Punishment, Labour, and the Legitimation of Power Interdisciplinary Conference BCDSS, University of Bonn – 18-19 February 2021

18 FEBRUARY 2021

10:30 – 11:00 Presentation of the Conference

11:00 – 13:00 Session 1 Labour Extraction and Connected Punitive Regimes

Chair: Hanne Østhus Discussant: Christian G. De Vito

Speakers:

Harry Mawdsley, Lecturer in Early Medieval History at Durham University, United Kingdom Penal Servitude in Late Antiquity: From Retribution to Restitution This paper will discuss the development of penal servitude over the course of late antiquity (c.300 – c.650 AD). While penal servitude was a common phenomenon throughout ancient and medieval Europe, the imposition of the punishment varied considerably in different societies. The late antique period, in particular, witnessed some major changes in the how the punishment operated. In the later Roman Empire, penal servitude was a severe act of retributive justice, which was limited to the lower social orders (or humiliores) and took place in state controlled industries, such as mines and quarries, bakeries, factories, and public entertainment complexes. By contrast, in the post-Roman kingdoms, penal servitude was a restitutive measure, employed when offenders could not meet the costs of the compensatory payments upon which much of criminal law was based. Sentences of penal servitude were thus organised very differently than in the Roman world, since they did not require the involvement of the state, nor did they imply particular kinds of labour, and nor were they (at least in theory) limited to specific social groups or classes. Drawing on both legal and literary sources, this paper will look to contextualise and explain these radical changes in the forms and functions of penal servitude. In doing so, it will provide a fresh perspective on this important yet often-overlooked aspect of the late antique criminal justice system.

Khohchahar E. Chuluu, Associate Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, the University of Tokyo, Japan as Punishment: Enslavement and Penal Servitude in Early Modern Northeast Asia Slavery as punishment is not always self-evident in whether it means degradation in social status as a punishment (i.e., enslavement) or penal servitude, or both. Slavery, as a legal concept, could also have a public meaning of (e.g., in American slavery). These two aspects of slavery as punishment are interchangeable to each other, while often interrelated or overlapped. This paper explores the practice of slavery as punishment in early modern northeast Asia, with a primary focus on Japan, , and Mongolia. It discusses the distinction and interrelation between enslavement and penal servitude in these preindustrial countries, through a detailed analysis of what the enslaved criminals and convict laborers conducted at individual and governmental places. Primary sources from these countries reveal that individuals would have taken slaves as a result of punishment, while governments (especially in Japan and China) preserved “government (or official) slaves” for themselves. Slavery as punishment in these countries served as both a labor resource and social control, while it had shown differences in practice in terms of applied crimes, content of labor, emancipation methods, access to the state power, and so on. Such different characteristics are helpful to understand the diversity of slavery-as-punishment practice in early modern northeast Asia. Moreover, this paper also examines regional diversity within each of these countries. By doing so, this paper argues that the slavery-as-punishment practice in these early modern countries involved more in statecraft and state power than in mere social status. This study has implications in matters such as slavery and state building, the abolition of slavery and the continuing practice of penal servitude, and labor and human rights.

Felix Ackermann, German Historical Institute Warsaw, Poland (To be Confirmed) A Micro History of the Partition of Poland as Carceral Regime

