Global convict labour

522 Pages·2015·4.678 MB·English

by  Christian Giuseppe De Vito, Alex Lichtenstein

Global Convict Labour
Studies in Global Social History
Editor
Marcel van der Linden (International Institute of Social History,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Editorial Board
Sven Beckert (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA)
Philip Bonner (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa)
Dirk Hoerder (University of Arizona, Phoenix, AR, USA)
Chitra Joshi (Indraprastha College, Delhi University, India)
Amarjit Kaur (University of New England, Armidale, Australia)
Barbara Weinstein (New York University, New York, NY, USA)
VOLUME 19
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sgsh
Global Convict Labour
Edited by
Christian Giuseppe De Vito
Alex Lichtenstein
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Global convict labour / edited by Christian Giuseppe De Vito, Alex Lichtenstein.
  pages cm. -- (Studies in global social history ; volume 19)
 Includes bibliographical references and index.
 ISBN 978-90-04-28501-9 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-28502-6 (e-book : alk. paper) 1. Convict
labor--History. 2. Punishment--History. 3. Imperialism--History. I. De Vito, Christian G. II. Lichtenstein,
Alexander C.
 HV8888.G56 2015
 365’.6509--dc23
2015017738
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issn 1874-6705
isbn 978-90-04-28501-9 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-28502-6 (e-book)
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Contents
Editors’ Preface vii
List of Illustrations xviii
List of Tables xix
List of Contributors xx
Writing a Global History of Convict Labour 1
Christian G. De Vito and Alex Lichtenstein
PART 1
Genealogies of Convict Labour
1 Contextualising Condemnation to Hard Labour in the Roman
Empire 49
Miriam J. Groen-Vallinga and Laurens E. Tacoma
2 Penal Enslavement in the Early Middle Ages 79
Alice Rio
3 Prison and Convict Labour in Early Modern Europe 108
Pieter Spierenburg
4 “ An Austrian Cayenne”: Convict Labour and Deportation
in the Habsburg Empire of the Early Modern Period 126
Stephan Steiner
5 The Long View of Convict Labour in the Portuguese Empire,
1415–1932 144
Timothy J. Coates
6 Convict Labour Extraction and Transportation from Britain
and Ireland, 1615–1870 168
Hamish Maxwell-Stewart
vi Contents
PART 2
Coloniality, Ethnicity, Racialism and Convict Labour
7 Labouring for the Raj: Convict Work Regimes in
Colonial India, 1836–1939 199
David Arnold
8 The Relegation of Recidivists in French Guiana in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries 222
Jean-Lucien Sanchez
9 “… a Weapon of Immense Value”? Convict labour in
British Colonial Africa, c. 1850–1950s 249
Stacey Hynd
10 Colonies of Settlement or Places of Banishment and Torment? Penal
Colonies and Convict Labour in Latin America, c. 1800–1940 273
Ricardo D. Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre
PART 3
Convict Labour and Governmentality
11 Gender and Convict Labour: The Italian Case in Global Context 313
Mary Gibson
12 Forced Labour in Nazi Concentration Camps 333
Marc Buggeln
13 Historicising the Gulag 361
Lynne Viola
14 “A Parade of Trick Horses”: Work and Physical Experience in the
Political Prison 380
Padraic Kenney
15 Rethinking Working Class Struggle through the Lens of the
Carceral State: Toward a Labour History of Inmates and Guards 400
Heather Ann Thompson
Bibliography 439
Index of Places 490
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Editors’ Preface
Two prisoners…mime the digging of sand. …Their heads are shaven. It is
an image of back-breaking and grotesquely futile labour. Each in turn fills
a wheelbarrow and then with great effort pushes it to where the other
man is digging, and empties it. As a result, the piles of sand never dimin-
ish. Their labour is interminable.
– Athol Fugard, stage directions, The Island1
At a recent performance of this play at Johannesburg’s Market theatre, the first
ten minutes – a duet of grunts of literally backbreaking pain as each prisoner
indeed mimed loading and pushing a wheelbarrow of heavy dirt around an other-
wise empty stage only to dump it at his partner’s feet – produced an almost unbear-
able tension. Here Fugard reveals the “bare life” of penal labour as torture, but not
only as inflicted by the prison authorities, who in fact remain invisible throughout
the play (and, in the climactic scene, are assumed to be embodied by the audi-
ence). Instead, in an endless circular process, the pointless labour is reinforced by
the inmates themselves. As Robben Island prisoner Neville Alexander (quoted by
Padraic Kenney in his contribution to this volume) remarked about his own expe-
rience of labour on “the Island,” “The pointlessness of the whole thing weighs
heavily on the prisoners.”2 Fugard himself, in his notebooks, imagined Robben
Island as a space defined by “Meaningless Absurd Labor. Punishment. Sisyphus.”3
Padraic Kenney’s essay on political imprisonment in this volume gestures
towards this totalistic nexus of labour and punishment, reduced to its
Sisyphean essence: “Torture, labour, and exercise: each activity approximated
time itself in the prison. They offered an apparent respite from monotony, yet
became monotony itself, confined in space and time.” With Fugard’s opening
in mind, we might regard the experience of prison labour on Robben island as
the apotheosis of this form of penality. But, as Kenney also asks in his medita-
tion on the intersection of convict work and political identity: “is prison labour
degrading, transformative, or punitive – or all three”?
This volume of essays, growing from a two-day workshop held at the
International Institute of Social History (iish) in Amsterdam in June 2012,
provides the opportunity to explore multiple dimensions of convict labour
across time, space, and varieties of state formation. The general aim of the
1 Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, Statements (New York, 1986), 47.
2 Neville Alexander, Robben Island Dossier, 1964–1974 (Cape Town, 1994), 31.
3 Athol Fugard, Notebooks, 1960–1977 (New York, 1984), 212.
viii Editors’ Preface
