The Transformation of the World (148 page)

Not all large-scale farming in the nineteenth century should be seen primarily in world economic contexts.
Peones
working on Latin American haciendas were neither slaves nor wage laborers; rather, the model was that of a patriarchal family, with the
patrón
often appearing as a kind of godfather figure, and the ties of mutual obligation were of a noncontractual character resting on a “moral economy” outside the market. Often the physical location of the hacienda made it a closed world, the boss's precinct resembling a fortress surrounded by the
peones
in their villages. Unlike plantations, late-nineteenth-century haciendas were
typically undercapitalized and technologically backward. The dependence of the
peones
rested not so much on overt compulsion as on a debt to the
haciendado
reminiscent of credit relations between ordinary peasants and the dominant elite in Chinese or Indian villages. Like the (slave) plantation, the hacienda was a relic from the early modern colonial period, and one need not consider it “feudal” (although many writers have) to identify it as a contrasting form to the plantation. The hacienda was geared more to self-sufficiency than to export production; labor relations had strong noneconomic overtones. Its characteristic social boding contributed to the fact that in the Latin American republics, the peasantry were unable to exercise their rights as free citizens. They had no opportunity to benefit from the freedom promised at the time of independence, and most of their protest movements failed to achieve results.
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In the case of Mexico, the years from 1820 to 1880 may be regarded as a transitional period for the hacienda.
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With the demise of the colonial state, the
indios
lost a power that, however unreliably, had afforded them a degree of protection. Instead, the ruling Liberals and their ideology of progress viewed the
indios
as an obstacle preventing Mexico's development along European or (later) North American lines. They therefore showed no consideration for indigenous people. Whereas the colonial hacienda had still involved a certain balance between the interests of the landowner and the Indian commune, the policies of the new republic—and a fortiori of the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship after 1876—largely dispersed communal property and left the
indios
at the mercy of profit-hungry
haciendados
. This practice, however, did not make the hacienda a mainstay of the export economy, comparable to the plantations of Southeast Asia or Brazil. Nor was the hacienda in every case a historical dead end. After 1880, Mexico's industrialization slowly got under way with the laying of the railroads. Many haciendas took the opportunity to introduce less restrictive work contracts, a greater division of labor in production, more professional forms of management, and a move away from paternalist social relations.
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Such modernized haciendas, often very large in size, existed alongside a multiplicity of smaller ones that continued to operate as they had in colonial times. On the whole, the nineteenth-century Latin American hacienda was a monadic structure in which the
patrón
largely did as he pleased. Although the body of laws was often highly progressive, the police and judiciary seldom intervened in favor of the
peones
, who no longer had the existential security provided by a functioning village community. The
peones
should not be thought of as a “landless proletariat” in the style of plantation workers or East Prussian, Chilean, or African migrant laborers; they remained in one place, geared to the life of “their” hacienda. But neither were they a peasantry structurally tied to a village, in the Russian, Western European, or Indian sense. This is not to deny that Latin America had a migrant proletariat without land of its own or (and this is decisive) the opportunity to acquire some. The phenomenon was widespread in Argentina,
³⁷
where workers (and tenant
farmers) tended to be Italian or Spanish in origin, typically single or with a wife and children living in the city.

2 Factory, Construction Site, and Office

Workshops

Work may be categorized according to where it takes place. Many workplaces in the nineteenth century had changed little in comparison with earlier times. Independent artisans in Europe—and a fortiori in Asia and Africa—worked essentially under “premodern” conditions, at least until the introduction of the electric motor late in the century and the spread of industrial mass production. In other civilizations too, older models continued to govern the organization of workshops. Knowledge transmission and market regulation through guilds or other collective institutions, which survived longer in the Ottoman Empire and China than in Europe, differentiated artisans from ordinary workers. The growth of industry devalued the productive activity of many craftsmen, but there were also plenty of cases where a workshop adapted successfully to changed market conditions. All in all, the crafts lost less of their economic importance in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth. In Europe too, good-quality clothing was still largely being made by a tailor, shoes by a shoemaker, and flour by a miller. A broader definition of crafts might take in hybrid forms of self-help, collaborative effort, and professional partnership. This is how a majority of private housing was built in most parts of the world—from simple western European half-timbered buildings to the wide range of African types.
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House building was “preindustrial,” and some of its work routines remain so to this day.

A number of crafts first developed in the nineteenth century, while others acquired a new significance. The steady or rising number of horses meant that smithies, for example, were used right through the century, and heavy industrial steelworks actually appeared as a reinvention of their art at a higher energy level, though without individual craftsmen. In many cultures the blacksmith enjoyed high esteem or even mythical status, as master of fire, physical strongman, toolmaker, and weapons producer—although in India it was seen as lower-caste work. In large areas of sub-Saharan Africa, it was not a craft with an ancient history but started up in the eighteenth century and reached its peak roughly between 1820 and 1920. Smithies produced things that were both useful and beautiful; jewelry, for example, was a prestige item for accumulation, as was coinage in places where there was not a state monopoly. They had a high degree of autonomy, being largely in control of their own production process. The conventional image of the village blacksmith is rather misleading, since he might well have worked also to satisfy demand outside his local area. In the Congo, for example, many had a far-flung clientele that was both ethnically and socially
diverse.
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The need to acquire raw materials tied them into wider trading circles and encouraged them to cultivate numerous social contacts.