Emilie Luther Søby, PhD Candidate at Aalborg University, Denmark and Johan Heinsen, Associate professor at Aalborg University, Denmark Coercive Networks in Eighteenth-Century Copenhagen This paper adopts Taylor C. Sherman’s concept of the coercive network originally proposed as a way of understanding “the various colonial coercive institutions and practices in a single frame, and as a function of larger political, administrative, economic, social and cultural processes.” (Sherman 2009) However, it posits that the notion of punishment as a composite effect constituted through such networks is not only a useful tool in the study of colonial societies, but also European metropoles. Even at the very seat of state and commercial interests, the regimes of punishments were plural in ways that often effaced the distinctions between both public and the private as well as the formal and informal. Furthermore, even in an early modern European capital this lumpy network created an assemblage of punishments defined by “contradiction and the unpredictability which arose out of systems replete with tensions.” (ibid.) The analysis revolves around the Danish-Norwegian capital’s two main . One is the workhouse of Christianshavn in which convicted men and women performed intramural labour, spinning wool for the use in state factories. The other is an institution known to contemporaries as “the Slavery” – a prison for male convicts performing hard extramural labour for the state, mainly in the creation and maintenance of military infrastructure. These prisons were central hubs in two interlocking systems of incarceration and penal labour that co-existed from the early seventeenth-century to the middle of the nineteenth, yet were organized and run in quite different ways and with different rationales. On the basis of a database documenting about 20.000 prison stays in these two institutions in the eighteenth century, the paper examines the ways in which these two institutions were linked to each other as well as to a number of other institutional sites of coercion including sites of corporal punishment such as the gallows and the pillories but also institutional sites such as hospitals, schools, poor houses, state factories, orphanages and jails as well as a wider world of sites for coerced labour and everyday violence including households, workshops and army regiments. Tracing the continuous circulation of convicts, the paper examines these links and their logics. It also asks what kind of penal experiences life within such a network created. Finally, the paper examines the tensions that marred this network and the way they shaped its makeup. This is done by following two lines of enquiry: One is at the institutional level revolving around the constantly shifting practices of how to handle those convicts who were defined, for evolving reasons, as dangerous or problematic such as the insane, the disabled, the suicidal or those prone to escape. Doing so demonstrates how the penal reforms of the period were less products of enlightenment ideals and more the dynamic results of open-ended processes of experimentation in which the agency of the convicted played a key part. The other line of enquiry asks how life in the coercive networks enabled social relations among those subjected to punishment that could ultimately be leveraged by them in their efforts to gain autonomy, either within the prisons or in trying to escape them.

13:00 – 13:30 Lunch

13:30 – 15:30 Session 2 Punishment and the Making of Labour Regimes

Chair: Paulo Cruz Terra Discussant: To be Confirmed

Speakers:

Alexandre Loktionov, Lady Wallis Budge Fellow at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom Regulating Labour Through Foreign Punishment? Codification and Sanction at Work in New Kingdom Egypt The issue of regulating labour, and particularly preventing abuse of authority by officials, is addressed in a number of texts from New Kingdom Egypt. The focus of this paper will be on two royal decrees of this period, the Nauri Decree of Seti I and the Karnak Decree of Horemhbeb, which are particularly illustrative in this regard. Both texts are primarily concerned with stopping officials from requisitioning workers for unauthorized projects, as well as regulating appropriate levels of taxation of the working population. This paper argues that, by adopting a highly prescriptive approach which effectively amounted to codification, coupled with tough sanctions for offenders, these decrees sought to reform labour management in a manner not previously seen in Egypt (or arguably anywhere else). The intellectual underpinning of these reforms is then connected to increased contacts between Egypt and Mesopotamia during this period, highlighting the prominence of protasis-apodosis (codifying constructions following an ‘if…then…’ pattern) and harsh physical penalties in the cuneiform culture which was increasingly penetrating into Egypt. The core argument presented is that, by absorbing elements of a foreign legal tradition and giving it a characteristically Egyptian flavour, New Kingdom Pharaohs sought to increase the efficiency of labour extraction processes, removing agency from local officials and ultimately concentrating it in themselves through the medium of codes they promulgated.

Nabhojeet Sen, Research Associate and PhD Candidate at the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn, Germany Punishment and Labour Regime: Western India in the Eighteenth Century The paper looks at the entanglement of punishment and labour relations in Western India during the eighteenth century. During this period, the Indian subcontinent was awashed with large scale changes in governance, authority and the formulation that accompanied the transition from an autochthonous regime to a formally colonial rule, as well as the numerous wars that racked this part during those tumultuous decades. This paper looks at these shifts in governance and authority through the role that punishment played in the making and remaking of labour relations. One of the many mechanisms of punishment in the erstwhile Maratha state in Western India of the eighteenth century was with labour on the many forts that were spread throughout Maharashtra. These convict labour worked on the creation and repair on the forts, in the making of gunpowder, on mortar work, in stables, in winnowing and thrashing of grains etc. and even in the army. More importantly, women, convicted of “adultery” and those captured during war could also be sold and purchased as a slave (Batik). However, one should remember that this had a specific caste and gendered dimension to it. Forts, as such became critical to such entanglements of punishment and labour, as it did by also contributing to mobilizing and immobilizing (women imprisoned in forts sent for private after being purchased as a slave, transfer of workers needed for labour on the forts). As such, the paper hopes to bring a further level of complexity to studies of power and governance in “pre-colonial” South Asia, so far characterized by scholars as “harmonious”, “collaborative” and “non-coercive”. It also seeks to bring further reflections on to the histories of global labour by posting pre-colonial Maharashtra as existing along a continuum of coercion and disciplinarian strategies with the colonial regime that came subsequently.

