Abstract
There have been two major intercontinental streams of movement of contract labour in the modern world. The first of these, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, involved an outflow from the countries of Western Europe, mainly the British Isles and Germany, to colonial settlements in the New World. The second, of importance from the middle of the nineteenth century to the first quarter of the twentieth century, was an outflow from the less developed parts of the world, particularly Asia, to other underdeveloped areas in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, plus Australia, mainly for the production of plantation crops, particularly sugar. While these two streams did have certain legal similarities - a contract, presumably voluntarily agreed to by the migrants to provide labour for a limited period of time in exchange for transportation, with regulation and controls by national governments - there were considerable differences in their racial composition, the racial attitudes of recipient countries, the relative incomes of sending and receiving countries, the specific uses of labour during the period of contract, and the opportunities available after the contracts had expired.
This paper draws upon research done while I was the recipient of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The work was completed under National Science Foundation grant No. SES-8121026. Useful research assistance was provided by Stacey Dulberg. I have benefitted from the comments and suggestions of David Brion Davis, Douglas Deal, Seymour Drescher, Michael Edelstein, David Eltis, David Galenson, Henry Gemery, Barry Higman, Ronald Jones, Sidney Mintz, Rebecca Scott, Ralph Shlomowitz, Ronald Takaki, and Peter Temin, as well as from the discussions of the Workshop participants.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For a discussion of these issues, see Stanley L. Engerman, ‘Coerced and Free Labor: Property Rights and the Development of the Labor Force’, forthcoming (in translation) in Annales. For an excellent earlier summary discussion of contract labour, see Carter Goodrich, ‘Indenture’, in Edwin R.A. Seligman, (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Volume VII, (New York, 1932), pp. 644–648. For an important discussion of the role of sugar production in generating the intercontinental movement of labour, see the essays in Sidney Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, (Chicago, 1974). See also David W. Galenson, ‘The Rise and Fall of Indentured Labor in the Americas: An Economic Analysis’, Journal of Economic History, XLIV, (1984), pp. 1–26.
These advantages of higher population density were noted by many writers in the nineteenth century, in particular Henry Carey and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and were the basis of their suggestions as to appropriate land and immigration policy. In the early stages of European settlement land was often used to subsidize migration, either by a grant to the migrant or to the landowners attracting migrants. In some cases land was provided both to the importer of contract labour and to the labourer after his contract had expired as part of his ‘freedom dues’.
Rice was also primarily a plantation crop during the period of the settlement of South Carolina. While it is generally presumed that only slaves could profitably be used to produce sugar under the technology of the times, because of the labour and capital requirements of large plantations, it is of interest that small-scale cane farming was introduced in the late nineteenth century when the opportunities to use slave labour were eliminated, and that in the mid-twentieth century there were examples of considerable sugar output coming from regions with relatively little plantation production. For a discussion of this, see Vladimir P. Timoshenko and Boris C. Swerling, The World’s Sugar: Progress and Policy, (Stanford, 1957), pp. 63–89, and G.B. Hagelberg, The Caribbean Sugar Industries: Constraints and Opportunities, (New Haven, 1974), pp. 63–102. Thus there may have been more flexibility in production technique than presumed in the past, although examples such as the delay in Australia’s ability to end non-white production of sugar by moving to small, white-operated, farms might indicate that the successful adoption of alternative sugar technologies to compete with plantation production was not easy. See also the discussion in Stanley L. Engerman, ‘Contract Labor, Sugar, and Technology in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Economic History, XLIII, (1983), pp. 635–659.
On slave labour, see, e.g., the discussions in Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross, (Boston, 1974), the sources cited there, and the subsequent debates on the economics of slavery. There were, of course, various means by which slaves did have some influence on their working conditions, since owners needed to be concerned with conditions giving rise to discontent and resistance, which would limit their economic gains.
See Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage, (Chapel Hill, 1947), on America, and A.G.L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies, (London, 1966), on Australia.
