PORT CITIES, LABOR, AND COMMODITY CHAINS

The integration of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans into increasingly capitalist circuits of international trade was already well underway before the period under study in this Special Issue. From the late fifteenth century, Portuguese and Spanish ships turned seas and oceans into global highways whose maritime infrastructure connected an expanding web of ports and their respective hinterlands. By the late sixteenth century, the Spanish treasure fleet and the Manila galleons had merged Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Ocean economies into an incipient single trading system to secure for European markets the Chinese goods that American silver allowed them to procure. Other European powers further integrated existing and novel subsystems across the globe when they joined the Spanish and Portuguese in the following century, linking together over vast distances peoples, polities, economies, and ecosystems. The complex processes they unleashed transformed the world beyond recognition, tilting the global balance of power towards the Western Eurasian periphery. While global and world historians have explored these broader transformative currents from a bird's-eye view, regional specialists have long concentrated on important subsystems connected to the rise of the global economy. Whole fields have been built up around particularly the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions, which continue to generate important research and debates.Footnote ¹¹ The recent emphasis on the porousness of borders, imperial entanglements, and connected histories is simultaneously bringing scholars of separate ocean worlds into dialogue.Footnote ¹² New multi-sited studies of labor within, beyond, and across empires complement this trend, highlighting through a combination of global, regional, and local scales the processes that structured the lives of laboring people.Footnote ¹³

Port cities have rightfully come to play a prominent role in this literature. Yet, despite a flurry of important studies on everything from the peculiarities of gender and sexuality on the libertine waterfront to the unstable formation of national, imperial, and cosmopolitan identities in the maritime borderlands, the majority of work remains focused on the commodities that came from the hinterland, passed through port and onto ship, and from there were transported across the oceans and on to other destinations.Footnote ¹⁴ During the past few decades, historians have uncovered in granular detail the credit arrangements and familial, diasporic, and religious networks that made this trade possible, the legal and fiscal frameworks that supported it, and the public-private military infrastructures that protected it.Footnote ¹⁵ But while a rich and varied literature has grown up around port city merchants engaged in international commerce, the physical labor that actually moved commodities across the global marketplace has received far less attention.Footnote ¹⁶

As the articles collected in this volume demonstrate, the concentration of vast numbers of specialized workers in port cities, and their complex combination at key nodal points in a globe-spanning network of commodity chains, is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, they show clearly just how much physical labor was required to make the early modern market work. This basic observation clashes even with prominent strands of Marxist historiography, otherwise quite attuned to the role of labor in history, which have tended to treat the market as a sphere where commodities circulated as if by magic and without the blood and sweat of human toil.Footnote ¹⁷ Envisioning commodity circulation in such a way not only excludes the labor that was directly implicated in the transportation of goods. It also hides the varied and vast amount of labor that built, maintained, and protected the infrastructure that made such movements possible, including roads, canals, streets, warehouses, stables, wells, aqueducts, barracks, prisons, fortresses, shipyards, docks, seawalls, and breakers.

This volume concentrates primarily on colonial and postcolonial port cities in the Americas, the greater Indian Ocean world, and the western Pacific rim. Depending on whether they were initially the products of European colonization, such as Paramaribo in Dutch Suriname or Rio de Janeiro in Portuguese Brazil, or instead indigenous cities conquered and integrated by expanding maritime empires, such as Manila in the Spanish Philippines or Calcutta in British India, the infrastructure supporting their integration into global economic networks either had to be built from scratch or expanded dramatically. During the early modern period, this infrastructure was concentrated mostly at the port and in the city itself. Commodities usually arrived either by coastal and riverine transport, or by ocean-going ships from a more extensive “maritime hinterland” that included both distant ports and nearby productive “hinterseas”, such as fishing grounds, oyster beds, or the wreck sites that Kevin Dawson explores in his contribution to this Special Issue.Footnote ¹⁸

