Wage-Earning Slaves: Coartación in Nineteenth-Century Cuba, by Claudia Varella & Manuel Barcia

ABSTRACTTwenty years after its initial publication, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Pulitzer Prize winning monograph A midwife's tale: the life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812 (1990) still serves as a major benchmark in women's labour/economic history mainly because it provides scholars with a window into the life of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century lay American rural healer not through the comments of an outsider, but through the words of the healer herself. While, on the surface, Ballard's encoded, repetitive, and quotidian diary may seem trivial and irrelevant to historians, as Ulrich notes, ‘it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard's book lies … For her, living was to be measured in doing’ (p. 9). By piecing together ‘ordinary’ primary source material to form a meaningful, extraordinary socio-cultural narrative, Ulrich elucidates how American midwives, such as Martha Ballard, functioned within the interstices of the private and public spheres. A midwife's tale is thus not only methodologically significant, but also theoretically important: by illustrating the economic contributions that midwives made to their households and local communities, and positioning the organizational skill of multitasking as a source of female empowerment, it revises our understanding of prescribed gender roles during the early American Republic (1783–1848). Even though A midwife's tale is clearly limited in terms of time (turn-of-the-nineteenth century) and place (rural Maine), it deserves the renewed attention of historians – especially those interested in gender relations and wage-earning, the economic value of domestic labour, and women's work before industrialization.

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Holy Rollers: Monasteries, Lamas, and the Unseen Transport of Chinese–Russian Trade, 1850–1911

International Review of Social History ◽

10.1017/s0020859014000406 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 59 (S22) ◽

pp. 69-88 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Devon Dear

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Qing Empire ◽

Paid Labor ◽

Resultant Increase ◽

Wage Earning ◽

The Right

AbstractThis article examines the roles of Mongolian monasteries and lamas in transportation between the Qing Chinese (1636–1911) and Russian Romanov (1613–1917) empires during the latter half of the nineteenth century. A series of treaties between 1858 and 1882 granted Russian subjects the right to trade in Mongolian territories under Qing sovereignty, and the resultant increase of Russian trade across Mongolia provided new wage-earning opportunities. Larger monasteries, with their access to pack animals and laborers, acted as brokers, while for poorer lamas haulage was one of the few sources of paid labor available in Mongolian territories, making working in transportation a strategy of survival for many Mongolian lamas. Mongolian porters provide a window on to how the broad processes of nineteenth-century imperialism in the Qing empire affected labor on the Sino–Russian frontier, and on to how imperialism was experienced in one of the most remote corners of the Qing empire.

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Claudia Varella – Manuel Barcía, Wage-Earning Slaves. Coartación in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

IBERO-AMERICANA PRAGENSIA ◽

10.14712/24647063.2021.13 ◽

2022 ◽

Vol 48 (1) ◽

pp. 113-114

Author(s):

Josef Opatrný

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

University Of Florida ◽

Wage Earning

Book review: Claudia Varella – Manuel Barcía, Wage-Earning Slaves. Coartación in Nineteenth-Century Cuba. Gainesville, Florida: University of Florida Press 2020, 217 p. ISBN 9781683401650.

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From Loss of Services to Loss of Support: The Wrongful Death Statutes, the Origins of Modern Tort Law, and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Family

Law & Social Inquiry ◽

10.1111/j.1747-4469.2000.tb00159.x ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 25 (03) ◽

pp. 717-755 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

John Fabian Witt

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

New York ◽

The United States ◽

Century Model ◽

Next Of Kin ◽

The Family ◽

Wage Earning ◽

Gender Asymmetry ◽

Wrongful Death ◽

Domestic Roles

The wrongful death statutes enacted in most states during the mid-nineteenth century have long represented a classic moment in the narrative of American legal history. Historians have not observed, however, that American wrongful death statutes amended the English act on which they were modeled to introduce a gender asymmetry peculiar to the United States. Led by New York, most American jurisdictions limited wrongful death actions to “the widow and next of kin” of the decedent, categories that did not include husbands of deceased wives. Thus, a wife could bring a wrongful death action for the death of her husband, but a husband could not bring a wrongful death action on his own behalf for the death of his wife. The wrongful death statutes represent a heretofore unrecognized conjuncture of the beginnings of the modem law of torts with the nineteenth-century legal reconstruction of the family. The statutes mowed accident litigation away from an eighteenth-century model of masters suing for loss of the services of a servant, slave, wife, or child, toward the now more familiar model of suits for loss of wages and support. Moreover, the gender asymmetry of the statutes embodied and reproduced a new nineteenth-century conception of the family in which men worked as free laborers and women were confined to relatively narrow domestic roles, removed from the market and dependent for their support on the wages of their husbands. Indeed, the statutes anticipated by over half a century the American welfare state's two-track approach to support for wage-earning men and dependent women.

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Wage-Earning Slaves

10.5744/florida/9781683401650.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Claudia Varella ◽

Manuel Barcia

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Systematic Study ◽

Lived Experiences ◽

Primary Sources ◽

Valuable Insight ◽

Colonial Rule ◽

Spanish Colonial ◽

Rural Settings ◽

Wage Earning ◽

Insight Into

Wage-Earning Slaves is the first systematic study of coartación, a process by which slaves worked toward purchasing their freedom in installments, long recognized as a distinctive feature of certain areas under Spanish colonial rule in the nineteenth century. Focusing on Cuba, this book reveals that instead of providing a “path to manumission,” the process was often rife with obstacles that blocked slaves from achieving liberty. Claudia Varella and Manuel Barcia trace the evolution of coartación in the context of urban and rural settings, documenting the lived experiences of slaves through primary sources from many different archives. They show that slave owners grew increasingly intolerant and abusive of the process and that the laws of coartación were not often followed in practice. The process did not become formalized as a contract between slaves and their masters until 1875, after abolition had already come. Varella and Barcia discuss how coartados did not see an improvement in their situation at this time but essentially became wage-earning slaves as they continued serving their former owners. The exhaustive research in this volume provides valuable insight into how slaves and their masters negotiated with each other in the ever-changing economic world of nineteenth-century Cuba, where freedom was not always absolute and where abuses and corruption most often prevailed.

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Working in a Fez Factory in Istanbul in the Late Nineteenth Century: Division of Labour and Networks of Migration Formed along Ethno-Religious Lines

International Review of Social History ◽

10.1017/s0020859009990241 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 54 (S17) ◽

pp. 69-90 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Mustafa Erdem Kabadayı

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Division Of Labour ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Production Volume ◽

Industrial Workers ◽

Turkish Republic ◽

Labour Relations ◽

Success Stories ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

Wage Earning

SummaryIn terms of production volume, most Ottoman state factories cannot be regarded as success stories, yet the labour relations they initiated, engendered, and supervised were important for the emergence of factory labour in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish republic. One of those state factories was the Imperial Fez Factory, where, throughout the nineteenth century, approximately 500 workers were employed, making it the second highest concentration of industrial workers in the empire after the Imperial Arsenal. Very recently, a limited number of wage ledgers for the fez factory became available for research. Those ledgers provide unprecedented information not only on remuneration but also on the production process and labour-control practices in the fez factory. Those ledgers enable us, for the first time, to formulate research questions within the framework of a broad labour history, in particular for the Ottoman factory workforce in the late nineteenth century. This article examines the effects of the ethno-religious characteristics and gender of Ottoman factory labourers on employment practices and wage-earning at the fez factory.

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