The Shipyard

Any workplace might have assumed a new shape in the nineteenth century. One example is the shipyard, known for millennia in various civilizations as a hub of craft cooperation, and already in the early modern age it was one of the main sectors of large-scale enterprise in countries such as England, France, and the Netherlands. In those days it had been a domain of carpenters. Then shipbuilding became a leading branch in the industrialization process, and by 1900 it was one of Britain's most important industries, with a dominant position in the world market thanks to the productivity of the Scottish yards. This entailed radical changes in technology, which did not happen all of a sudden; only in 1868 did the total tonnage of
new
iron ships exceed for the first time that of wooden ones launched from British yards.
⁴⁰

Shipwrights and the new technicians or workers engaged in iron-hull construction had different types of social organization (the former trade still being rather closed) and for some time lived and worked alongside one another.
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The switch from wood to iron did not occur everywhere, but it was by no mean confined to the West. The Indonesian shipbuilding industry was able to execute it at a time when the yards of the Dutch mother country were capitulating in the face of British competition.
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Shipyard labor was overwhelmingly male and quite highly skilled, providing fertile ground for the early political organization of the working class, often in conjunction with other groups of workers in a port city. In some countries, such as China, shipyard and arsenal workers formed the oldest core of the industrial proletariat.

The Factory

The main novelty of the nineteenth century was the factory, in its dual nature as large production site and field of social activity.
⁴³
Cooperative forms and power hierarchies first took shape here, before spreading to other parts of society. The factory was purely a locus of production, physically separate from the household; it required new habits and rhythms of work and a kind of discipline that left only limited meaning to the idea of “free” wage labor. Factory organization involved a division of labor adapted in sharply varying degrees to the capabilities of the workforce. Experiments with ways of making labor more efficient began very early on—long before 1911, when the American engineer and first high-profile management adviser Frederick Winslow Taylor developed a theory of psychophysical optimization, dubbed “Taylorism,” to speed up labor processes and bring them under stricter “scientific” control.

The factory was also new in a more mundane sense in places where it appeared for the first time in history. Factories were not necessarily located in cities. Often the reverse was true: a city grew up around factories. Sometimes
the factory remained as a freestanding complex in the “countryside,” as in Russia, where in 1900 more than 60 percent stood in a nonurban setting.
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In extreme cases, new factory sites became “total institutions,” in which the owner provided food and board for the workers and largely sealed them off from the rest of society.
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Such things did not happen in Russia alone. In the “closed compounds” introduced in 1885 into the South African diamond mines, black miners were housed in barracks or locked up under prisonlike conditions.
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The concept of an autonomous factory world should not, however, be seen as entirely negative. On occasion a patriarchal-philanthropic entrepreneur, such as Robert Owen in Scotland, Ernst Abbe in Jena, or Zhang Jian in Nantong in southern China, attempted to create spaces for social improvement in the shape of model industrial communities.
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The first generation of factory workers were not always recruited from the surrounding area; those who went to work in the Ukrainian Donbas region, for example, often came from far away.
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Entrepreneurs delegated the task of advertising for labor to local contractors, who might then spread their net far and wide to haul in workers from rural areas. Contract work existed almost everywhere that a culturally alien management confronted a mass of unskilled workers without being able to rely on an existing labor market. In return for a flat fee, the local contractor “procured” the necessary numbers to work for a fixed wage over a specified period of time; he was also responsible for their good behavior and therefore often served a disciplinary function, as well as lending money at an unfavorable rate to those dependent on him. No special skills, beyond a basic dexterity, were expected of the workforce during this first phase of light industrial development, and so the contractor did not have to select too carefully. Such a labor market substitute could be found in China, Japan, and India as well as in Russia and Egypt.
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One of the earliest demands of the workers' movement in these countries was for a ban on the much-hated system of contract labor. In any case it proved to be a transitional phenomenon: management did not usually insist on keeping such indirect forms of control, since they prevented it from developing its own personnel policy. If the formation of the initial workforce became stalled in the circuit between village and factory, the workers' mentality might retain rural features for a long time to come.

Beyond all regional and cultural variants, the factory was everywhere associated with similar constraints for those who worked in it. In addition to betterknown European or North American examples, a few from India and Japan might serve to illustrate what Jürgen Kocka called the “wretchedness of early factory work.” In Japan the number of mechanical silk-spinning mills quadrupled between 1891 and 1899, most of them in the silkworm-producing regions in the center of the country. The workers, almost all of them women, typically came from families of impoverished tenant farmers; many were really still children, almost two-thirds being under the age of twenty.
⁵⁰
Recruited by contractors who usually paid their wages straight to the family in their home village, most spent
less than three years in the factory working in appalling conditions: accommodation in supervised dormitories, meager rice meals with nothing more than a few vegetables, a fifteen-to seventeen-hour workday with very short breaks, exposure to sexual violence. The work was monotonous but required constant attention; accidents were common at the cauldrons where the silkworm cocoons were boiled. Such factories were the worst breeding ground for tuberculosis.

Things were no better in the cotton industry, which experienced a boom around the same time and soon became an even larger employer of female labor. One of its distinctive features was exhausting night shifts, with a fourteen-hour day as the norm until 1916. Amid deafening noise and in air filled with toxic fumes, women slaved away on machines that claimed a continual toll of victims. Foremen ensured work discipline with the help of canes and whips, and it was only after 1905 that some positive incentives were gradually introduced. Here too, workers lived in prisonlike dormitories that were poorly ventilated and often without individual bedding. With virtually no provision for medical care, ill health resulting from the work conditions ensured that three-quarters of the women lasted less than three years in the factory.
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