It should be noted that the Australian sugar industry did not begin to develop until after the end of convict labour shipments.
For an extensive discussion of this, and other issues concerning the pre-Revolutionary War movement of indenture servants from the British Isles to the Americas, see David W. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, (Cambridge, 1981).
See David Eltis, ‘Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migrations: Some Comparisons’, American Historical Review, LXXXVIII, (1983), pp. 251–280, for an extended discussion and references concerning the white and black migrations in the period before the end of the nineteenth century. Eltis estimates that ‘for every European who came to the Americas before the massive population shifts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries got underway, at least four and perhaps five Africans disembarked’. This includes all white migration, not just that of contract labour.
See the summary table in A.M. Carr-Saunders, World Population, (Oxford, 1936), p. 49. See also the tables presented in Imre Ferenczi and Walter F. Willcox, International Migrations, Volume I, (New York, 1929), particularly, pp. 230–231.
For estimates of gross migration in the nineteenth century, see Table II.
For the most recent updating of Curtin’s estimates on the magnitude of the slave trade, see Paul E. Lovejoy, ‘The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis’, Journal of African History, XXIII, (1982), pp. 473–501, and his Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, (Cambridge, 1983). See, of course, Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, (Madison, 1969).
See Eltis, ‘Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migrations’.
The major recipients of contract labour (besides Cuba) accounted for roughly one-quarter of world cane sugar production in the late nineteenth century. For data on world sugar production, see Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, The World Sugar Economy in Figures, 1880–1959, (Commodity Reference Series, 1), pp. 31–32. See also Engerman, ‘Contract Labor, Sugar and Technology’, p. 651. In the period 1880/81–1884/85, Cuba and Puerto Rico accounted for about one-third of world cane production and Indonesia about 15 percent. The United States, Brazil, and other areas in the Western Hemisphere not drawing upon contract labour, accounted for about one-fifth of world cane production.
The major sources of estimates of the major migration stream from Britain in the period prior to the Revolutionary War are: Smith, Colonists in Bondage; Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America; Henry A. Gemery, ‘Emigration from the British Isles to the New World: 1630–1700: Inferences from Colonial Populations’, in Paul Uselding, (ed.), Research in Economic History, Volume V, (Greenwich, 1980), pp. 179–231; Henry A. Gemery, ‘European Emigration to the New World, 1700–1820: Numbers and Quasi-Numbers’, in Bailyn, et al., (eds.), Perspectives in American History, New Series, 1, (1984), pp. 283–342; and E. A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871, (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 219–228. See also the paper by Gemery included in the volume.
It is estimated that there were about 10,000 migrants to French Canada before 1760, of whom about 3,900 were engagés. See George Langlois, Histoire de la Population Canadienne-Française, (Montreal, 1934), p. 60. The outflow to the French West Indies remains of uncertain magnitude. K.G. Davies, drawing on the work of G. Debien, cites the figure of 6,200 engagés sent from La Rochelle over the period 1634–1715, of whom less than one-fifth went to Canada, with the majority going to the French West Indies. See K.G. Davies, The North Atlantic World in the Seventeenth Century, (Minneapolis, 1974), pp. 96–108, and G. Debien, Les Engáges pour Les Antilles, (Paris, 1952), p. 142. There were a few French migrants going to Louisiana. See also the paper by F. Mauro included in this volume. On the German migration see, most recently, Marianne Wokeck, ‘The Flow and Composition of German Immigration to Philadelphia, 1727–1775’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, CV, (1981), pp. 249–278. See also the paper by G. Moltmann included in this volume. The magnitude of the Dutch contract labour outflow to New Amsterdam, the Caribbean, the Cape Colony, and the East Indies is not easy to locate (in the sources available to me), although there were frequent discussions of the possible use of servants and of the choices to be made between slaves and servants. See, e.g., numerous documents in E.B. O’Callaghan, (ed.). Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, (Albany, 1856). In a discussion of the Dutch settlement of the Caribbean, it has been stated that ‘the Dutch almost never had equivalents to the English indentured servants’ or the French engagés’, although the same source later notes the arrival of counterparts to indentured servants’. Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680, (Gainesville, 1971), pp. 367, 444. See also the paper by E. van den Boogaart included in this volume. Similarly, it has been stated the Spanish colonies had ‘no organized system of indenture comparable with that in the English or French colonies’. J.H. Parry, The Spanish Seaborne Empire, (New York, 1966), p. 235. See also the paper by B.H. Slicher van Bath included in this volume, and the essays by Woodrow Borah, Peter Boyd-Bowman, Magnus Morner, and James Lockhart, in Fredi Chiapelli, (ed.), First Images of America, Volume II, (Berkeley, 1976), pp. 707–804. For some useful discussions of this period, including a discussion of migration flows from Western and Central Europe, see John Duncan Brite, ‘The Attitude of European States Toward Emigration to the American Colonies and the United States, 1607–1820’, Ph.D. dissertation. University of Chicago, 1937. For a discussion of the stream of migration from Central Europe to Russia at the end of the eighteenth century, see Roger P. Bartlett, Human Capital: The Settlement of Foreigners in Russia, 1762–1804, (Cambridge, 1979).
See Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, and Gemery, ‘Emigration from the British Isles to the New World, 1630–1700’, on the changing pattern of location. Galenson also presents data and discussions of the changing distribution and skill composition of the labour force in different parts of North America settled by the British.
See Langlois, Histoire de la Population Canadienne-Française.
For some eighteenth century data on the numbers of servants in the British West Indies, see Robert V. Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America Before 1776, (Princeton, 1975), pp. 172–258. Wells also provides estimates for other colonies.
See, e.g., Sharon V. Salinger, ‘Colonial Labor in Transition: The Decline of Indentured Servitude in Late Eighteenth Century Philadelphia’, Labor History, XXII, (1981), pp. 165–191, and Robert O. Heavner, Economic Aspects of Indentured Servitude in Colonial Philadelphia, (New York, 1978). On the Chesapeake see, most recently, Lorena S. Walsh, ‘Servitude and Opportunity in Charles County, Maryland, 1658–1705’, in Aubrey C. Land, et al., (eds.), Law, Society, and Politics in Early Maryland, (Baltimore, 1977), pp. 111–133; Lois Green Carr and Russell R. Menard, ‘Immigration and Opportunity: The Freedmen in Early Colonial Maryland’, in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, (eds.), The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century, (Chapel Hill, 1979), pp. 206–242; and Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, (Chapel Hill, 1986).
In addition to Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, see also James Horn, ‘Servant Emigration to the Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century’, in Tate and Ammerman, (eds.), The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 51–95. Sex ratios and age distributions in the slave trade are presented in Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage, (Princeton, 1978). Whereas Galenson (pp. 24–25) estimates four-fifths of the servants (and over ninety percent for those migrating after 1700) were male, the slave trade was generally ‘only’ 60 to 70 percent male.
There are numerous sources for the nineteenth century migrations, the most useful being: Ferenczi and Willcox, International Migrations; Kingsley Davis, The Population of India and Pakistan, (Princeton, 1951); Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar, (London, 1949–50); K.O. Laurence, Immigration into the West Indies in the Nineteenth Century, (St. Lawrence, Barbados, 1971); Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery, (Oxford, 1974); G.W. Roberts and J. Bryne, ‘Summary Statistics on Indenture and Associated Migration affecting the West Indies, 1834–1918’, Population Studies, XX, (1966), pp. 125–134: and R.R. Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of ihe British Colonial Empire, Volume II, (London, 1949) and Volume III, (London, 1953). There are, of course, numerous other sources, some referred to in this paper and others cited in these works.
See, e.g., Johnson U.J. Asiegbu, Slavery and the Politics of Liberation, 1787–1861, (London, 1969), and Monica Schuler, ‘Alas, Alas, Kongo’, (Baltimore, 1980), as well as her paper included in this volume.