conference was to bring scholars together in a common endeavor that would
begin to develop a global and comparative history of convict labour across
many of the regimes of punishment that have appeared from the 16th century
to the present, including galleys, penal servitude, corvée, transportation, work-
houses and factories, leased convict labour, chain gangs, concentration camps,
political imprisonment directed at individuals, and state or military labour
camps. As this ambitious list of topic suggests, forced labour has been an
important component of penality in many eras, in diverse geographic locales,
and in every type of state regime. Yet only rarely has it been considered in
global, transnational, or comparative frameworks. With a few noticeable
exceptions, scholars have tended to focus on the peculiarities of each regime of
punishment; a series of independent sub-disciplines have thus emerged, e.g. the
history of the penitentiary, of the Nazi concentration camps, or of transporta-
tion to different destinations. The iish conference aimed to overcome this frag-
mentation. By looking at convict labour as a common feature of diverse regimes
of punishment across space and time, we sought to highlight their co-existence
in specific periods and contexts, to stress the dynamic and interconnected
nature of the various regimes of punishment, and to link their emergence and
decline to particular moments in the evolution of the global political economy.
Secondly, and perhaps somewhat less successfully, the conference attempted
to overcome the Eurocentric and methodologically nationalist attitude of
much of the general theories and historiographies of the relationship between
punishment and society. In the opening bibliographic chapter, we attempt to
rectify this in our synthesis of the existing literature on convict labour in an
effort to provide “an itinerary through time, space, and different regimes of
punishment.” In doing so, we question the “unwarranted teleology of penal
reform and modernization that is assumed to move progressively towards
stable forms of incarceration and rehabilitation, and away from brutality,
unmitigated punishment, and naked coercion or enslavement” entailed by a
blinkered focus on European penal developments. Moreover, those develop-
ments themselves proved deeply enmeshed with a global history in which
Europe was but one player. Accordingly, we asked participants, even (or espe-
cially) those still working within the boundaries of the nation-state, to keep in
mind comparative and entangled histories, trans-national and trans-local con-
nections, even while they highlighted the distinctive nature of the national or
typological form of convict labour in their area of expertise.
To this end, we arranged the conference itself – and the papers that follow
in this volume – around three broad thematic approaches to these problems.
First, in an effort to understand the deep historical linkages between punish-
ment and work in myriad social contexts, we asked some scholars to address
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Editors’ Preface ix
the “genealogy” of convict labour. Simply put, we wanted to explore how, when,
and why particular states and/or political authorities chose to make forced
labour part of a penal regime. In many cases, this was closely linked to state
formation, imperial expansion, or the projection of military power. But this
hardly exhausted the question, for these political moments were conjoined
with particular phases of economic development, coinciding with the extrac-
tion of resources (primitive accumulation, if you like), with infrastructural
public works, with forms of proto-industrialization, or with full-blown capital-
ist development, to name several possible but by no means exhaustive cases.
Moreover, even in its origins, penal force was never an exclusive means of
commandeering labour. Its genealogy can only be understood in relationship
to the other forms of labour with which it often coexisted, whether enslaved,
conscripted, indentured, household, or wage labour. The conference itself
limited the chronological scope of these genealogies to no earlier than the
early-modern period, but we have chosen to supplement those contributions
with new chapters that examine the Roman Empire (Groen-Vallinga and
Tacoma) and early medieval Europe (Rio). Not only do these additional chap-
ters lengthen the temporal reach of this collection, they also offer potential
rejoinders to some of the generalizations we attempt to advance in our open-
ing historiographic essay, which focuses primarily on the post-1500 period.
For example, the importance of long-distance transportation seems less sig-
nificant in the Roman case, and judging from Alice Rio’s essay, penal servitude
was much more “embedded in personal loyalties and solidarities” than a func-
tion of state power in early medieval Europe. Even once the state claimed a
monopoly on the power to punish, as Pieter Spierenburg’s essay reminds us,
“quasi-patriarchal form of discipline” persisted in the workhouses of the early
modern Netherlands, and no doubt elsewhere as well.
It seems clear from several of the contributions to the “genealogies” section
that even in the metropole the evolution of convict labour was often unavoid-
ably entangled with colonial projects, in part because of the prevalence of
transportation. As Timothy Coates observes in his chapter, in the Portuguese
case “The objectives of penal reform and redemption of the [metropolitan]
convict became intertwined with extracting labour and maintaining colonies
in Africa.” For his part, looking out to the Pacific rather than the Atlantic,
Hamish Maxwell-Stewart calls attention to the fact that “labour extraction in
convict Australia resembled the coercive strategies employed to manage
unfree labour elsewhere in the British Empire.” Our second section, which
investigates convict labour through the lens of “coloniality,” takes up this ques-
tion more directly. The term “coloniality” serves to direct attention well beyond
matters of mere geo-politics of colonialism per se, and towards a complex set
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