peru's Coastal Sugar Plantations: 1880–1920”, in Munslow, B. and Finch, H. (eds), Proletarianization in the Third World (London, 1984), pp. 109–110Google Scholar. For other examples of the theorization of unfree labour in Latin America as a pre-capitalist/feudal/semi-feudal relation, see Bauer, “Rural Workers”, pp. 53, 61; Cotlear, El Sistema, p. 52.

³² Amit Bhaduri, “A Study in Agricultural Backwardness under Semi-Feudalism”, The Economic Journal, 83 (1973), pp. 120–137; idem, The Economic Structure of Backward Agriculture (London, 1983); Prasad, Pradhan H., “Semi-Feudalism: The Basic Constraints of Indian Agriculture”, in Das, Arvind N. and Nilkant, V. (eds), Agrarian Relations in India (New Delhi, 1979), pp. 33–49Google Scholar; Lopsided Growth: Political Economy of Indian Development (Bombay, 1989), pp. 37–43. For other instances of the unproblematic equation of unfree labour with feudal/semi-feudal relations in Indian agriculture, see, inter alia, Bardhan, Land, Labor, pp. 81–83; Breman, Peasants, Migrants, pp. 131, 306–313; S. P. Tiwary, “Bondage in Santhal Parganas”, and Suneet Chopra, “Bondage in a Green Revolution Area: A Study of Brick Kiln Workers in Muzaffernagar District”, both in Patnaik and Dingwaney, Chains of Servitude, pp. 180–181, 212.

³³ For the use of forced labour by both parties to the conflicts of 1914–1918 and 1939–1945, see Ferencz, B., Less than Slaves: Jewish Forced Labour and the Quest for Compensation (Cambridge, Mass., 1979)Google Scholar; Summerskill, M., China on the Western Front: Britain's Chinese Work Force in the First World War (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Eisner, L., “Foreign Workers and Forced Labor in Germany During the First World War”, in Hoerder, D. (ed.), Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies (Westport, 1985), pp. 189–222Google Scholar; Sherwood, M., Many Struggles: West Indian Workers and Service Personnel in Britain 1939–45 (London, 1985), pp. 93–130Google Scholar; Hayes, Peter, Industry and Ideology: 1G Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar; and Herbert, Ulrich, A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880–1980: Seasonal Workers/Forced Laborers/Guest Workers (Ann Arbor, 1990)Google Scholar. Accounts of peonage, unfree migrant labour, and the workfare system in the USA and Canada are contained in United States Congress, Hearings on Migrant and Seasonal Farmworker Powerlessness, Part 1 (Washington, 1970), pp. 5–15, 28, 39–49, 66, 95–100, 108–111, 116–117, 122, 125–145, 158, 176ff, and Part 2 (Washington, 1970), pp. 353ff, 433–434, 450–451, 473–474; and Friedland, William H. and Nelkin, Dorothy, Migrant: Agricultural Workers in America's Northeast (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; Daniel, Pete, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South 1901–1969 (Urbana, 1972)Google Scholar, and “The Metamorphosis of Slavery, 1865–1900”, Journal of American History, 66 (No. 1, 1979), pp. 88–99; Griffith, David C., “Nonmarket Labor Processes in an Advanced Capitalist Economy”, American Anthropologist, 89 (1987), pp. 838–852CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Block, Fred and Noakes, John, “The Politics of New-style Workfare”, Socialist Review, 18 (1988), pp. 31–58Google Scholar; Satzewich, Vic, “Unfree Labour and Canadian Capitalism: The Incorporation of Polish War Veterans”, Studies in Political Economy, 28 (1989), pp. 89–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the employment of unfree black workers in the mining and industrial sectors of white South Africa, see among (many) others, Wilson, Francis, Labour in South African Gold Mines 1911–1969 (London, 1972)Google Scholar, and Migrant Labour in South Africa (Johannesburg, 1972); First, Ruth, Black Gold: The Mozambican Miner, Proletarian and Peasant (Brighton, 1983)Google Scholar. For the existence of unfree industrial labour in the special processing zones of China, see Yonghong, S., “Export Processing Zones in China”, Economic and Political Weekly, 24 (1989), pp. 355–365Google Scholar.

³⁴ A common form of historical and contemporary restructuring is the decentralization of the labour process itself, a transformation which entails the displacement of existing factory production by a small scale outwork/putting-out system based on unfree sweated labour. A recent study of the clothing trade in nineteenth-century London has argued that the introduction of the sweatshop system was a result of industrial growth rather than stagnation, and suggests that the switch to production with low-paid workers in unregulated or non-unionized premises during the second half of the century was a direct response by employers to the consolidation in the first half of a well-organized, militant and highly unionized workforce protected by factory legislation: Schmiechen, James A., Sweated Industries and Sweated Labor: The London Clothing Trades 1860–1914 (London, 1984)Google Scholar. For accounts of a similar restructuring process in the contemporary period, see Levidow, Les, “Grunwick: The Social Contract meets the 20th Century Sweatshop”, in Levidow, L. and Young, B. (eds), Science, Technology and the Labour Process (Volume 1) (London, 1981), pp. 123–171Google Scholar; Mattera, Philip, Off the Books: The Rise of the Underground Economy (London, 1985)Google Scholar; and Mitter, Swasti, “Industrial Restructuring and Manufacturing Homework: Immigrant Women in the UK Clothing Industry”, Capital & Class, 27 (1986), pp. 37–80Google Scholar. The way in which unfree relations are enforced within these small-scale units is outlined by Hoel, Barbro, “Contemporary Clothing ‘Sweatshops’, Asian Female Labour and Collective Organization”, in West, Jackie (ed.), Work, Women and the Labour Market (London, 1982), pp. 80–98Google Scholar.

³⁵ Instances abound across space and time of cost cutting achieved through restructuring based on deproletarianization, albeit frequently not theorized as such. See, for example, Hannington, Wal, The Problem of the Distressed Areas (London, 1937), pp. 92–114Google Scholar; Dew, C. B., Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Iron Works (New Haven, 1966), p. 30Google Scholar; Tinker, Hugh, A New System of Slavery; The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830–1920 (London, 1974), pp. 217–218Google Scholar; Santana, Arismendi Dfaz, “The Role of Haitian Braceros in Dominican Sugar Production”, Latin American Perspectives, 8 (1976), pp. 120–132CrossRefGoogle Scholar; DeWind, Josh et al. , “Contract Labor in US Agriculture: The West Indian Cane Cutters in Florida”, in Cohen, Robin et al. (eds), Peasants and Proletarians: The Struggles of Third World Workers (London, 1979), pp. 380–396Google Scholar; Monteón, Michael, “The Enganche in the Chilean Nitrate Sector, 1880–1930”, Latin American Perspectives, 22 (1979), p. 66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ramesar, Marianne, “Indentured Labour in Trinidad 1880–1917”, in Saunders, Kay (ed.), Indentured Labour in the British Empire 1834–1920 (London, 1984), pp. 60Google Scholar, 65; and Brass, Tom, “Class Formation and Class Struggle in La Convención, Peru”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 7 (1980), pp. 427–457CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “Revisionist Reinterpretations”, and “Class Struggle and Deproletarianisation”.

³⁶ For examples of racism as a result of restructuring, again not necessarily interpreted as such, see Beachey, R. W., The British West Indies Sugar Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1957), p. 109Google Scholar; Tinker, A New System of Slavery, pp. 217, 218–219; Hunt, Doug, “Exclusivism and Unionism: Europeans in the Queensland Sugar Industry 1900–1910”, in Curthoys, Ann and Markus, Andrew (eds), Who Are Our Enemies? Racism and the Australian Working Class (Sydney, 1978), pp. 80–95Google Scholar; Cohen, The New Helots, pp. 52–53, 129–130, 187, 193ff; Plant, Roger, Sugar and Modern Slavery (London, 1987), pp. 69–70Google Scholar; Baud, Michiel, ”Sugar and Unfree Labour: Reflections on Labour Control in the Dominican Republic, 1870–1935”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 19 (1992), pp. 301–325CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ Nieboer, H. J., Slavery as an Industrial System: Ethnological Researches (The Hague, 1910)Google Scholar. This view also structures the argument in two recent texts, where the presence of unfree labour in Russia and on the plantation systems of America, the Caribbean, South Africa, and Australia is linked to the existence in all these contexts of labour shortages. Miles, Capitalism and Unfree Labour, pp. 205, 214; Kolchin, Peter, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), pp. 18Google Scholar, 359ff.

³⁸ Attributing indentured migration generally to a “distaste by free labourers t o bear the non-pecuniary costs of production upon the plantations”, Engerman, “Servants to Slaves”, p. 277, implies that everywhere and at all times free labour was unwilling to undertake plantation work under any circumstances. Such a view overlooks the fact that planters employed unfree contract/indentured labour because locals were exercising not an absolute but rather a relative unwillingness to work, and withholding their labour-power in order to secure improvements in pay and conditions for the application of this commodity o n the plantation itself. In other words, the object of employing unfree labour in such circumstances was to compel free locals to accept plantation work conditions and pay levels that they would otherwise have rejected. For an excellent case study of the latter process, see Rodney, Walter, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905 (London, 1981)Google Scholar. Much the same kind of restructuring procedure was operated by agribusiness enterprises in the United States during the 1960s, when unfree contract labour from the Caribbean was (and continues to be) imported specifically with the object of forcing local workers to accept lower wages and less favourable conditions. About this situation the normally conservative US Congress has commented: “Growers[…] have convinced the US Department of Labour that a shortage of domestic farmworkers exists and thus offshore workers are needed. We see very little evidence of such a shortage but rather that the introduction of [unfree migrant] offshore workers has greatly hampered the domestic workers and in some cases has resulted in foreign workers displacing US workers in […] this country. With the foreign workers' arrival, harvesting prices for US labor dropped. As a stable supply of labor was introduced, employers refused to negotiate prices to be paid to US laborers.” Unlike local workers, who can negotiate for higher wages, foreign contract workers have to accept pay levels and conditions imposed by employers, who accordingly “find it much less expensive with a controlled labor force”. United States Congress, Hearings, Part 1, pp. 178, 185.

³⁹ See, for example, Kumar, Land and Caste, Patnaik, “Introduction”, pp. 9, 11ff; Patnaik, Utsa, “The Agrarian Question and the Development of Capitalism in India”, Economic and Political Weekly, 21 (1986), pp. 781–793Google Scholar; and Ramachandran, Wage Labour, pp. 258–259. For a critique of the argument which unproblematically links unfreedom to population density in the case of the Caribbean, see Bolland, O. Nigel, “Systems of Domination after Slavery: The Control of Land and Labor in the British West Indies after 1838”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23 (1981), pp. 591–619CrossRefGoogle Scholar.