Indebtedness, Socio-cultural Hierarchies, and Unfree Labor on Nineteenth-Century Ceylonese Plantations

2021 ◽  
pp. 321-340
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Unfree Labor ◽  
Cultural Hierarchies

‘The Worst Oratorio Ever!’: Colonialist Condescension in the Critical Reception of George Tolhurst’s Ruth (1864)

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (02) ◽  
pp. 199-227
Author(s):  
Sarah Kirby
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
First Century ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Parent State ◽  
British Colony ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Cultural Hierarchies ◽  
Made In

The oratorio genre was regarded amongst the most edifying and instructive artforms of the Victorian era, and it was to these lofty ideals that George Tolhurst (1827–1877) aspired when composing his 1864 oratorioRuth. The first work of its kind written in the British colony of Victoria, Australia,Ruthreceived an initially favourable local reception; Tolhurst was urged by the Melbourne press to aim higher and present his work to a wider and more discerning audience. Consequently, he took his work to London where it was roundly criticized, widely mocked and eventually dubbed ‘the worst oratorio ever’. It might be assumed that a work so poorly received in the cultural metropolis of London would be, like so much other Victorian music, immediately forgotten. However, through its notoriously bad reception,Ruth– in what Percy Scholes describes as a ‘succès de ridicule’ – found a cult following that has spanned from the nineteenth century to the present day. This article examines the critical reception ofRuththrough the lens of colonial social relations, arguing that the treatment ofRuthin both London and Melbourne is emblematic of broader trends in the nineteenth-century relationship between parent state and settler colony. It also explores the surprising phenomenon of twentieth- and twenty-first-century consumption ofRuthin Britain, questioning whether the legacies of certain Victorian social and cultural prejudices relating to the artistic products of the colonies have been mitigated. Aesthetic and representational decisions made in recent revivals of Ruth suggest that cultural hierarchies forged during the Victorian era continue to be reinforced in the present day.

scholarly journals Unfree Labor, Apprenticeship and the Rise of the Victorian Hull Fishing Industry: An Example of the Importance of Law and the Local State in British Economic Change

2006 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc W. Steinberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Labor Relations ◽  
Local State ◽  
Fishing Industry ◽  
Labor Discipline ◽  
Unfree Labor ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
And Control

Within the last decade there has been considerable renewed attention on the importance of British master and servant law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a means of labor discipline and control. This article argues for further analyses of how the law was used within local contexts and specific industries and calls for increased focus on the role of the local state in labor relations. It argues that unfree labor played an important role in the development of some industries, and challenges claims of the demise of apprenticeship in later nineteenth-century England. Through an analysis of the Hull fish trawling industry in 1864–1875 it demonstrates that the exploitation of apprentice labor, and the control of fishing apprentices through punitive master–servant prosecutions were vital to the expansion of the trade.

The Making of Wage Laborers in Nineteenth Century Southern Africa: Magololo Porters and David Livingstone, 1853–1861

2014 ◽  
Vol 86 ◽  
pp. 15-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elias Mandala
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
The Other ◽  
Wage Labor ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
The Core ◽  
Unfree Labor ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Indirect Rule

AbstractThis essay illuminates the worldwide transition to free labor from various forms of unfree labor by examining that process in the particular conditions of Southern Africa's encounter with Britain. Dr. David Livingstone's servants—whose descendants in Malawi have been called “Magololo,”1 a term used throughout this essay to distinguish them from the “Kololo” conquerors of Bulozi in contemporary Zambia and parts of Namibia—exemplify this global development. Between 1853 and 1861, over a hundred young Magololo men worked as porters, deckhands, and guides and showed Livingstone the very places in southern Africa whose “discovery” (for Britons) made Livingstone famous. Owing tribute labor to their king, Sekeletu, they initially performed these tasks as subjects. But, after Livingstone's return from England in 1858, they labored for wages; they were among the first groups of Africans in the region to make the emblematic modern move from formally unfree labor to formally free labor. This transition, which would form the core conflict of indirect rule in British Africa, radically altered Livingstone's relationship with his guides: They rebelled against him in 1861. This is one side of the story. The other side follows from the fact that one cannot sensibly speak about workers without the story of their employers. Accordingly, this essay revisits the well-known story of Livingstone's life but offers a different perspective than other biographies. It is the first study to combine the long-familiar documentary evidence with oral sources, for the specific purpose of retelling the Livingstone narrative (in its many renderings) from the viewpoint of his relations with the Magololo workers. In that way, it can shed light on the beginnings of the transition to wage labor in this region.