Samuel Tracol, Lecturer at the University of French Guiana, French Guiana "Distinguish and Submit": A Connected History of Forced Labor in French Guiana. While slavery was abolished in all French colonies in 1848, French Guiana became a in 1852. Tens of thousands of convicts were sent there for a sentence of until 1938 and the last convoy. It is a fundamental institution in the construction of a social grammar of segregation and inequalities in the France of the Third Republic. This penal policy refers to the construction of political and socio-economic modernity in a threefold dimension: disciplinarization of bodies and individuals [FOUCAULT, 1975], industrialization and the emergence of urban proletariats, colonization and racialization. The hesitations of 1848 regarding the colonial valorization of French Guyana and the model to choose inscribed the convict labor in a general history of post-abolitionist dependencies: indentured labour in Dutch and English Guyana, seringuieros in the Brazilian Amazon, compulsory labour in West Africa. Finally, the penal colony of French Guiana constitutes a situated institution: the convict labour is a response to a specific colonial situation [BALLANDIER, 1951], a negotiated accommodation to imperial ideology. We will situate the convict labour in French Guyana into a connected history of labour by echoing the models on an imperial scale, both in the metropolis and in the colonies: -First axis: succeeding to slavery. A model of asymmetrical dependence among others in a colonial situation; -Second axis: distinguish, segregate and punish. The construction of a global society based on the relegation of misery and race and their re-education through labour; -Third axis: at the convict’s level. Distinguishing in space and by punishment by the work to be done. Individual routes: forced labour as a in an individual's working life.

Radhika Singha, Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India ‘Simulating’ Free Labour: The Indian Jail Committee Report 1919 -20 and Post-war Colonial Reconstruction The paper assesses the Indian jail committee report of 1919-20 as one among the various blue-prints then circulating for the post-war reconstruction of imperial legitimacy in India. It asks why a cash- strapped government sponsored a globe- trotting inspection of prisons and for a committee which then returned to enthuse about the reformative potential of flexible or ‘indeterminate sentencing’. Embarrassingly enough this was a penological idea, embraced in America, but faltering in Britain. As interpreted by the committee the reformable element in jails, and among potentially criminally and vagrant populations, had to be sorted out rigorously from the unproductive recidivist fringe and placed in work milieus simulating those which brought out the productivity of ‘free’ labour. Reviewing the meaning of a sentence of ‘hard labour’, the committee concluded that it meant simply the performance of a full task. To that end therefore, money could be spent on better supervision and modern technology. Subjects made productive were subjects who had been reformed. Hence they could be allowed to ‘earn’ small gratuities, or remissions in sentence. Sites of extra-judicial preventive detention, such as the ‘criminal tribe’ settlement and the juvenile , seemed to offer an even more favorable context for graded stages of confinement leading eventually to integration to free society. The exercise was cast as one which would serve a nation ‘standing on the verge of industrialization’ and as an official initiative to add a dimension of social reconstruction to the demand for self-rule. The paper explores the play of imagination around the idea that labour productivity could be enhanced in prisons and at other sites of confinement, by simulating ‘free’ work milieus, and the limits of imagination as acknowledged in the report itself.

15:30-16:00 Coffee break

16:00 – 18:00 Session 3 Punishing Workers, Managing Labour

Chair: Christian De Vito Discussant: M. Dores Cruz

Speakers:

Adam Fagbore, Research Associate and PhD Candidate at the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn, Germany Punishment and the Revenue Extraction Process in Pharaonic Egypt The processes of control and collection are prominent themes throughout pharaonic history, but it is unclear to what extent the central regime attempted to administer agricultural land to collect revenues direct from the farmer who actually worked the land. Relations between those involved in agricultural cultivation and local headships of extended families and wider kinship groups were deeply embedded within a broad range of interpersonal discourses, behaviours, and practices. Village headsman and officials at all levels of an impersonalised ‘state’ hierarchy were themselves land-holders, whom drew income from the land, and were held responsible for the collection of revenue produced from their fields. Therefore, it is necessary to define who is working the land, what is the relationship between those that worked the land, the headsmen, and those from within outside power structures (in the context of direct intervention against specific groups of the population) with a focus on the imperatives of a subsistence economy. In order to address these points, I will focus on revenue extraction as a ‘state’ process, how it is connected to the role of punishment, its impact upon local hierarchies (the targets of revenue extraction), and then, how violence against revenue payers was legitimised.