See James, Duffy, A Question of Slavery, (Cambridge, 1967), as well as two interesting contemporary writings, quite revealing in regard to attitudes towards slavery and contract labour, by Henry W. Nevinson, A Modern Slavery, (New York, 1906), and by William A. Cadbury, Labour in Portugese West Africa, (London, 1910).
In addition to Tinker, A New System of Slavery, see also S.B. Mookherji, The Indenture System in Mauritius, 1837–1915, (Calcutta, 1962); I.M. Cumpston, Indians Overseas in British Territories, 1834–1854, (London, 1953); Panchanan Saha, Emigration of Indian Labour, (Delhi, 1970); C. Kondapi, Indians Overseas, 1838–1949, (Bombay, 1951); Kernial Singh Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, (Cambridge, 1969); and K.L. Gillion, Fiji’s Indian Migrants, (London, 1962). For information and sources on the West Indies, see Laurence, Immigration into the West Indies in ihe Nineteenth Century; Stanley L. Engerman, ‘Economic Adjustments to Emancipation in the United States and British West Indies’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XIII, (1982), pp. 191–220, and Engerman, ‘Contract Labor, Sugar, and Technology’. Davis, Population of India and Pakistan, pp. 98–106, estimates that only 7.8 percent of gross emigration from India in the period 1834–1900 went to non-Asiatic regions. Given differences in repatriation, these regions did account for about 21.6 percent of India’s net emigration. So large was India’s population that even the substantial total outflow of 27.7 millions from India between 1846–1932 was equal to only 9.4 percent of the 1900 population, considerably smaller than the relative outflows from most European nations. Thus the contract labour stream from India represented a quite minute part of India’s population. There are extensive discussions of these streams of Asian and African contract labour in the papers by P.C. Emmer and H. Gerbeau, included in this volume.
See, most usefully, Persia Crawford Campbell, Chinese Coolie Emigration, (London, 1923); Watt Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru, (Durham, 1951); Duvon Clough Corbitt, The Chinese in Cuba, 1847–1947, (Wilmore, 1971); Katharine Coman, The History of Contract Labor in ihe Hawaiian Islands, (New York, 1903); Clarence F. Glick Sojourners and Settlers, (Honolulu, 1980); Robert A. Huttenback, Racism and Empire, (Ithaca, 1976); and Ronald Takaki, Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920, (Honolulu, 1983).
See Peter Corris, Passage, Port and Plantation, (Melbourne, 1973); O.W. Parnaby, Britain and the Labor Trade in the Southwest Pacific, (Durham, 1964); H.E. Maude, Slavers in Paradise, (Stanford, 1981); the various writings of Ralph Shlomowitz, most recently, ‘Melanesian Labor and the Development of the Queensland Sugar Industry, 1863–1906’, in Paul Uselding, (ed.), Research in Economic History, Volume VII, (Greenwich, 1982), pp. 327–361; and the writings of Adrian Graves, most recently the essay included in this volume, as well as his forthcoming book, The Political Economy of the Queensland Sugar Industry, 1862–1906. It should be noted that the settlement of Fiji with imported Pacific contract labour was originally for the production of cotton during the American Civil War, and that the British annexation of Fiji was influenced, in part, by the desire to regulate the trade in contract labour.
See R.A.J. Van Lier, Frontier Society, (The Hague, 1971); Annemarie de Waal Malefijt, The Javanese of Surinam, (Assen, 1963); and Cornells Goslinga, ‘Immigration in Surinam, 1863–1939’, in Some Papers Presented at the Fourth Annual Conference of Caribbean Historians, (Mona, 1972), pp. 49–64. The latter volume includes a number of other useful papers on immigrant labourers in the Caribbean in the nineteenth century.
On the Japanese, see Hilary Conroy, The Japanese Frontier in Hawaii, 1868–1898, (Berkeley, 1953), and on the Filippinos, see Bruno Lasker, Filippino Immigration, (Chicago, 1931). The latter case was of interest in that the terms of the contract were considered non-binding upon the labourers.
For an important description of this migration, its economic consequences, and the importance of trade in tropical products, see W. Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations, 1870–1913, (London, 1978), and various of the essays in W. Arthur Lewis, (ed.), Tropical Development, 1880–1913, (London, 1970). Lewis (pp. 189, 209) notes the extremely sharp drop in sugar prices between 1883 and 1913, particularly severe before 1899, with the rise in productivity in sugar production. This price decline, due in part to the shift to European beet sugar production under government subsidy, meant increased difficulties for cane-producing regions and their contract labourers.
As Lewis points out (Growth and Fluctuations, pp. 181–193), in the second stream race and income were related, and only those from low-income countries (non-Europeans) were willing to accept plantation labour because of their limited economic opportunities at home. These issues have been further developed, and put into a broader cultural context, in several essays by Sidney Mintz.
It is difficult to find estimates of the return flows from the American colonies, but the presumption seems that they were quite small. Among southern European (mainly Italian) migrants to the United States and South America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was a more significant return flow, but most immigrants did remain in the Americas. On this see, e.g., Herbert S. Klein, ‘The Integration of Italian Immigrants into the United States and Argentina: A Comparative Analysis’, American Historical Review, LXXXVIII, (1982), pp. 306–329, and the literature cited there.
Some estimates of the ratios of Indians returned to Indians arrived are: British Guiana, 31.6 percent; Trinidad, 22.4 percent; Surinam, 33.7 percent; Martinique, 20 percent; Guadeloupe, 18 percent (Laurence, Immigration into the West Indies in the Nineteenth Century, p. 57); and Mauritius, 34.9 percent (Kuczynski, Demographic Survey, Volume HI, pp. 796–797). Indian migrants to Mauritius were not provided return passage after 1851. It is estimated that the ratio of returnees was nearly two-thirds for Pacific islanders recruited into Queensland (Parnaby, Britain and the Labor Trade, pp. 203,206), while Gillion (Fiji’s Indian Migrants, p. 190) estimates that by 1957 ‘about 40 percent of the immigrants had gone back to India’. Of Javanese coming to Surinam, it is estimated that about one-quarter returned before World War II (Malefijt, Javanese of Surinam, p. 22). These statistics relate to different time periods and, for various reasons, are not fully comparable.
See Malefijt, Javanese of Surinam, p. 27. The argument for provision of plots to time-expired servants, to meet their drive for land ownership and thus encourage permanent settlement, was frequently made in the British debates.
For a discussion of these restrictions, see Huttenback, Racism and Empire.
The one possible exception was on some of the Pacific islands where the combination of white settlement, epidemic diseases, and contract labour led to population decreases.
For data, see Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, pp. 23–33; Wokeck, ‘Flow and Composition of German Immigration’, and Salinger, ‘Colonial Labor in Transition’. See also fn. 20, above. Wokeck estimates that about 37 percent of the German migrants to Philadelphia were adult male, the rest being women and children. In the London lists of 1773–1776, the ratio of the number of men above 20 to total migrants was 70 percent (Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, p. 27). Debien (Les Engages pour Les Antilles) points out that few French engages were female.
The outflow from India, after the passage of legislation, was generally about 70 percent male, close to the rate specified. The impact of the legislation can be seen in the case of Mauritius, which had 83.8 percent male in-migration prior to 1856, and 70.7 percent afterward. A similar shift can be seen in the data for British Guiana, presented in Dwarka Nath, A History of Indians in British Guiana, (London, 1950), p. 208. The debates are given throughout Tinker, A New System of Slavery. Chinese migration was almost entirely male, as was that from the Pacific islands.