scholarly journals Free and Unfree Labor in the Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Amazon

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (S25) ◽  
pp. 23-43
Author(s):  
Adalberto Paz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Brazilian Amazon ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Unfree Labor ◽  
Mass Influx

AbstractThe nineteenth-century Brazilian Amazon was characterized by a wide variety of unfree labor performed by Indians,mestiços, free blacks, freedpersons, and slaves. Since the mid-eighteenth century, the Portuguese Crown’s failure to promote the mass influx of enslaved Africans resulted in legislation that successively institutionalized and regularized coerced labor, limiting the mobility of individuals in the lower classes and obligating them to work against their will. Initially, this was restricted to Indians, but the measures were eventually applied to the entire free population of color. This article discusses the conditions under which these laws emerged and their impact on the living conditions of the population subject to them, placing the nineteenth-century Amazonian experience within wider historiographical debates about free and unfree labor.

Cloth and Silver: Pawning and Material Life in Mexico City at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

2004 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Francois
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Daily Basis ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Household Level ◽  
Domestic Servants ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
Cultural Hierarchies

For most residents of Mexico City at the turn of the nineteenth century, daily life was cash poor. Homemakers with servants or without, merchants and artisans, carpenters and domestic servants all turned to pawnshops to finance routine household, business and recreational needs, some on a daily basis. At the end of the colonial period and in the first decades of independent republican rule, residents from the lower and intermediate ranks of the city commonly raised cash by securing loans with possessions as collateral, leaving clothing, tools, and jewels temporarily with pawnbrokers. Based on more than 8,000 transactions culled from pawnshop records from the 1780s to the 1820s, this article argues that pawning material goods served to alleviate economic and other pressures at the household level.It was mostly women managing households who provided for dependents and/or maintained class and ethnic identities through creative financing strategies that depended on regular use of petty credit mechanisms. Archival documents and literary sources suggest that there were fundamental continuities in this material history of Mexico City from the last decades of the colonial period well into the decades after Independence, which was achieved in 1821. Material goods continued to serve as collateral for small loans throughout the nineteenth century. Pawning was a regular strategy used by many urban residents to negotiate the colonial and post-colonial political economy as well as cultural hierarchies. Petty credit secured by women helped individuals and families steady their precarious foothold on the social ladder of hierarchy. While pawning could allow some to maintain their status or even ascend the ladder, for most people collateral credit cushioned (or simply prolonged) the slip down.

Agricultural Structure and Proto-Industrialization in Russia: Economic Development With Unfree Labor

1985 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard L. Rudolph
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Industrial Activity ◽  
Agricultural Structure ◽  
Unfree Labor ◽  
Wide Scale ◽  
Agrarian Crisis

A revised view of the nature of Russian industrialization is proposed. It is argued that economic conditions on the serf estates did not hinder industrialization; they in fact facilitated proto-industrialization by promoting the nonagricultural pursuits of the peasantry. In opposition to the traditional view that industrialization took place after the Emancipation of the serfs in 1861, and that there was an “agrarian crisis” in the nineteenth century, it is argued that industrialization was well underway on a wide scale on the basis of serf labor before 1861. The so-called agrarian crisis may really have been a period of increased proto-industrial activity by the peasants.

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