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Varieties of Force State-Organized Production, Industrialization, and Coerced Labour in Nineteenth-Century Naval Shipyards
No full textNaval expenditure has been linked to the history of state formation primarily through the role of naval shipyards in pioneering new production techniques, labour relations, and systems of state management. Labour historians working on the subject of naval shipyards during the transition from sail to steam have focused on the slow abolition of guild restrictions (and privileges), apprenticeship relations, impressment, and criminal or corporal punishment among skilled shipwrights, as well as their gradual replacement by a “modern” waged workforce. However, even in the technologically most advanced naval shipyards in Western Europe, coerced labourers continued to do much of the heavy work. When put into a global perspective, it becomes clear that industrialization in these crucial state facilities relied on, and itself propelled, experiments in the use of a large variety of forms of coerced labour - from skilled labour by enslaved Africans in Cuba and the US South, to labour conscription in the Ottoman Empire under the Tanzimat reforms, and convict labour in England and France. This chapter presents a survey of nineteenth-century experiments in forced labour, and focuses primarily on non-colonial settings. It shows that coerced labour was not peripheral to state managers’ programmes of administrative reform and industrial transformation but was instead intimately connected to their “modernizing” ambitions.</p
Introduction: Worlds of labour turned upside down:Worlds of Labour Turned Upside Down Revolutions and Labour Relations in Global Historical Perspective
No full textRevolutions are relatively new, rare and extraordinary events in history, which is perhaps one reason why historians and social scientists alike continue to be surprised and fascinated by them. Although this interest goes back to at least the early modern revolutions, it was what Eric Hobsbawm calls the “age of revolutions” that inspired the study of the subject in the nineteenth century. The revolutions of this period included the American (1765–1783), the French (1789–1799), the Haitian (1791–1804) and the Irish (1798) revolutions, in addition to the Latin American wars of independence and the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848. The next upsurge of studies emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, examining the paths of the Russian (1917), German (1918-1919), Chinese (1911 and 1949), Cuban (1953-1959), Hungarian (1956), Portuguese (1974) and Iranian (1979) revolutions. To this list, one should add the anti-colonial revolutions, such as in Algeria (1954–1962), and the revolutions that toppled the Stalinist regimes in 1989.As the historiography of revolutions expanded in the twentieth century, the relationship between labour relations and revolutions and the “social question” more generally became marginalized, at least after the wave of revolutions immediately following the First World War. Two salient developments contributed to this trend: the deep scepticism of grand narratives and structural explanations beyond the structures of language and imaginations promulgated across fields by the cultural turn, and the declining influence of Marxism within academia as well as within actual revolutionary events. The essays in this volume, however, are part of reinstating the centrality of the relationship between labor relations and revolutions. Collectively, they probe the importance of shifts in labour relations for creating the preconditions of revolution, influencing their course, and shaping the outcome of revolutions. The historiographic introduction argues for returning the “social question” to the heart of revolution studies, and summarizes the main ways in which the essays collected in this volume advance the general understanding of modern revolutions from a global perspective
Introduction: The Early Modern State: Drivers, Beneficiaries, and Discontents
No full textDuring the early-modern period, the capacity of European states to raise finances, wage wars, make their own and far away populations subjects, and exert bureaucratic power over a variety of areas of social life increased dramatically. Nevertheless, these changes were far less absolute and definitive than the literature on the rise of the “modern state” once held. While war expanded the boundaries of the emerging fiscal military states of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rulers remained highly dependent on negotiations with competing elite groups and private networks of contractors and financial intermediaries. Attempts to increase control over subjects often resulted in popular resistance, limiting and influencing the direction of the development of state institutions. Marjolein ‘t Hart has been and remains in the front lines of developing this new approach challenging a unilineal view of the transformation of European states. Starting from her innovative work on taxation, state finance, and the economics of warfare in the Low Countries during and after the “Dutch Wars of Independence”, she has contributed significantly to the literature on European state formation and extra-European expansion in a comparative perspective. This introduction offers an overview of the scholarly career of ‘t Hart, and places the contributions that follow in the context of her work.</p
El abastecimiento estratégico de cáñamo durante el largo siglo XVIII, 1675-1830: entre el Báltico, Granada y las Américas
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