See Ferenczi and Willcox, International Migrations, Volume I, particularly, pp. 210–215. The major European migration streams with a sex ratio (of males to females) equal to (or above) that of Indian contract labour were the Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese.
On the history of sugar production, see Deerr, History of Sugar. See also Charles Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization, (Ithaca, 1970).
See, most recently, Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, (Chapel Hill, 1972), and Richard Sheridan, The Development of the Plantations to 1750, (Barbados, 1970).
For a discussion of another region, Brazil, using slave labour to grow tobacco at this time, see Catherine Lugar, ‘The Portuguese Tobacco Trade and Tobacco Growers of Bahia in the Lats Colonial Period’, in Dauril Alden and Warren Dean, (eds.), Essays Concerning the Socioeconomic History of Brazil and Portuguese India, (Gainesville, 1977), pp. 26–70.
See Russell R. Menard, ‘From Servants to Slaves: The Transformation of the Chesapeake Labor System’, Southern Studies, XVI, (1977), pp. 355–390, and Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, pp. 117–168, and the sources cited there. The Gemery and Galenson estimates indicate an extremely sharp break after 1700 in the destinations of white migrants to the British colonies. Prior to 1650, an estimated 70 percent of these migrants went to the West Indies, falling to 50 percent between 1650 and 1700, and 20 percent between 1700 and 1780. Between 1650 and 1780, the West Indies received an estimated 28.7 percent of all white migrants (and 37.8 percent of the sample of British indentured labour for whom destinations were known) while the Chesapeake received 23.3 percent of all migrants (and 54.5 percent of the indentured labour), and Pennsylvania 16.5 percent of migrants (and 5.6 percent of indentured labour). Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, pp. 83–84, 216–218.
For useful discussions of the elasticity of the supply of slaves from Africa, see Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn, ‘The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Tentative Economic Model’, Journal of African History, XV, (1974), pp. 223–246; E. Philip LeVeen, The African Supply Response’, African Studies Review, XVIII, (1975), pp. 9–28; the essays by Joseph Miller, Patrick Manning, Mahdi Adamu, Martin Klein and Paul E. Love joy, Paul E. Love joy and Jan S. Hogendorn, and Richard N. Bean and Robert P. Thomas in Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn, (eds.), The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, (New York, 1979). See also Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade, (Madison, 1975), pp. 153–196.
The resident population’s labour supply can be described either as the most elastic, given alternative opportunities (particularly if there was a large, unsettled frontier), or most inelastic, given its presence. There was a point - the total population - at which the supply would become perfectly inelastic at any point in time, but there were many more native-Americans and free white workers available than were utilized on the plantation labour force throughout the Americas.
Throughout the Americas there had been early attempts to use native-Americans as the basis of the plantation and mining labour force, but due to disease and other factors these were not successful and slaves were imported. In parts of South and Central America native-American Indians did become a widely used form of forced labour, but these were generally areas in which no large-scale export production occurred and plantations were unimportant. See, e.g., William L. Sherman, Forced Native Labor in Sixteenth-Century Central America, (Lincoln, 1979). See also Klein, The Middle Passage, pp. 3–22.
See, e.g., the discussion in Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, (New York, 1975). Such opportunities became more limited over time, but the opportunity to own land clearly seemed the most desired course for most Whites (and, later, Blacks) in the Americas.
For population breakdown by race, see Wells, Population of the British Colonies, and John James McCusker, Jr., ‘The Rum Trade and the Balance of Payments of the Thirteen Continental Colonies, 1650–1775’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1970. The one major exception to be noted is Brazil, which had a higher proportion of slaves than did several of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean islands.
It is estimated that in 1774 slaves and servants comprised 14.9 percent of Philadelphia’s labour force, with 46.2 percent of the unfree labourers being servants. While the share of servants plus slaves in the total Philadelphia labour force moved only within a small range between 1767 and 1775, the share of servants in the total unfree labour force rose from 24.8 percent in 1767 to 61.1 percent in 1775. Salinger, ‘Colonial Labor in Transition’, p. 180. Outside Philadelphia it is probable that free labour provided a larger component of the Pennsylvania labour force.
However, for an alternative estimate of the magnitude of the Post-Revolutionary War migration into the United States, with quite important implications for the study of migration patterns, see Gemery, ‘European Emigration to the New World: 1700–1820’ See also Robert W. Fogel, et al., ‘The Economies of Mortality in North America, 1650–1910: A Description of a Research Project’, Hisorical Methods, XI, (1978), pp. 75–108.
See Charlotte Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 1860–1885, (Cambridge, Mass., 1957).
For brief discussions, see Goodrich, ‘Indenture’, and Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, pp. 179–180.
See Tinker, A New System of Slavery, pp. 61–115. Even during the years they overlapped, there were considerably more Africans imported into Cuba in the illegal slave trade than there were Chinese contract labourers imported. See, e.g., Mary Reckord, ‘Chinese Contract Labour in Cuba, 1847–74’ in Some Papers Presented at the Fourth Annual Conference of Caribbean Historians, pp. 79–88.
For a longer discussion of this case as well as references to the relevant literature, see Stanley L. Engerman, ‘Economic Change and Contract Labor in the British Caribbean: The End of Slavery and the Adjustment to Emancipation’, Explorations in Economic History, XXI, (1984), a revised version of which will also be published in David Richardson, (ed.). Abolition and its Aftermath in the West Indies: Volume I: The Historical Context, 1790–1870, (London, forthcoming). See also Engerman, ‘Economic Adjustments to Emancipation’, while Sidney W. Mintz, ‘Slavery and the Rise of Peasantries’, in Michael Craton, (ed.), Roots and Branches: Current Directions in Slave Studies, (Toronto, 1979), pp. 213–242, has an insightful comparative presentation.
See, e.g., Douglas Hall, Free Jamaica, (New Haven, 1959), and William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation, (Oxford, 1976), as well as his essay included in this volume.
Sugar output in Mauritius immediately after apprenticeship (in 1839–1843) was almost identical to that prior to emancipation, and by the 1850’s it had reached levels about four times those achieved before the end of slavery. Deerr, History of Sugar, p. 203.
Clearly, given British attempts to end the slave trade to Cuba and the difficulties that created with Spain, agreement to permit Indian contract labour into Cuba was impossible.
See, e.g., Alleyne Ireland, Tropical Colonization, (London, 1899), pp. 160–194, for data on exports per capita in 1882–91, related to the extent of immigration and to the land-labour ratio. It should be noted that the time pattern of labour inflow differed among the British colonies. Thus Mauritius reached about 80 percent of its inflow by 1865, at which time the British Caribbean had received less than one-quarter of its total inflow, while migration to Natal had barely begun and that to Fiji not yet started.
Java provides the one important late-nineteenth century example of extensive sugar production without contract (or slave) labour. Yet despite the high population densities it was still necessary to use political pressures to provide for the labour force in sugar production, and it appears that the plantation was not the only basis of sugar production, some being grown on peasant farms. See G.R. Knight, ‘From Plantation to Padi-field: The Origins of the Nineteenth Century Transformation of Java’s Sugar Industry’, Modern Asian Studies, XIV, (1980), pp. 177–204. For another transition to sugar production, in an area in which slavery had never been important, see Patrick Bryan, ‘The Transition of Plantation Agriculture in the Dominican Republic, 1870–84’, Journal of Caribbean History, X–XI, (1978), pp. 82–105.
See Engerman, ‘Economic Adjustments to Emancipation’.
See, most recently, Thomas H. Holloway, Immigrants on the Land, (Chapel Hill, 1980). In the Brazilian sugar regions, there had been some discussion of the importation of Chinese coolie labour, but (for reasons other than humanitarianism), these proposals were rejected. See Peter L. Eisenberg, The Sugar Industry in Pernambuco, (Berkeley, 1974), p. 204.
Puerto Rico also continued to expand sugar production after the end of slavery. For discussions of Puerto Rico and Cuba (as well as the Dominican Republic), see the essays included in Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Frank Moya Pons, and Stanley L. Engerman, (eds.). Between Slavery and Free Labor: The Spanish-Speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth-Century, (Baltimore, 1985). The Cuban case involved a number of different forms of labour organisation, but the separation of the central factory from the production of cane meant that the relative importance of the plantation as a cane-producing unit declined at the end of the nineteenth century, with a shift to the greater importance of smaller farms, some of which used hired labour, and some of which were owner-operated.
In Peru Chinese contract labourers were also used to collect guano for export. See Deerr, History of Sugar, p. 141, and Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru, p. 86.
See, most recently, Peter Richardson, Chinese Mine Labour in the Transvaal, (London, 1982)
There were, however, frequent movements of contract, and other forms of non-free labour, within Africa in the twentieth century.
See the discussions in Green, British Slave Emancipation; Tinker, A New System of Slavery; and Engerman, ‘Economic Change and Contract Labor’.
There were discussions of the possible import of Chinese labour into Trinidad as early as the first decade of the nineteenth century, but this would not become a major movement for another several decades. See the discussion in B.W. Higman, ‘The Chinese in Trinidad, 1806–1838’, Caribbean Studies, XII, (1972), pp. 21–44.
Slavery in British India legally ended in 1843 but it played only a relatively minor economic role, and there had been earlier movements of Indian contract labour to the islands in the Indian Ocean.
See Tinker, A New System of Slavery, pp. 288–366. The Sanderson Committee Report, more formally, Report of the Committee on Emigration from India to the Crown Colonies and Protectorates, with accompanying minutes of evidence and papers, is Cd. 5192–5194, in the 1910 Parliamentary Papers.
See the discussions by Ralph Shlomowitz and by Adrian Graves cited in fn. 26. At this time there was also some shift from plantations to cane-farming in Trinidad and Mauritius. See Engerman, ‘Contract Labor, Sugar, and Technology’.
See, however, the cases discussed in W. Kloosterboer, Involuntary Labour Since the Abolition of Slavery, (Leiden, 1960). In general, the African schemes resembled forced more than contract labour. The distances involved in the relocation of labour were less than in the intercontinental movements, as well as less frequently involving permanent relocation.
There were, of course, some exceptions in which legally free labour worked on plantations as wage labourers. In many cases, however, this was either in areas of high population density or in which racial restrictions persisted. The possible importance of debt commitments binding labourers in several cases (‘debt peonage’, ‘debt bondage’) makes, at times, the drawing of a firm distinction between voluntary and involuntary labour force participation difficult.
Slavery, and the slave trade, had been legally accepted and regulated prior to its abolition but, of course, it was neither voluntary nor contractual for the enslaved.
The hearings of the Sanderson Committee Report are a particularly rich source of arguments and supporting quotes for the discussion in this and the next paragraph.
The one major exception to this was the Portuguese contract labour migration, mainly from Madeira and the Azores, to the British Caribbean and to Hawaii. Even then, however, the Portuguese in Hawaii were paid higher wages than the other contract labourers imported at the same time. Coman, History of Contract Labor in the Hawaiian Islands, pp. 27–32. Not surprising, perhaps, Portugal probably had the lowest per capita income of the countries of Western Europe.
Again, it is important to remember that there was a relationship between race and income, the non-European nations generally having considerably lower incomes than did those in Europe and those European Whites settled overseas. This also meant that the incomes accepted by migrants from Asia tended to be considerably below those considered acceptable to most Whites at the time.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1986 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Engerman, S.L. (1986). Servants to slaves to servants: contract labour and European expansion. In: Emmer, P.C. (eds) Colonialism and Migration; Indentured Labour Before and After Slavery. Comparative Studies in Overseas History, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4354-4_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4354-4_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-8436-9
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-4354-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive