Migration and Ethnicity in Coal Field History (Worldwide)
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Migration and ethnicity in coal field history (worldwide) A global industry Between Spitsbergen (Svalbard) Islands (Norway) in the far north,1 South Island (New Zealand) in the far south,2 Vancouver Island (Canada) in the far west,3 and Hoikkaidō Island (Japan) in the far east,4 coal mining has been (and to a certain extent still is) a truly global industry. Being place-bound by geology, often originating in isolated places, and always labour intensive, coal mining was dependent on migrant labour in almost every district.5 At the start, experienced miners were often recruited from other districts; inexperienced workers came from the surrounding countryside, and soon also from more distant places, regions and countries. Cross-border migratory labour connected coalfields, regions and countries, and mobilised new groups of workers of a variety of national and ethnic descent. Therefore, the history of labour in the coalfields is not only a global, but often a transnational history as well. Mobilisation of ethnic minorities Ethnic (minority) groups were also mobilised from within national states and empires, however, like in the nineteenth and early twentieth century Flemish workers to the Walloon coalfields in Belgium, Irish to Scotland in the UK (before Irish independence), Poles to the Ruhr area in the German empire (before Polish independence), African-Americans from the south to Virginia and Alabama in the US, migrants from the French colonies in the Maghreb (Algeria and Morocco) to France, and Koreans to the Hoikkaidō and Chikuho coalfields in Japan (Korea then being a part of the Japanese empire). It is certainly no coincidence that at that time these ethnic minorities were all considered and treated as people of a lower status 1 K.E. Catford, 'The industrial archaeology of Spitsbergen', Industrial Archaeology Review XXIV (2002) 23-36; see also: Dag Avango et al., ‘Between markets and geopolitics: natural resource exploitation on Spitsbergen from 1600 to the present day’, Polar Record 47 (2011) 29-39. 2 Len Richardson, Coal, class and community: the Únited Mineworkers of New Zealand, 1880-1960 (Auckland 1995). 3 John Douglas Belshaw, Colonization and community: The Vancouver Island coalfield and the making of the British Columbian working class (Montreal 2002). 4 Suzanne Culter, Managing Decline: Japan’s Coal Industry Restructuring and Community Response (Honolulu 1999); Ann B. Irish, Hokkaido: A History of Ethnic Transition and Development on Japan’s Northern Island (North Carolina 2009). 5 Cf. for the European coalfields: René Leboutte, Vie et mort des bassins industriels en Europe 1750-2000 (Paris 1997), ch. IX: ‘Croissance démographique et migrations’. 1 than the dominant ethnic groups in these countries. Their mobilisation as miners reflected the low status of work in the mines, and also the position of immigrants as secondary workers within the mines. This is perhaps less clear in the cases of English migrants to South- Wales and Russian migrants to the Ukraine (Donetsk) coal basins,6 but many of these still were of the lowest grade within their ethnic groups. Global labour history These salient features of mining labour have generated a lot of research, especially in labour history. In this research the common saying that ‘everybody was black down there’ has been increasingly provided with a question mark.7 In his overview on coal mining in global labour history in the volume Global Labour History. A State of the Art, Ian Phimister contended that ‘histories of coal mining communities and workers’ struggles have tended to cluster in recent years […] around ethnicity and culture’.8 While, according to Phimister, ‘this had never been a major concern of mainstream British mining historiography’, these issues have continued to attract historical investigation in Germany’, especially with respect to ‘the relationship between Polish-speaking labour migrants and German miners’ unions in the Ruhr coalfields’ . Without further ado, he then jumps to American labour historiography, where they ‘have, of course, remained a key area of debate’. Since Herbert Gutman wrote on the black coal miner and the United Mine Workers of America in 1968, a debate has been going on in American labour history about ‘interracial solidarity and unionism’, evolving from a ‘class over race’ perspective to the conclusion that there was a ‘complex intertwining’ of ‘race and class consciousness’ and that ‘the racial policies of organized labour were far from monolithic’.9 Phimister then proceeds to parallel research on the tense relationship between ‘the historical construction of class solidarity’ 6 Russians were by far the largest group of migrants in the Ukrain Donetsk basin, see: ibidem, 288-291. 