By the nineteenth century, some ports that had previously been oriented predominantly toward the sea and each other began to extend their influence deep into landlocked interiors. This created new waves of labor migration, first sending out soldiers, settlers, and slaves to conquer and work the land, followed by thousands of laborers to build the roads, canals, and railroads that physically integrated and drained the new hinterlands of agricultural commodities and funneled them towards the rising industrial cities of the metropole.Footnote ¹⁹ On the back of these transformations, some ports, for example New York in the United States or Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, managed to remake themselves into new centers of imperial power. In the process, they spawned yet another round of labor-intensive infrastructure construction as their populations grew into the hundreds of thousands and their urban landscapes were transformed to rival established seats of power in the old world.Footnote ²⁰

MIGRATION, GENDER, AND PORT DEMOGRAPHY

The demographic specificities of port cities in the colonial and postcolonial world had a large impact on how groups of workers interacted. Historically, port cities everywhere have been characterized by “a disproportionate dependency for population growth on in-migration and the specific configuration of migrant streams”.Footnote ²¹ But an important difference in the way that colonial port cities met their labor requirements when compared to their metropolitan counterparts was the preponderance within this in-migration stream of coerced workers, including slaves, indentured servants, debt peons, prisoners of war, convicts, and conscripted military personnel.Footnote ²² Although particular sectors within these port city economies continued to experience both acute and chronic labor shortages well into the nineteenth century, as the mad scramble for labor in both Evelyn Jennings's and Martine Jean's articles in this Special Issue illustrate, more well-established port cities – fed by continuous in-migration from their own rural hinterland and far-distant regions overseas – tended to develop sizeable wage labor, informal, and criminal sectors that operated alongside highly coercive labor relations. In addition, port cities also received large numbers of transitory migrants, such as sailors and soldiers, who often worked as day laborers or carried out specific tasks for local employers.Footnote ²³ Taken together, this made for an unusual degree of diversity and flexibility in the combination of port city labor relations.

Their distinct migratory patterns also influenced the demography of port city laboring populations in another significant way: more than is often acknowledged, resident port city workforces were predominantly female. In addition to the regular coming and going of migratory male seafaring labor, depending on a city's size and location, the seasonal arrival and departure of fleets could mushroom or collapse a town's population overnight, suddenly adding or subtracting several thousand mostly young and single men to and from a population that often did not exceed 20,000. This not only gave many colonial port cities constantly fluctuating population levels and a huge number of temporary residents, it also increased dramatically the proportion and economic importance of women among the permanent and semi-permanent population.Footnote ²⁴ Common images of brawny longshoremen, careless sailors, or bean-counting clerks thus obscure the far more typical female port city worker. As both Titas Chakraborty's and Melina Teubner's contributions to this Special Issue highlight, women's indispensable labor assured the reproduction of those predominantly male workers who were more directly involved in the movement of goods and the building of the infrastructure that supported it.

Port cities have frequently been described as enclaves of potential and contested freedom. For example, Douglas Catterall and Jodi Campbell have suggested that female port city workers were often able to carve out independent survival and career trajectories that would have been far more difficult to accomplish in either the ossified social order of a metropolitan port or in the violent environment of the colonial hinterlands.Footnote ²⁵ Similarly, those whose racial or ethnic heritage might identify them as bound laborers in the hinterland often found in the fluidity of social relations that prevailed on the waterfront the ability to disappear and obfuscate their personal history.Footnote ²⁶ Moreover, the difficulty of maintaining effective social control and surveillance among the broad diversity of workers who toiled side by side, and lived together along the waterfront, combined with the easy availability of news and rumors from similar communities overseas, often allowed for the emergence of counter-hegemonic, cosmopolitan, anti-racist working-class cultures that in moments of crisis could make port cities the centers of revolutionary mobilization.Footnote ²⁷ Such militancy never went unchallenged, however. As the history of eighteenth-century barrels, nineteenth-century militarized docklands, and twentieth-century container ships demonstrates, authorities may have found it difficult to break working-class power on the waterfront, but they often managed to gain the upper hand – at least temporarily – by developing new technologies, new ways of eroding inter-group solidarity, and new mechanisms for social control.Footnote ²⁸

FREE AND UNFREE LABOR

The distinction between free and unfree laborers is perhaps the most generic way in which to capture the dividing line between the groups of workers encountered in port cities. It has long been central to the historiography on the “making of the working class”. But it is also a highly problematic one, as a large body of literature demonstrates.Footnote ²⁹ For example, to consider wage labor as free labor does not make much sense for one of the emblematic groups of wage laborers in port cities: sailors. Even when working under contract and for a wage, which was not always the case, the conditions of their employment often imposed severe limits on their freedom of movement, stipulated corporal punishment for even minor offenses, and mostly entailed long-term contracts that they could exit before their time was due only through desertion or death.Footnote ³⁰ Important differences between such “bound” wage laborers and those working in absolute dependency certainly existed. Nevertheless, it makes much more sense to understand the growing differentiation between them as taking place within a wide spectrum of coerced labor relations, than through a clear juxtaposition.Footnote ³¹ Similar conclusions have been drawn by Paul Craven and Douglas Hay, who have looked at the evolution of penal codes for slave labor and contractual employment in the British Empire. Complicating the notion of a clear evolutionary path from unfree to free labor, they argue that “penal sanctions not only persisted but increased in much English and colonial master and servant law in the eighteenth century, and enforcement rates increased significantly in Britain in the nineteenth century, and massively in many colonies”.Footnote ³² Again, in their recent special issue in this journal, Clare Anderson, Ulbe Bosma, and Christian De Vito outlined how, in the course of the nineteenth century, convict labor increased on a massive scale. In colonial contexts, this type of labor directly complemented indentured labor as a new, state-organized source of coerced labor to replace slavery.Footnote ³³ Meanwhile, coercion continued to play an important role in the working lives of sailors and soldiers, especially but not exclusively those recruited among colonial subject populations.Footnote ³⁴

Putting interaction between workers of different statuses center stage shows that the boundaries between free and unfree laborers were porous not only in legal terms, but also in daily practice. This is even so at the individual level. In their own lives, many workers experienced a variety of gradations of coerced labor relations. Recently arrived slaves from Africa in an Atlantic or Indian Ocean port might have experienced personal independence, or slavery of different types, before being captured by Europeans. Meanwhile, artisans working along the waterfront might previously have been slaves, indentured servants, or soldiers, or might even have fulfilled several of these roles at the same time.Footnote ³⁵ Collective experiences also blurred group distinctions. Whether diving for treasure in the Caribbean (Dawson), building roads and prisons in nineteenth-century Havana and Rio de Janeiro (Jennings and Jean), loading and unloading goods for the Dutch East India Company in Batavia in the seventeenth century (Van Rossum), or performing the work of war and conquest (Thomas), mixed groups of workers often performed more or less the same tasks in close proximity, if not jointly. Furthermore, the image that emerges from the articles gathered here is one of laborers of different statuses intermingling in many settings outside of their workplaces. They encountered each other when socializing in spaces such as bars and brothels (Chakraborty), around street stalls selling food (Teubner), or at public festivities and riots (Brandon). On and off the job, they depended on each other for care, provisions, protection, or news. None of the contributions idealize these daily encounters and dependencies. Sometimes they were extremely unequal, competitive, hostile, and exploitative. But not always. Even though the comparative lack of sources on ordinary people in non-conflictual situations means that the importance of mutual trust and everyday solidarities across sectional interests is underrepresented in the archives, cooperation and common resistance, sometimes across seemingly impregnable barriers, are a crucial part of the history of port city class formation.Footnote ³⁶

While neither freedom, nor unfreedom, nor the distinction between them, were absolute, there were of course stark differences in levels of coercion experienced by various groups of workers. Often, the fear of being pushed downward on the scale of coercion created competition and hatred between groups that could be exploited by those in power. Indeed, all the evidence collected in the articles presented here suggests that ruling classes were frequently highly conscious of the specific mixture of backgrounds and statuses that went into the port city populations under their control. Seeking the in-migration of specific types of laborers functioned primarily as a condition for economic expansion, but it was also a useful political instrument. In her study of the West African slaving port of Benguela, Mariana Candido describes how this dynamic worked not only between so-called free and unfree laborers, but also among different groups that entered colonial society as coerced laborers. From the seventeenth century onward, Portuguese rulers increasingly shipped European convicts from Portugal and Brazil to different colonies to replenish their local white populations. As Candido describes,

Spatial segregation, if necessary, enforced by military means, and the creation of strict rules and taboos about interaction across boundaries of status, gender, or ethnicity became important instruments of control.Footnote ³⁸

THE ATLANTIC AND INDIAN OCEANS, SEVENTEENTH TO NINETEENTH CENTURIES

Looking at combinations of labor relations in port cities in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries brings out notable connections, similarities, and parallels that the historiographical division between the two basins tends to obscure. Certainly, major differences existed, and it is important to recognize that they did. It is clear that before the mid-eighteenth century early modern European powers were far less able to impose themselves in the broader Indian Ocean region than in the Americas. Large Eurasian states, such as the Ottoman and Mughal empires and Ming and Qing China, were formidable powers capable of confining first the Portuguese, and then the Spanish, Dutch, English, French, Danish, and Swedish, to the edges of their territories. Only from the mid-eighteenth century onward, and with accelerated force from the nineteenth century, were Europeans – whose technological, military, and fiscal tools of domination had been sharpened through inter-European rivalry – able to turn the tables on Eurasian empires, and that only at a moment when the internal struggles of the latter weakened their ability to resist European military aggression. In contrast, the devastation wrought by Conquistadors in the Caribbean islands and against the Aztec and Inca empires triggered a demographic crisis that allowed Europeans to take control of islands, littorals, and vast land masses at a much earlier stage.Footnote ³⁹

The failure of European states and companies to build a plantation sector in the New World based on indigenous labor and indentured Europeans prompted them to carry over twelve million African captives across the Atlantic between 1500 and 1900, approximately the same number of Africans as were forced into Asia as slaves between 800 and 1900.Footnote ⁴⁰ African slavery and the racial hierarchies that accompanied it consequently shaped labor relations in the Atlantic basin more pervasively than in the Indian Ocean. As a result, until well into the nineteenth century, Abolitionism, a movement that runs throughout many of the contributions in this Special Issue, remained much more focused on the plantation complex in the Atlantic than on the extensive but more dispersed use of slave labor in the Indian Ocean.Footnote ⁴¹

Yet, one can easily overstate the contrasts between the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. Enslaved Africans were traded into both the Indian and Atlantic Oceans; both basins saw the enslavement of indigenous populations and the modification of pre-existing forms of coerced labor; and both regions witnessed different combinations of plantation slavery with household slavery, indentured servitude, wage labor, and penal labor. In this Special Issue, Van Rossum's contribution in particular brings out the large variety of coerced labor relations at different locations in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century VOC empire, challenging the notion that European companies across the board resorted to “milder” forms of exploitation in the context of the Indian Ocean world.

The centrality of race in defining different groups of workers thrown together in colonial port cities is a particularly strong theme in Atlantic history. Yet, this process is often studied separately from the development of ethnic categorizations as a tool of colonial administration in other parts of the world. Reading Brandon's and Thomas's articles side by side offers a way to discern more nuanced parallels and differences in the processes of racialization that played out in both oceans, though not necessarily at the same time or in the same form, nor perhaps to the same degree. Brandon's article pays close attention to racialization and social control in eighteenth-century Paramaribo. His contribution highlights the fact that despite the preponderance of African slavery, race as a category of separation always operated in combination with other markers of difference. It also shows racialization to have been a contested process, sometimes reinforcing competition between groups of laborers with diverging economic interests, but at other times clashing with everyday solidarities. A good example of the latter is the story of a German immigrant in Paramaribo, Christiaan Crewitz, who had first carved out a living for himself by “catching tortoises with the Indians”, before being arrested for illegally serving beer and soup to black slaves at his tavern.

Similarly drawing attention to the importance of overlapping forms of categorization, Thomas shows the obsession of British officials with the composition of the military forces sent by the British East India Company to conquer Manila in the Seven Years’ War. In doing so, they not only attached importance to the balance between European and Asian soldiers, but also to a large variety of differences within these broad groups (including Catholic Swiss, Irish, and Scottish troops, as well as French deserters, “sepoys”, “Coffreys”, “Topasses”, “Chinese coolies”, and “lascars”). Significant differences were introduced in the payment systems and the enforcement of discipline between these groups, even if they performed the same type of military labor. Nevertheless, Thomas describes instances in which laborers merged into a motley crew that not only captured Manila, but also plundered, protested, and deserted together. While ethnic categorization and racialization offered colonial and postcolonial governments in the Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds an impressive tool of social control between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, solidarity and camaraderie among workers continued to find ways to challenge it, even if only intermittently.

Interesting parallels also existed with respect to the roles performed by women in both ocean basins. Chakraborty's and Teubner's contributions both address the issue of economic opportunities for women in the reproductive trades. In her article on women in household and caregiving occupations in East India Company ports in eighteenth-century Bengal, Chakraborty reveals how women who attained their freedom after years of enslavement as household workers sometimes managed to gain economic independence through their ongoing contribution to these industries. Such economic autonomy resonates with Teubner's attention to the upward mobility of female street-food vendors who worked in Rio de Janeiro between the 1830s and 1870s. Her article mentions the example of an enslaved woman from Africa, Emília Soares do Patrocinio, who sold vegetables at different stands at the city market. That such female labor was not confined to petty trades is shown by the fact that the same Emília Soares do Patrocinio was able to acquire considerable wealth and become the owner of enslaved workers herself, leaving to her heirs several properties, twenty slaves, jewelry, and money. As the transition from slavery to slave ownership in the latter example suggests, upward mobility for individuals did not necessarily imply the negation of wider oppressive structures. The multi-layered inequalities that shaped reproductive labor are brought out in the horrible story related by Chakraborty of the rape of the two slave girls Sabina and Biviana, nine and five years old respectively, by EIC sailors Michael Cameron and John Massey.

Abolitionism, one of the major forces that transformed the world in the nineteenth century, is another important backdrop against which to explore changes in labor relations in the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean jointly rather than separately. The campaign to abolish slavery was spearheaded by the British, but only after the burning of Cap Français and the violent interaction among slaves, sailors, free Africans, and petits blancs in revolutionary Saint-Domingue had ended slavery in Haiti. The ending of the legal slave trade pushed European states and capitalist interests in one region after another to find alternative sources of labor. In doing so, they altered inter-oceanic migration flows considerably.Footnote ⁴² While East African slaves were systematically channeled into the Atlantic to work on plantations, at least from the 1770s, plantation owners and states also began to tap into alternative pools of Asian labor. As Jennings's contribution shows, between the 1840s and 1870s, Chinese workers were forced into the Atlantic to work as contract laborers, under deeply exploitative conditions, to help the Spanish build the railroads that connected Havana to Cuban sugar plantations in the hinterland. This happened on the heels of decades of failed experiments with different forms of labor relations to build up Cuba's infrastructure. Other interlinked migratory patterns also allowed Abolitionism to thicken connections between the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Clare Anderson's contribution to this volume reflects how penal labor, long exploited in the Atlantic in conjunction with plantation slavery, expanded in the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century. Her contribution highlights the fact that penal labor was marketed as a form of “enlightened labour relations” in India to “seek advantage in global markets that were increasingly sensitive to the expropriation of slave labour.”