This essay examines the counterfeiting and uttering of British Imperial coinage in interwar Nigeria, and the response of the colonial state. In particular, it establishes a connection between criminality and resistance to European colonialism in Africa. In this regard, it contextualizes the preponderant involvement in the counterfeiting saga of the Ijebu, a subgroup of the Yoruba nationality in southwestern Nigeria. Though other considerations were involved, the preponderance of the Ijebu in making what was called “Ijebu money” illustrates how self-help criminality was both a means of accumulation and a veritable form of resistance to colonial rule. Following their military defeat in 1892 and their subsequent alienation from British rule, this criminal activity represented resistance by other means. The point must be stressed, however, that not all Ijebu were counterfeiters, and all counterfeiters were not Ijebu, and that the counterfeiters were no “heroic criminals”, who shared their loot with the poor.

During the post-Independence period, Buenos Aires province engaged in a republican-authoritarian experiment in which the relations between dominant and subaltern were altered and redefined. The ascent to power of Juan Manuel de Rosas and the federalists meant an increase in the violence meted out by the state against its political and military opponents. On the other hand, the diffusion of a market economy created the basis of contractual relations across a variety of social fields and institutions. This was true with regard to relations between masters and servants in the household, between officers and soldiers within regiments, between rural residents and justices of the peace, between ranchers and peons at the estancia. Though coercion did not disappear, the power to coerce found limits because of the very expansion of market relations. To address these changes, in their complexity and diversity, this article uses the concept “repertoires of coercion”. The concept may be useful to analyze and compare relations of power in multiple social or institutional spaces. In addition, the article addresses the question of the relationship between coercion and market culture, suggesting that in a situation of labor scarcity, and the military mobilization of the subaltern classes, contractualism tends to pervade relations of power, even those previously based upon coercion.

Structural, organizational, and technological changes in British industry during the interwar years led to a decline in skilled and physically demanding work, while there was a dramatic expansion in unskilled and semiskilled employment. Previous authors have noted that the new un/semiskilled jobs were generally filled by “fresh” workers recruited from outside the core manufacturing workforce, though there is considerable disagreement regarding the composition of this new workforce. This paper examines labour recruitment patterns and strategies using national data and case studies of eight rapidly expanding industrial centres. The new industrial workforce is shown to have been recruited from a “reserve army” of workers with the common features of relative cheapness, flexibility, and weak unionization. These included women, juveniles, local workers in poorly paid nonindustrial sectors, such as agriculture, and (where these other categories were in short supply) relatively young long-distance internal migrants from declining industrial areas.

TOM BRASS. Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour. Case Studies and Debates. [The Library of Peasant Studies, 16.] Frank Cass, London [etc.] 1999. £47.50. (Paper: £20.00).

Free and Unfree Labour. The Debate Continues. Ed. by Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden. [International and Comparative Social History, 5.] Peter Lang, Bern [etc.] 1997. 603 pp. S.fr. 98.00.