7 Robert H. Woodrum, Everybody Was Black Down There: Race And Industrial Change in the Alabama Coalfields (Athens, Georgia 2007); Leen Beyers, Iedereen zwart: het samenleven van nieuwkomers en gevestigden in de mijncité Zwartberg, 1930-1990 (Amsterdam 2010); see also: L. Beyers, ‘Everyone black? Ethnic, class and gender identities at street level in a Belgian mining town, 1930-50’, in: Berger, et al. (eds.), Towards a comparative history of coalfield societies, 146-163; Marcel Deprez et al., ‘Siamo tutti neri!’: des hommes contre du charbon: études et témoignages sur l'immigration italienne en Wallonie (Seraing 1998); M. Cégarra et al., Tous gueules noires. Histoire de l’immigration dans le bassin minier du Nord-Pas-de-Calais (Lewarde 2004). 8 Ian Phimister, ‘Global Labour History in the Twenty-First Century: Coal Mining and Its Recent Past’, in: Jan Lucassen (ed.), Global Labour History. A State of the Art (Bern etc. 2006) 573-589, cit. 579. 9 Referring to: Joe William Trotter, Coal, class, and color: blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915-32 (Urbana 1990) and Daniel Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878-1921 (Chapel Hill 1998). 2 and ‘the politics of ethnic identity’ in such diverse countries as India (Chota Nagpur),10 Indonesia (Ombilin, West-Sumatra),11 Australia (Blair Athol),12 South-Africa (Hlobane Colliery, Natal),13 and Rhodesia/Zimbabwe (Wankie Colliery, his own research).14 While in the research mentioned by Phimister many comparative insights can be gained on the issues of class (solidarity), race (discrimination), and ethnicity (ethnic identity) in a number of mining districts, foremost in the American and the (former) British imperial world, his overview is far from complete, both on the variety of issues raised in research on migration and ethnicity in coalfield history and in the geographical scope of this kind of research in different parts of the world. This becomes clear, among others, in the volume edited in 2005 by Stefan Berger, Norry LaPorte, and Andy Croll, Towards A Comparative History Of Coalfield Societies, which contained several (comparative) studies on migration and ethnicity, reflecting ‘coalfield experiences across all five continents’, in, among others, the United States, South-Africa, Germany, Japan, Britain, and Belgium.15 In the United States and the (former) British Empire, where Phimister seems most at ease, more research has been done than he mentions,16 and ‘even’ in Britain, already in 1979, the impact of Irish immigration on the development of trade unionism in the Scottish 10 Referring to: Dilip Simeon, The Politics of Labour Under Late Colonialism: Workers, Unions and the State in Chota Nagpur 1928-1939 (New Delhi 1995). 11 Referring to: Erwiza Erman, Miners, managers and the state: a socio-political history of the Ombilin coal- mines, West Sumatra, 1892-1996 (Amsterdam 1999); see also: idem, ‘Generalized violence: a case study of the Ombilin coal mines, 1892-1996’, in: Freek Colombijn, Thomas J. Lindblad (eds.), Roots of violence in Indonesia: contemporary violence in historical perspective (Leiden 2002) 105-131. 12 Referring to: Diane Menghetti, Blair Athol: The Life and Death of a Town (Clermont Qld 1995). 13 Citing: Ruth Edgecombe, The Constancy of Change: A History of Hlobane Colliery, 1898-1998 (1998); see also: idem and Bill Guest, ‘The Black Heart of the Beautiful Mountain: Hlobane Colliery, 1898-1953’, South African Historical Journal 18 (1986) 191-221. 14 Citing: Ian Phimister, Wangi Kolia: Coal, Capital and Labour in Colonial Zimbabwe 1894-1954 (Harare/Johannesburg 1994). 15 S. Berger, A. Croll and N. LaPorte (eds.), Towards a comparative history of coalfield societies (Aldershot 2005), 4. 16 On the American coalfields: Ronald L. Lewis, Black Coal Miners in America. Race, Class, and Community Conflict 1780-1980 (Lexington 1987); Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-21 (Urbana 2001); on Nigeria: Carolyn A. Brown, ‘We were all slaves’: African miners, culture and resistance at the Enugu Government Colliery (Portsmouth 2003); see also: idem, 'Nigerian Coal Miners, Protest and Gender, 1914-49: the Iva Valley Mining Community’, in: Berger et al. (eds.), Towards a comparative history of coalfield societies, 127-144; on South-Africa see the (comparative) work by Peter Aexander: ‘A Moral Ecopnomy, an Isolated Mass, and Paternalized Migrants: Transvaal Collery Strikes, 1925-49’, in: ibidem, 238-252; idem, ‘Race, class loyalty, and the structure of capitalism: coal miners in Alabama and the Transvaal, 1918-1922’, Journal of Southern African Studies 30 (2004) 115-153; idem, ‘Challenging cheap-labour theory: Natal and Transvaal coal miners, ca. 1890-1950’, Labor History 49 (2008) 47-70; on Australia the work of Alan Murray deserves to be mentioned: