Chocolate, slavery, forced labour, child labour and the state

2018 ◽  
pp. 77-92
Author(s):  
Ronald Hinch
Keyword(s):  
Child Labour ◽  
The State ◽  
Forced Labour

Chocolate, slavery, forced labour, child labour and the state

2018 ◽  
pp. 77-92
Author(s):  
Ronald Hinch
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Child Labour ◽  
The State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Forced Labour ◽  
Late Fifteenth

The objective in this chapter is to review the history of slave labour in the cocoa industry, including forced labour and unpaid child labour, to illustrate how governments often collaborate with the cocoa industry to create and perpetuate these abuses. Slavery in the cocoa industray is a serious form of food crime affecting husdreds of thousands of workers in the cocoa industry. The chapter traces the history of slavery in the cocoa industry from the arrival of Europeans in the Americas in the late fifteenth century to its contemporary forms in West Africa. It illustrates the often explicit but somemtimes passive complicity of governments in creating and protecting the slave trade in the name of protecting both private commericial interests as well as the interests of the State. Some of the proposed solutions to ending the slave trade in the cocoa industry are also discussed.

subsistence production (where in the colonial period mainly extra-economic factors such as forced cultivation or forced labour caused the integration of the peasantry in the market exchange). Socialist development was there-fore strongly identified with modernising through the rapid expansion of the state sector, that is, nationalisation and mechanisation on an ever-increasing scale. The peasantry would be gradually absorbed within this expanding sector, and hence, at first, the role of the peasantry was seen as essentially passive with its transformation mainly centring on social aspects. As such, the policy of communal villages became virtually a habitational concept (and was in actual fact the responsibility of the national directorate of housing): a question of social infrastructures (water supplies, schools, etc.) within a concept of communal life without concerning production and its transformation. This view conflicted heavily with the objective conditions in the rural areas characterised by a deep involvement of the peasantry in market relationships and their dependence on it either as suppliers of labour power or as cash crop producers. This contradiction became more obvious, when the balance of payments became a real constraint (in 1979) and, hence, the question of financing accumulation cropped up more strongly in practice. The peasantry as suppliers of cash crops, of food and of labour power to the state sectors occupied a crucial position in production and accumulation. However, the crucial question then becomes whether the peasantry only performs the role of supplying part of the accumulation fund or whether the peasantry itself is part and parcel of the process of transformation and hence that accumulation embraces as an integral part the transformation of peasant agriculture into more socialised forms of production. In other words, it poses the question whether the strategy is based on a primitive socialist accumulation on the basis of the peasantry (transferring the agrarian surplus to the develop-ment of the state sector), or whether accumulation includes the transformation of peasant agriculture. Clearly, the way this question is posed in practice will influence heavily the nature of the organisation of the exchange between the state sector and the peasantry. The proposition that the state sector can develop under its own steam (with or without the aid of external borrowing) cannot bypass this crucial question since, on the one hand, a considerable part of foreign exchange earnings and of the food supply to the towns depended on peasant production and, on the other, the very conditions of productivity and profitability in the agrarian state sector depended heavily on the organic link that existed.between labour supply and family agriculture. The monetary disequilibrium originating from the state sector has a severe impact on the organisation of the exchange between the state sector and the peasantry. First, the imbalance between the demand for and the supply of consumer commodities affected rural areas differently from urban areas. The reason was that in urban areas the rationing system guaranteed to each family a minimum quantity of basic consumer necessities at official prices. In the rural areas the principal form of rationing remained the queue! Hence, forced savings were distributed differently over urban and rural areas. Furthermore, the concentration of resources on the state sector also implied that the peasants'

2013 ◽  
pp. 205-205
Keyword(s):  
Rural Areas ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
The State ◽  
State Sector ◽  
Crucial Question ◽  
Peasant Agriculture ◽  
Forced Labour ◽  
Urban And Rural Areas ◽  
Labour Power

Negated Agency, Silenced Voice, and the Continued Negotiations in the Spaces Within

2020 ◽  
pp. 311-339
Author(s):  
Khushboo Jain
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Child Labour ◽  
The State ◽  
Labour Law ◽  
Child Rights ◽  
Child Agency

Childhood is believed to be a stage that requires protection, both in national and international policymaking realms. This essay looks at a few such intersections where lives of certain ‘categories’ of children have been gravely affected by laws meant for their protection and rehabilitation. Through detailed exploration of the making of the anti-child labour law and the category of railway children, this essay argues that repeatedly rehashed state plans of action to address child labour or children in railways situation are dysfunctional because they have abysmally failed to address it with the depth, diversity, and comprehensiveness required. This essay, touching upon case studies of child labour rescue raids conducted by the state in collaboration with NGOs and ethnographic accounts of children who have been rescued, and children who have defined their life and work in their own ways, attempts to explore how ‘childhood’ and ‘child agency’ have become a contested site between children, the existing state and NGO/legal activist/child rights groups discourses on child protection.

scholarly journals Learning to Labour: “Native” Orphans in Colonial India, 1840s–1920s

2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-42
Author(s):  
Soni
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Power ◽  
Child Labour ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Poor Children

AbstractTo this day, the history of indigenous orphans in colonial India remains surprisingly understudied. Unlike the orphans of Britain or European and Eurasian orphans in the colony, who have been widely documented, Indian orphans are largely absent in the existing historiography. This article argues that a study of “native” orphans in India helps us transcend the binary of state power and poor children that has hitherto structured the limited extant research on child “rescue” in colonial India. The essay further argues that by shifting the gaze away from the state, we can vividly see how non-state actors juxtaposed labour and education. I assert that the deployment of child labour by these actors, in their endeavour to educate and make orphans self-sufficient, did not always follow the profitable trajectory of the state-led formal labour regime (seen in the Indian indenture system or early nineteenth-century prison labour). It was often couched in terms of charity and philanthropy and exhibited a convergence of moral and economic concerns.

The State and Pre-Colonial Demographic History: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Madagascar

1991 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 415-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gwyn Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Demographic Transition ◽  
Agricultural Production ◽  
Demographic History ◽  
Adult Mortality ◽  
The State ◽  
Transition Theory ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Forced Labour ◽  
The Impact

This paper analyses the demography of nineteenth-century Madagascar in the light of the debate generated by the demographic transition theory. Both supporters and critics of the theory hold to an intrinsic opposition between human and ‘natural’ factors, such as climate, famine and disease, influencing demography. They also suppose a sharp chronological divide between the pre-colonial and colonial eras, arguing that whereas ‘natural’ demographic influences were of greater importance in the former period, human factors predominated thereafter. This paper argues that in the case of nineteenth-century Madagascar the human factor, in the form of the Merina state, was the predominant demographic influence. However, the impact of the state was felt through natural forces, and it varied over time. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Merina state policies stimulated agricultural production, which helped to create a larger and healthier population and laid the foundation for Merina military and economic expansion within Madagascar. From the 1820, the cost of such expansionism led the state to increase its exploitation of forced labour at the expense of agricultural production and thus transformed it into a negative demographic force. Infertility and infant mortality, which were probably more significant influences on overall population levels than the adult mortality rate, increased from 1820 due to disease, malnutrition and stress, all of which stemmed from state forced labour policies. Available estimates indicate little if any population growth for Madagascar between 1820 and 1895. The demographic ‘crisis’ in Africa, ascribed by critics of the demographic transition theory to the colonial era, stemmed in Madagascar from the policies of the imperial Merina regime which in this sense formed a link to the French regime of the colonial era. In sum, this paper questions the underlying assumptions governing the debate about historical demography in Africa and suggests that the demographic impact of political forces be re-evaluated in terms of their changing interaction with ‘natural’ demographic influences.

Ideology and Social Policy: the Origins of the Trade Boards Act

1991 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Blackburn
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Child Labour ◽  
The State ◽  
Compulsory Arbitration ◽  
Legal Control ◽  
Low Pay

The issue of sweated labour formed one of the most intractable social problems of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Numerous remedies to solve sweating, such as the restriction of female and child labour, the abolition of domestic workshops, consumers' leagues, and co-operative production were variously advanced but subsequently found to be wanting. Eventually, and bowing to the inevitable, Edwardians finally sanctioned one cautious measure which they thought would curb sweating at its root – that is the legal control of low pay in the form of the 1909 Trade Boards Act. Initially, the act applied to domestic chain-making, ready-made and wholesale bespoke tailoring, paper-box making, and the machine-made lace and finishing trade. In these four industries in which wages were deemed unduly low, boards were established consisting of equal numbers of employers' and workers' representatives, plus independent members nominated by the state. In effect, the boards were thus a form of compulsory arbitration on pay.

scholarly journals Forced Labour and access to Education of Rohingya Refugee Children in Bangladesh: Beyond a Humanitarian Crisis

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 20-35
Author(s):  
Md Mahmudul Hoque
Keyword(s):  
Formal Education ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Child Labour ◽  
Household Composition ◽  
Host Community ◽  
Refugee Children ◽  
Access To Education ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Humanitarian Crisis ◽  
Forced Labour

Rohingya refugee children in Bangladesh are forced into labour inside and outside the camps for a range of reasons. The article explores the child labour situations inside and outside the camps and relates the issue with access to education for Rohingya children. Being informed by various perspectives concerning child labour and education in developing country context, this research work takes a qualitative approach to study the issue. After collecting data through a few qualitative methods including observations and semi-structured interviews, the researcher explores the issue with those informed perspectives. The study finds that lack of formal identity, lack access in the formal market, absence of social sanctions against child employment, lack of aspirations, household composition and poor living conditions are some of the key factors that force children to various forms of labour. The host community members employ Rohingya children as cheap labourers and domestic workers while undocumented children often become victims of bonded labour, sex trade and trafficking. Forced labour and lack of access to formal education have formed a humanitarian crisis in the largest refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar which demands support and actions from local and international agencies.

scholarly journals Child Labour, Parental Neglect, School Boards, and Teacher Quality: School Inspector Reports on the Supply and Demand of Schooling in Mid-nineteenth-century Sweden

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Germund Larsson ◽  
Johannes Westberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
School Boards ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Child Labour ◽  
Research Field ◽  
The State ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Wide Range

By examining the state school inspector reports of 1861–1863, which provide rich insights into the local conditions of schooling in Sweden, this article sheds further light on the wide range of factors that weakened school enrolment and attendance in nineteenth-century Sweden. In terms of parental demand, these included child labour on farms, at manors, and in industries; the transformation of the servant system among rural households; and religious practices, such as the confirmation and the beliefs of Protestant sectarian groups. On the supply side, factors that school inspectors reported included the inability of Swedish teacher seminars to examine enough teachers and the problematic behaviour of local school boards. As a result, this article provides additional input into the debate in educational history regarding the role of the state, religion, rural elites, and parents in the rise of mass schooling, while simultaneously providing further qualitative evidence to a quantitatively oriented research field in economic history on the determinants of schooling.

Child Labour Laws in South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe: A Comparative Analysis

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Beauty Vambe ◽  
Amos Saurombe
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Qualitative Methodology ◽  
Child Labour ◽  
International Labour Organisation ◽  
Child Work ◽  
Child Rights ◽  
Forced Labour

This article reports on a study that investigated the effectiveness of child labour laws intended to promote child rights and the protection of children from unfair and forced labour. Legal scholars distinguish between child work and child labour: forced child labour manifests itself in abusing children sexually, forcing children to work on farms, and compromising children’s rights to education. Although South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia have laws in place to protect children from child labour, the abuse of children continues in these countries. Furthermore, although these three countries are signatories to conventions of the International Labour Organisation that seek to eliminate child labour, they have been unable to stem the tide of child labour. This article argues that there is a need for the three countries to work closely together to implement policies that reverse or fight against child labour. The researchers used a qualitative methodology to interpret the variations in the application of child labour laws. They found there are no harmonised laws to deal with child labour in South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Hence, this article recommends that an independent supranational organisation be established in Southern Africa to monitor, evaluate, and implement progressive laws to eradicate child labour in line with internationally recognised best practices as set out in child labour laws.

The Changing Form of Child Labour circa 1880–1918

1999 ◽  
pp. 118-138
Author(s):  
Michael Lavalette
Keyword(s):  
Child Welfare ◽  
Child Labour ◽  
The State ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Period 1880

This chapter, written by Michael Lavalette, presents interpretations for the decline of child labour in the period 1880-1920 and addresses the role of the state in the handling of child welfare. Throughout the chapter, Lavallette stresses how dangerous it is to think that the issue of child labour is resolved. Instead, he emphasises the importance of recognising the ways that child labour and exploitation can be restructured and disguised in today’s society.

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