Lorenzo Avellino, PhD Candidate at the Paul Bairoch institute of Economic History of the University of Geneva, Switzerland "They Have Nothing to Lose on the Side of Things": The Aporias of Free Labour in Lombardy after the Abolition of Trade Guilds In Italy as elsewhere, after the abolition of trade guilds and the introduction of ‘free labour’, merchants and manufacturers were facing an unresolvable problem: how to make workers who had ‘nothing to lose on the side of things’ respect their contractual commitments? Under the pressure of the silk Verlager, worried about the growing disorders in the manufactures, this question occupied the Lombardic authorities continuously between 1790 and 1820. Their strategies ranged from chaining workers to their looms, through having the police raid taverns, to imprison recalcitrant workers and repress weaver who begged. Indeed, the impossibility of ensuring the presence of workers and their regularity at work in a civil rights regime gave rise to new forms of discipline in and outside the workplace. Using archives from judicial courts and documents from the Chamber of Commerce both from Milan and Como, I propose to reconstruct the practices of the workers and the underlying logic of these different punitive regimes in order to shed light on a number of aporias that this transition from status to contract gave rise to. I will suggest that ‘free’ labour in preindustrial Lombardy, rather than being organised by a logic of liberal labour hiring (locatio operis), became mostly modelled on new kind of servile relationships.

Franco Barchiesi, Assistant Professor at the Department of African American and African Studies, The Ohio State University, Refusing the Plantation: Labor Discipline and the Punishment of Blackness in Post-Abolition Barbados At the end of the nineteenth century, Barbados was shaken by waves of workers’ insurgency subverting the island’s racialized capitalist labor regime. The colonial state, under the control of a small white planters’ elite, felt threatened by what it portrayed as “laborers’ disaffection” combined with rising juvenile crime. As a remedy, the plantocracy emphasized corporal punishment, which disproportionately affected black women and children. This paper analyzes black workers’ insubordination and the state’s punitive responses in terms of structural anti-blackness rather than, as in prevailing explanatory frameworks, social conflicts grounded in political economy or institutional dynamics. Carceral and police practices like flogging or the cutting of Black women’s hair were intended not only as punishment, but as pedagogical devices to restore labor discipline, parental authority, and normative gender roles. Analyses centered on political economy often unwittingly reproduce official debates in which the expression “laboring classes” obscured the racial violence sustaining the Barbadian civil society. My research uses the lens of structural anti-blackness to interpret government documents in the Colonial Office records at the British National Archives and the Barbados Department of Archives, testimonies before the 1897 West India Royal Commission, and discussions at the Barbados House of Assembly. Local colonial administrators presented workers’ rebellion essentially as a labor problem. At the same time, for the white plantocracy, “laboring class” implicitly evoked blackness as a threat to the entire racial edifice of Barbados. The repressive and the pedagogical arguments used by the state against black workers’ protest instantiated a paradigm of preemptive and gratuitous violence targeting the “crime” of blackness itself. Blackness was, in other words, the ontological—not merely social, economic, or political—antagonist to the plantation order, which the state aimed at containing and defusing by terrorizing men, women, and children into legible and governable roles as laborers and their families.

Marcelo Rosanova Ferraro, PhD Candidate at The University of São Paulo, The Political Economy of Punishment: and the United States in the Nineteenth Century My research focuses on punishment and labor in the slave societies of the Mississippi Valley in the southern United States and the Vale do Paraíba in Brazil during the nineteenth century. Violence has been central to every slave society. However, patterns of punishment and discipline differed across time and space. The expansion of slavery in these two regions was connected to world market demands after the Industrial Revolution and the collapse of Saint-Domingue. The increasing prices of agricultural commodities led to the establishment of new plantation economies in the American South and Brazil. Under the lash of slaveholders and overseers, enslaved workers produced cotton and coffee in quantities never seen before. Seeking higher productivity, planters created management theories and imposed new regimes of labor. Discipline was essential, and although slaveholders used rewards as positive incentives, the whip was their main tool. This was a sensitive issue, since injured bodies were not as productive. Planters and overseers thus developed a new regime of punishment based on the optimization of violence, discipline, and productivity. Enslaved workers nevertheless resisted. In extreme cases, they faced violent reactions from slaveholders, or the harshness of slave law in courtrooms and gallows. The mutilation or death of a slave represented immediate financial loss. Even still, exemplary punishment had a disciplinary effect over . Under the rule of law, criminal justice also redefined state violence in the nineteenth century—supporting and legitimizing slavery. This comparative, global study of Brazil and the United States reveals the striking similarities between the two most dynamic slave economies in the age of industrial capitalism.

19 FEBRUARY 2021

10:30 – 12:30 Session 4 Regulating Mobility

Chair: Nabhojeet Sen Discussant: Lisa Hellman

Speakers:

Christian Langer, Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Peking, China The Ancient Egyptian Deportation Regime: Political Economy and Ideology This contribution outlines the political economy of ancient Egyptian deportation policies and their ideological legitimization. Deportation—as forced migration in general—has been an understudied topic in Egyptology. While (mass) deportations have been well-researched in connection with the Neo- Assyrian Empire, comprehensive studies into this matter are lacking for ancient Egypt. Based on my doctoral research on deportations in Egyptian pharaonic history, I will discuss some results related to evidence from Egypt’s imperial age in the Late Bronze Age, the so-called New Kingdom (c. 1550–1069 BCE). The main source of deportees was war, while inter-state treaties and vassal obligations were another means to acquire people from abroad and represented a more regular supply. The majority was utilized as labourers in the Egyptian economy, most prominently in production facilities of temples in both Egypt and occupied Nubia, whereas some entered the service of high-ranking officials as domestic servants. As a result of Egyptian imperialism there was an extensive movement of people from different origins throughout Egypt, Nubia, and West Asia. Deportation seems to have been an essential part of New Kingdom policies and possibly even contributed to Egypt’s rise as a regional great power. In this context, a brief discussion of the ideological function of the foreigner in the Egyptian thought and the punitive aspect of the deportations in retaliation of foreign resistance to Egyptian domination is also included.

Iurii Zazuliak, Research Fellow at the institute of Ukrainian Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Ukraine Bodily Punishments, and Social Classification of Peasants in Red Ruthenia (Galicia) during the 15th Century In my paper I intend to discuss the transformation of the regime of peasant dependency in the Kingdom of Poland on the eve of the late Middle Ages and early modern times with the focus on the noblemen’s violence as a means of social communication and control in relations of lordship and peasant dependence. More specifically I investigate the uses of violence in context of the right of peasants to the exit, the institution essential for the regulation of the peasant mobility and for the functioning of the local regimes of lordship at the eastern periphery (Red Ruthenia/Galicia) of the Kingdom of Poland during the 15th century. My intention is to demonstrate how the lords’ violence affected the changes in the patterns of peasant mobility and the social classification of peasantry. In this way it aims to highlight the problem of breach and continuity, innovation and tradition in the history of the peasant serfdom on the peripheral territories of the Polish Crown during the 15th and 16th centuries. The origin and establishment of the new forms of the serfdom at the end of the 15th and during the 16th century has been traditionally viewed in historiography as happened due to the cluster of the new fundamental social, economic and political processes. I would argue that its emergence was at the same time interrelated with the old and sometimes archaic practices and institutions of lordship based on the violence and punishments including marking and enslavement. I suggest that with the rapid increase of the political role of nobility during the second half of the late 15th and the early 16th centuries, accompanied by the new economic challenges and opportunities, those forms of noble violence against peasants were transformed into the mechanism of the institutionalization of the control over the peasant mobility and peasant labor at the end of the Middle Ages.

Paulo Cruz Terra, Professor at Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil Anti-, Punishment and Labour Relations in the Context of the Abolition of Slavery, and the Post-abolition, in Brazil and Portuguese Africa (1870–1914) The paper analyses how legislation, punishment and anti-vagrancy policy entangled with labour relations during the process of the abolition of slavery, and post-Abolition. It centres on the period between 1870 and 1914, time of relevant legislation concerned to labour regulation and anti-vagrancy policy, and addresses Brazil and the Portuguese Empire in Africa. The main argument is that the anti-vagrancy policy was the central point to the discussion about how conduct people from slavery to freedom, and how to make the ex-slaves to work. A difference about existing studies is that this tries to point out that much of the concern with creating legislation was a response to the worker´s agency in the face of working conditions, and their transformations. Another difference is to analyse the processes not closed in itself but in a comparative and connected way. The paper intends to discuss how the punishment for vagrancy was used to provide labour through forced labour for the State and private employers. Punishment for vagrancy was also used to deport workers from Portugal to Africa, especially to the penal colonies of Angola and Mozambique. The issue of convict labour was indeed debated constantly, including as a means of avoiding vagrancy.

Viorel Achim, Senior Researcher at the Nicolae Iorga Institute of History, Romanian Academy, Romania Combating Nomadism and the Sedentarization in the Case of some Gypsy Slave Groups in Wallachia in the 1830s In 1831, the elimination of nomadism and the sedentarization of Gypsy slaves became a state policy in Wallachia and Moldavia. During a generation the vast majority of this population of approximately 250,000 people was settled in villages, after initially more than half of them still practiced their traveling economy, which was a temporary circulation, practiced during the warm months of the year, when the Gypsies roamed the villages in a given region, earning their living by practicing their crafts. The sedentarization preceded and partially overlapped chronologically with the emancipation from slavery, which was achieved through a series of laws between 1843 and 1856. Sedentarization has in time led to the transformation in many aspects of the lives of enslaved and emancipated Gypsies. What was common to most Gypsy groups and communities was the strong pressure on the crafts and trades of these people exerted by introducing restrictions of movement, arbitrary measures such as the concentration in the same locality of tens or hundreds of people with the same craft, who thus could not find work for everyone, or even by the express prohibition of activities other than the tilling of the land. The authorities sought to transform the nomadic Gypsies into agricultural workers the landowners needed. This explains why sedentarization was a blow given to the crafts practiced by the Gypsies, which were also reduced, of course, due to the competition from industrial goods. This paper discusses some cases of Gypsy slave communities in Wallachia, for which the sedentarization led to the elimination of their traditional crafts and the pauperisation of the vast majority of these people, and which protested to the authorities against the new situation. The archival documents, first of all the petitions of these people, allow the reconstitution not only of the way in which the governmental policies regarding the Gypsy slaves were implemented locally (sometimes with notable differences), but also of the mechanisms of the sedentarization process these groups went through and in which several power factors were involved: the central and local state administration, the slave owners, the estate owners, the heads of the Gypsy groups a.s.o. From this look inside some interesting micro- histories, the economic factor, which the contemporaries perceived as very important and which is essential for understanding the historical process of Gypsy sedentarization, is not lacking.

12:30 – 13:30 Lunch break

13:30 – 15:30 Session 5 Agents of Coercion and Autonomy

Chair: Adam Fagbore Discussant: Johan Heinsen

Speakers:

Paola A. Revilla, Lecturer at the Art and Culture Department at the Bolivian Catholic University of "San Pablo", Bolivia Gratitude and Coercion: Considerations about Unfree Domestic Labor in Charcas (XVIth- XVIIIth Centuries) Working reality of slave, free and unfree servants in the Spanish-American colonies cannot be fully understood without considering the logic of the patriarchal system on which social relations rested. The coercion mechanisms that made it possible were multiple and did not necessarily rest on the explicit physical violence, but also on the psychic one, under the veil of gratitude to the master / mistress or sir / madam. Under this premise, the proposal wants to delve into the complexity of the “graciosa” of slaves, comparing it closely with that of the “rescued” chiriguanos and their descendants in the colonial “casa poblada” of Charcas. What leads these workers to often rest under the roof of their ancient masters even after becoming or being legally free? Does the treatment they received from their masters daily differ from the one conferred to their slaves? Special attention will be given on the effective actions of those servants who took some advantage of the gaps of the imposed logic, to reuse and even contravene this normalized reality. We are persuaded that the analysis of this phenomenon opens new perspectives to the historiographic keys with which we understand coercion in the worlds of work.

Marjorie Carvalho de Souza, PhD Candidate at the University of Naples – Federico II, Italy Punitive Remedies or Freedom Deeds? Targets and Uses of Service Rental Laws in 19th Century Brazil (1830-1888) That nonpecuniary pressures designed to compel work were not an exclusively feature of slave labour regimes it’s always more a consensus among social labour historians. Both in industrialized countries or in the agricultural periphery, during almost the whole 19th century employers claimed to be able to enforce labor agreements with various punitive tools – and were actually able to do so. Nevertheless, punishments and remedies for breach of contracts don’t tell the whole story of the first punitive legislations regulating labour: at least in 19th century Brazil, the notarial archives can reveal other dimensions and uses of laws for labour extraction. The first of those acts, designed to regulate the rental of services in 1830, was a first answer from Brazilian policymakers for the widespread anxiety among planters, still profoundly dependent on slavery, generated by the United Kingdom’s pressures by the end of the slave trade. The declared objective of that act was to regulate the labour of immigrants in agriculture, called to substitute the slave workforce. Despite of those professed intentions, notarial records show those contracts also being used very frequently by urban workers, above all freed labourers, to pay the loan that made possible their compensatory . Looking at this plural landscape of work experiences and multiple uses of the same legal instruments for different regimes of labour relations, this paper aims to reflect the ambiguous efficacy of written labour arrangements: if at first glance they were really conceived and also served to control workers and reproduce dependency, they could also be, and frequently were, for freed labourers, the only – and powerful – tool to formalize and warranty aspirations of freedom.

Michaela Dimmers, Research Fellow and PhD Candidate at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen, Germany Guarded by Convicts – The Convict Officer System in Prisons of Colonial India This paper addresses the intertwining of labour and punishment as well as authority and collaboration in systems of dependency in the colonial prison in India. In the 1860s, the colonial regime introduced a system of convicts keeping watch over prisoners, which was developed into a system of convict officers, employed as warders, overseers and night watchmen/women, thus elevating some convicts to privileged and eventually elite positions within the prison hierarchies. They were meant to ensure jail discipline and overseeing workshops in jails. Through acts of collaboration and mediation, they could carve out spaces of privilege and power for themselves, and became to constitute an intermediary group, situated between the jail administration and inmates. They could, but also had to, negotiate their loyalties constantly within the prison hierarchies, as for example incidences of escapes show, in which they either prevented fellow inmates to escape, aided them or escaped themselves. Physical attacks on them and free prison staff during breakdowns in jail discipline, show that they could be viewed by inmates as belonging to the coercive system, rather than being part of the inmate population. Such incidences lay bare asymmetries within the coercive prison hierarchies. By looking at duties, privileges, and questions of trust, as well as loyalties and disloyalties, the paper will examine questions of intermediation in unfree contexts. It will also analyze modes of punishment imposed by the colonial prison administration on convict officers and punishments inflicted by them on other prisoners. Thus, the paper seeks to contribute to an understanding of the inner workings of the colonial Indian prisons and some of its coercive labour regimes.

Chad Pearson, Lecturer in History at Collin College, United States The 1886 Southwest Railroad Strike, J. West Goodwin’s Law and Order League, and the Blacklist of Martin Irons This paper explores how employer-coordinated blacklisting in the aftermath of the massive 1886 Southwest Railroad strike punished high-profile labor leader Martin Irons. More than 200,000 members of the Knights of Labor (KOL) participated in this uprising against Jay Gould’s Union Pacific and Missouri Pacific Railroad. The strike, which started in Sedalia, Missouri before spreading to other states, was a disaster for the KOL. The union declined in its aftermath chiefly because of the repression unleashed by local police forces, National Guardsmen, and Law and Order Leagues, which consisted of bankers, manufactures, and merchants. After the strike, employers blacklisted thousands, including strike leader and Sedalia resident Martin Irons, who spent his final years of life in a state of emotional and financial precarity. Unable to secure steady employment, Irons was forced to move from place to place, where he suffered the sting of joblessness and , arrests for vagrancy, and broken health before he died virtually penniless outside of Waco, Texas in 1900. This essay examines how the founder of the first Law and Order League, J. West Goodwin, a Sedalia-based newspaperman, urban booster, and one of the country’s most influential labor union opponents, repeatedly reminded readers about what he considered Martin Irons’s moral lapses and shortsightedness. While Goodwin genuinely disliked labor unions in general and Irons in particular, his anti-union columns were likely influenced by the money he received from Jay Gould to keep Irons’s name in the press. By focusing on Goodwin’s promotion of the blacklist and Irons’s post-strike struggles, we can better appreciate underexplored dimensions of this form of punishment.

15:30 – 16:30 Final roundtable Chair: Christian G. De Vito