‘Every single CelestialFootnote 1 of them was carrying with him all he had in the world—a wooden chest with a ringing lock and brass on the corners, containing the savings of his labours: some clothes of ceremony, sticks of incense, a little opium maybe, bits of nameless rubbish of conventional value, and a small hoard of silver dollars, toiled for in coal lighters, won in gambling-houses or in petty trading, grubbed out of earth, sweated out in mines, on railway lines, in deadly jungle, under heavy burdens—amassed patiently, guarded with care, cherished fiercely.’Footnote 2
Introduction
This paper wishes to discuss the two leading interpretations in the history of wage and indentured labour. According to the first approach, the indentured contract resembled forced labour and slavery, and contracts were said to express a ‘legal fiction’. This interpretation has an interesting history of its own: it was advanced by colonial elites in the nineteenth century and later renewed in ‘subaltern studies’.Footnote 3 This approach deprives the abolition of slavery of any historical significance,Footnote 4 while neglecting all the efforts made by indentured immigrants to fight for their own rights.Footnote 5
Several legal scholars have opposed this view by demonstrating that the indenture contract was not considered an expression of forced labour until the second half of the nineteenth century—until that date, it had been viewed as an expression of free will in contract.Footnote 6 This argument joins recent trends in the history of emigration that also stress the shifting boundary between free and unfree emigration.Footnote 7 I will develop this last view but add a further dimension to it—that is, the link between the evolution of forms of labour in Europe and in its colonies. Let us be clear: I do not claim that British or French wage earners were ‘unfree’ or that their legal and social conditions were the same as those of indentured immigrants, I simply argue that it would be misleading to put these actors into distinct, opposing boxes: the indentured immigrant, close to forced labour on the one hand, and the wage earner, an expression of ‘free labour’, on the other. I add that all these actors (masters, servants, day labourers, indentured immigrants) belonged to one and the same world comprising legal inequalities between employers (masters) and workers (servants). Within this common world, inequalities between the legal and economic entitlements of working people and those of their masters were far greater in the colonies than in Europe and also differed between colonies of the same empire as well as between European countries and between different areas in a given country.
On this basis, I will be studying the relations between Europe and its colonies in a more complex way than the simple dependence of the latter on the former would suggest. I claim the necessity of avoiding any simplistic identification of colonial discourse with colonial practices. Colonial elites expressed quite complex and often divergent aims, which were all the more difficult to translate into practice as local people were far from being merely passive recipients. They interacted (and usually conflicted) with colonial authorities and values, and the final outcome was not always the one they desired. Some scholars (for example, Frederick Cooper)Footnote 8 have already studied this complex interaction in East Africa; I intend to do the same for some parts of the Indian Ocean and examine in detail the mutual influences between labour practices and labour institutions in Europe and in some of its colonies. At the same time, unlike Cooper, I do not believe that European powers sought to export an abstract wage earner (the wage earners as defined by Marx, Smith or Mill) but a historical form of it, that is, the servant. It was this particular historical form of wage earner that interacted with local practices; the historical issues in Europe and the colonies concerning labour and labour rights were influenced by this concept and practice of the ‘worker’.
This paper focuses on Mauritius and Reunion Island. This choice is justified by the fact that one-quarter of the two million indentured emigrants recorded in the years 1830–1920 were shipped to those islands. At the same time, the Indian Ocean allows us to escape from the transatlantic paradigm.Footnote 9 Trafficking began among Indians, Arabs, and Africans as early as the seventh century.Footnote 10 This peculiar set of rules and practices provided a specific ground for interaction with British and French notions and practices of labour.Footnote 11
This paper is structured as follows: in the first section I will discuss labour and labour rules in France, and show that the Revolution suppressed criminal sanctions for breaches of contract but significant contractual inequalities persisted, except in a few privileged urban industries. In the second and third sections I will study indentured contracts in Reunion Island and will show the continuing problems immigrants had in using the law to defend their rights. The fourth section is devoted to British working people; I argue that servant status and criminal punishment for breach of contract continued to be widespread during much of the nineteenth century. In the final section I will look at how these rules and practices were transplanted to Mauritius and explain why they changed in the mid-nineteenth century. The conclusion is an attempt to recompose the puzzle and raise new speculative issues in the colonial, national, and global history of labour.
Crossing revolutionary boundaries: day labourers and servants in husbandry in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
In the past, historians have been fond of comparing the continuation of guilds and the corporatist spirit in French labour law to the free market of Anglo-Saxon labour.Footnote 12 This contrast is no longer relevant and the regulation of labour in France is not viewed in opposition to market growth.Footnote 13 From this standpoint, France would even appear to have been the first country to have abolished domestic service as well as criminal penalties in labour disputes.Footnote 14 Indeed, the notions of ‘labour contract’ and ‘wage earner’, as we understand them today, were invented in France in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 15 As late as the eighteenth century, France's leading legal experts considered labour to be a service provision.Footnote 16 Moreover, French case law made no clear distinction between hiring a person for service and hiring an item.Footnote 17 Similarly, apprenticeship contracts and domestic service contracts for longer than a one-year term bound individuals to place all their time at the disposal of their employers,Footnote 18 which prompted the writers of the l'Encyclopédie méthodique to denounce such contracts as ‘slavery’.Footnote 19
Although the Revolution abolished lifelong domestic service, it retained both forms of contract from earlier periods: hiring for labour (louage d'ouvrage) and hiring for services (louage de service). While the former brought the status of the wage earner more in line with the independent artisan, the latter carried over an important legacy from earlier forms of domestic service. Cottereau has emphasized the importance of hiring for labour in nineteenth-century France and its ability to protect wage earners.Footnote 20 This argument, while not false, is nevertheless biased by the sources studied, that is, the textile industry and certain urban milieus. But what about the other sectors— especially agriculture and the colonies?
Both before and after the Revolution, agricultural labourers were either day labourers or ‘task-workers’ (tâcherons), and servants in husbandry were included these two categories.Footnote 21 By 1700, according to contemporary estimates, perhaps three-quarters of the rural families in France were headed by an artisan or a day labourer.Footnote 22 In the nineteenth century, official statistics show that day labourers were mainly found in the south along the Mediterranean, in Alsace-Lorraine, Ile-de-France, and Picardie.Footnote 23 The conditions of rural working people changed slowly over time. Prior to the Revolution, penalties were imposed on all those—day labourers, pieceworkers or servants in husbandry—who left their jobs before the end of their contracts or without their employer's authorization. A variety of contractual arrangements to limit mobility existed at the time (for example, bonuses for hard-working day labourers, payment by task), along with more general provisions.Footnote 24 Thus, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, agricultural labourers and servants were free to move about and change employers only at certain times of the year, in line with the critical periods in the agricultural calendar; in some regions, mobility was permitted around the feast of Saint Martin (11 November), that is, between the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter; in others, it was around the feast of Saint Jean (summer solstice) or at Christmas time.Footnote 25 The seasonal nature of agricultural labour gave rise to a significant amount of regional mobility, which was already considerable in the seventeenth century and remained high until around the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote 26 It is precisely this mobility, together with the notion of labour as service in the legal and economic culture of the time, that helps to explain why working people, their masters, and employers as well as the authorities devoted so much time and energy to specifying conditions for hiring. The Revolution abolished personal service, and first interpretations of the civil code considered that day labourers, servants in husbandry, and domestics were hired for labour while being in service. What did this mean?
Each type of worker had different rights to mobility which were linked to the other duties, forms of remuneration, and welfare protection provided for in the formal or informal arrangements they made with their master-employer. For example, for day labourers, the wage unit was one day, corresponding to a unit of work. The length of the working day was the same throughout a given region; it took into account meals, travel time, and rest periods, but it differed from one season to the next, and wages changed along with the length of the working day. Unless they were hired for a specific task, the day labourer was paid at an agreed price for their day's work, regardless of the amount of work they performed.Footnote 27
A day labourer could leave his employer at any time or be discharged without prior notice, without receiving or claiming any compensation. In practice, however, the need to ensure sufficient hands for urgent labour had an obvious corrective effect on this rule. Yet both the wage earner and the master paid for that freedom: the labourer's employment status was precarious and he ran the risk of seasonal unemployment, while the employer faced a possible shortage of hands during peak seasons.
This might be why some preferred piecework. This mode of hiring created a few reciprocal obligations: the labourer was supposed to finish the task he undertook and the employer was not to discharge him without serious reason until its completion.Footnote 28
Lastly, servants in husbandry were most closely tied to their masters. This was not due to the work they performed (for example, domestic chores) but rather because of their place of residence and commitments. In the anthology of local customs in Chatillon-sur-Seine, a servant in husbandry was defined as a person who hired out his labour, who was committed to serving someone, who belonged to the household, who took part in the master's work, who lived with their master, and who received wages from him called ‘gages’.Footnote 29 Servants in husbandry were subject to their master's will, which meant they ‘owed all [their] time to the master for any labour demanded’.Footnote 30 This subordination to the master meant that the promised gages was paid as a lump sum. The master could discharge the servant without notice or compensation for ‘dishonesty’, ‘disobedience’, ‘forgetting duties’, cursing or acts of violence. Servants in husbandry, on their side, often complained of poor or inadequate food.Footnote 31
In the event, most problems arose with regard to gages. Most practices allowed the master to withhold wages equivalent to the amount of compensation due from the wage earner. However, if the wages (gages) were inadequate for this purpose, the master's claim was not covered. This led to the proposal, renewed in 1848, to extend the worker's livret ouvrier Footnote 32 to agricultural labourers. The measure did not pass, however.
On the other hand, if a rural labourer, day labourer or servant demanded compensation from the master, he had no other recourse but the justice of the peace. This threat was therefore frequently brandished but seldom carried out. Several bills were presented in 1848, 1849, and 1850 to change the condition of servants in husbandry, which the bills’ promoters viewed as a throwback to domestic service under the Old Regime or even as ‘slavery’. However, the bills failed to pass and the counter-argument that ‘the servant voluntarily subordinates himself to the master’ prevailed.Footnote 33
The situation changed during the second half of the century when the number of disputes increasedFootnote 34 and demand for agricultural wage earners and servants intensified as rural people moved to the cities. Employers accused the justices of the peace of being ‘on the side of labourers and servants’,Footnote 35 just as manufacturers during the same period accused the magistrates on industrial tribunals of being biased against them.Footnote 36
In short, even after the Revolution, unlike urban workers, rural working people saw their legal entitlement increase only gradually over time. They were not granted judicial assistance nor the right to appeal to labour courts (prud'hommes) and they continued to be strongly subordinated to their masters. The gap between privileged urban workers and all the others was even wider in the colonies.
From rural labour to indentured contracts: the invention of engagisme
There is no doubt that French engagisme has received less attention than Anglo-Saxon indentured service. In the French colonies, the contract of engagement or indentured service was developed in the seventeenth century.Footnote 37 It was initially intended for white settlers whose transport expenses were advanced by employers or their middlemen in exchange for a commitment to work for several years. The engagés were subject to criminal penalties and could be transferred along with their contracts to other masters. It is important to point out that, owing to the close resemblance between wage earners and domestic servants, especially under the Old Regime, and the survival of forms of domestic service into the nineteenth century, the contract of engagement should not be understood in opposition to other labour relationships but rather as an extension and radicalization of them in the colonial scenario. Indeed, the notaries of Normandy in charge of drafting the first contracts of engagement in the seventeenth century explicitly relied on two already existing contracts: the agricultural labourer's contract and the sailor's contract.Footnote 38 These contracts allocated a special status to a hired person who offered his service and all his time to his master. As I have shown, the agricultural labourer transferred exclusive ownership of his time and his services to his employer; the sailor's contract extended the length of this commitment and added special clauses related to travel expenses.Footnote 39
In general, the engagés were not allowed to marry without their master's permission. An engagé had the right to redeem his indenture, but he could not oblige his master to agree to the early termination of his contract. There was a thin line between engagés and enlisted men. The terms of commitment and the criminalization of desertion were common to both categories.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the contract of engagement concerned mainly white Frenchmen who went to the French West Indies and Canada but also to colonies in the Indian Ocean.Footnote 40 From La Rochelle alone, 5,200 engagés left for the French West Indies between 1660 and 1715, a figure well below the 210,000 indentured Britons who left for North America between 1630 and 1700.Footnote 41
After the Napoleonic wars, although France officially reintroduced slavery, English pressure resulted in several slave importations being presented as contracts of engagement. In this manner, an estimated 45,000 slaves were illicitly imported to Reunion Island between 1817 and 1835.Footnote 42 Under these conditions, the distinction between slave and engagé was difficult to determine; the fragile boundary was noticeable on arrival and departure. Ships’ captains transporting Indians often resorted to fraud; engagés signed contracts to work in Singapore but ended up being sent to Reunion Island.Footnote 43 The French colonial administration encouraged the arrival of Indian engagés and tried to establish rules of law that were sufficiently clear to avoid trouble, but they also worried about their actual enforcement.Footnote 44 Translating those principles into action remained difficult. During the first half of the 1830s, Indian engagés numbered about 3,000.Footnote 45 The legal rules in force provided that they should receive food, lodging, and wages.Footnote 46 In practice, however, the employers-landowners seldom complied with the rules and, in the event of a dispute or a problem with the administration, the settlers justified withholding the wages of the Indian engagés by claiming they had failed to fulfil their commitments. The Indian engagés resisted not only by absconding, reducing the amount of work they did, and rioting, but also by taking their cases to court.Footnote 47 However, faced with the unfavourable attitude of the magistrates and the administration, Indian engagés formed a trade union in which the members with the best mastery of the French language played a highly active role in formulating appeals, intervening with the authorities, and so on.Footnote 48 In some trials, Indians won favourable decisions and were able to recover their wages or leave their employment without having to pay ‘compensation’ to their masters. This issue was debated among the settlers as rumours spread of increasing numbers of appeals by the engagés which, it was believed, would inevitably lead to the breakdown of the whole social order. In 1837, the trade union was prohibited.Footnote 49
At that point, like agricultural wage earners in France, the engagés discovered a different option: competition among employers. If they did not like their working conditions, they simply left their employers and went into the city where they worked as domestic servants. They became ‘fugitives’ and ‘deserters’.Footnote 50 Many landowners did not demand the return of their runaway engagés; they knew perfectly well that it was in the interest of many of them to appropriate engagés belonging to other settlers.
As well as competition between planters and estate owners, different attitudes among colonial rulers helped to reinforce the immigrants’ resistance. Some rulers, such as Governor Pujol, requested legal protections for immigrants like those already in place in Mauritius;Footnote 51 other colonial administrators and plantation owners thought the state of affairs was the result of Indian indolence rather than unfair contracts of engagement and lack of cooperation among landowners. It was in this context that slavery was abolished in France and its colonies. Did this step mark a new departure or consolidate existing practices under a new name?
Engagisme: a new departure
In 1847, in Reunion Island, there were a total of 6,508 engagés, comprising Indians, Chinese, Africans, and Creoles.Footnote 52 The lack of an available labour force encouraged several landowners to call for the recruitment of additional engagés, but this time from Africa, especially since the trend in France was moving towards the abolition of slavery and they had to prepare for this. Indeed, as in the British empire in the 1830s–40s, the abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1848 was followed by a revival of engagés. Indeed, while only 153 African engagés entered into service in 1853, thereafter, on average, about 4,000 Africans arrived each year between 1851 and 1854, 10,008 in 1858, and 5,027 the following year.Footnote 53 In reality, recruitment in India, Madagascar, Mozambique, and the east coast of Africa relied on networks that had been in place since the eighteenth century and employed the same practices as the slave trade. ‘Recruitment’ often took place violently, sometimes with the help of local tribal chiefs.Footnote 54 There were also ‘prior redemptions’—the name given to such purchases—in Madagascar, Zanzibar, and Mozambique, causing conflicts with the Portuguese and the English, officially over the protection of engagé rights, but in reality over control and the right to divide up the workforce among their respective empires.
Similar trends were found in relation to Indian engagés who, in principle, were under the protection of the British administration which regularly denounced the kidnapping of adults and children.Footnote 55 In all, 43,958 Indian engagés were to arrive in Reunion Island between 1849 and 1859.Footnote 56
Thus, the market for engagés was far from being ‘free’, not only because of diplomatic and political interference but also because of the way in which it worked. In the early 1850s, while the rules adopted in France were becoming increasingly favourable to workers (for example, the introduction of the law prohibiting child labour, the abolition of a criminal charge for forming workers’ coalitions), the Second Empire began imposing tighter restrictions on emancipated slaves and engagés. A contract of engagement was imposed on all workers in the colonies; the legal rules governing the livret ouvrier were widely used and enforced.Footnote 57 Anyone without fixed employment (defined as a job lasting for more than a year) was considered a vagrant and punished as such.Footnote 58 The penalties were considerable, but the law was also frequently circumvented through fictitious contracts of engagement that some—especially women—signed with landowners who were interested in having occasional labourers.Footnote 59
In principle, engagés had the right to go to court and denounce mistreatment and abuses. We have seen that during previous decades those rights had been largely ignored. Now, in practice, it was extremely difficult to make use of the rules, above all because colonial law courts were in the hands of local elites. Thus, when immigrants approached the courts to report abuses, they were often sent back to their employers who, at best, punished them and kept back their wages for insubordination; at worst, employers sued their workers for breach of contract and slander. In the face of these difficulties, workers sometimes joined together to denounce illegal practices, but they risked being sentenced by the judge and the police to two months of forced labour in a workhouse for illicit association and breaching the peace.Footnote 60
Legal disputes mainly concerned health care, contractual performance, and physical violence. Until the adoption of the 1898 law on labour accidents, French employers were not responsible for workers' injuries, unless it could be proved that they were at fault. In ‘hiring for service’ contracts, this attitude was justified by the fact that day labourers had short-term, informal contracts. As for louage d'ouvrage, workers were considered independent artisans and, as such, they were personally responsible for injuries and casualties. Finally, the mobility of servants in husbandry was severely constrained but they benefited from health care. In the colonies, under the concessionary regime, indentured immigrants were immediately assimilated as servants in husbandry and were therefore supposed to benefit from the health care their employers were explicitly obliged to provide according to the statutes and contracts.
This solution was adopted within the context of broader agreements with Britain on the circulation of the labour force in the Indian Ocean region; Britain demanded the provision of health care on plantations in exchange for liberalizing Indian immigration to Reunion Island. However, in Reunion Island other official provisions were that workers could benefit from health care only when they could demonstrate that they had complied with all the health and technical prescriptions detailed in the estate regulations and in official statutes.Footnote 61 In practice, health care provision was poor; medical services simply did not exist on plantations and injured and sick workers were not only mistreated but their wages were even reduced.Footnote 62
With regard to the broader legal protection of immigrants, unlike slaves, engagés had the right to return home. The terms negotiated in their contracts were supposed to comply with the general provisions of the law. In practice, however, repatriation was difficult. During the 1850s and the 1860s, just one-third of indentured immigrants returned home (mostly Indians). This percentage was close to that in Mauritius, the Caribbean, Surinam, and Jamaica at the time, but it was far from 70 per cent repatriation recorded in Thailand, Malaya, and Melanesia. Distance and the cost of transport were just two of the variables affecting repatriation; politics and concrete forms of integration were also important factors.Footnote 63 In Reunion Island, in particular, urban traders and some colonial officers encouraged engagés to return home. The former group argued that once the immigrants had completed their contracts, they settled in towns and engaged in illegal trade and were a source of unfair competition. Colonial administrators were inclined to support this view: the defence of public order required the repatriation of immigrants.Footnote 64
In contrast, several employers and estate owners, especially small ones, were hostile to both the resettlement of immigrants in towns or their repatriation and pushed for contracts to be renewed. Their attitude can be explained by the fact that, unlike large estate owners, they faced increasing problems in finding the financial resources, networks, and diplomatic support to recruit new workers. They therefore made use of all available legal and illegal means to retain workers at the end of their contracts. In particular, they seized immigrants’ wages and livrets, and added strong penalties whenever possible (‘laziness’ and failure to accomplish assigned tasks in good time were the most common arguments for adding penalties). Hence, the worker's ‘debt’ was never repaid and their contracts were extended. Day labour standards and objectives were gradually raised so that few workers could meet them; they were thus subject to stiff penalties, even though they were working 18 to 20 hours a day instead of the ten specified in their contracts and official rules.Footnote 65 If all this was not enough, employers did not hesitate to physically force workers to renew their contracts.
These practices had been informally denounced since the 1850s but it was not until the 1860s that they were brought before the courts, under pressure from British diplomats and French central government authorities.Footnote 66 Even then, lawsuits often went on for years and concerned only a very small percentage of workers. Local court records list a few dozen cases per year of contractual abuses and illegal wage retention, even though there were several thousand workers were on the island. Even in these few cases, employers were merely forced to give workers their due wages with no damages or interest, and many immigrants were granted permission to terminate (illegal) contracts and abuses without their employers having to pay penalties.Footnote 67
Beside contracts and wages, corporal punishment and violence were the most common crimes brought before magistrates. In the late 1860s and the 1870s, special investigative commissions were set up, most often in response to British diplomatic pressure. Their archives testify to widespread corporal punishment, but also to the resistance of the commission's members to acknowledge its existence. In most cases, abuses were described as ‘exceptional’. In fact, they were commonplace and they were an expression of deep-rooted brutality. Yet, employers were sentenced to as little as one month in prison, even in cases of the death of brutalized workers.Footnote 68 Throughout the 1870s, between just one and seven employers were sentenced each year for injuries and violence in first level courts. At the appeals court level, the figure dropped to one per year and—exceptionally—four in 1875, but this was a single lawsuit and the three people who received sentences were themselves immigrants who worked as supervisors.Footnote 69
On the opposite side, every year in the jurisdiction of each justice of the peace, employers sued several hundreds of workers for breach of contract. Sentences were usually favourable to the plaintiffs and the workers had to face heavy financial penalties, which often translated into forced labour. Every year, immigrants were also dragged into court for robbery; sentences were tough—five years of forced labour for a stolen chicken, for example.Footnote 70
Theft was mentioned in sordid cases as, for example, when Chinese ‘coolies’ were sued after refusing to allow their employer to ‘safeguard’ their savings. The police confirmed they had found an ‘unjustified’ amount of money in their barracks; the ‘coolies’ claimed it was their savings and the employer claiming the money belonged to him. The ‘coolies’ were sentenced to five to seven years of forced labour.Footnote 71
To sum up, in Reunion Island, after the abolition of slavery, access to justice was extremely difficult for immigrants and their living conditions were incredibly harsh. The source of legal inequalities in the contracts of engagisme can be found in the contracts of day labourers in France. The opportunity for legal redress and sentences were not the same for labourers and their employers; this gap was even greater in the colonies where the abuses, corruption or simply the partisan attitudes of local officers were extremely widespread.
This situation evolved over time and the conditions of indentured immigrants improved after 1875. This was due to several factors: the endurance of the immigrants themselves, who continued to denounce abuses despite the difficulties they encountered; their engagement in passive resistance, absconding, and forming groups; and their willingness to pursue lawsuits. All these became tools for resistance. To a certain extent this proved favourable to the large planters who mostly benefited from immigrants running away from small estates where the labour conditions were worse. This was met with increasing ‘benevolence’ on the part of colonial elites, in some instances because they firmly believed in freedom and/or the virtues of the free market, while others responded to political pressure from Paris and London. No doubt Britain was inclined to protect Indian immigrants in Reunion Island not only for humanitarian reasons but also to guarantee a labour force for British employers in India and other parts of their empire. Whatever the rationale for Britain's action—probably a combination of both motivations—the final outcome was increased legal protection for immigrants. Unfair competition between small and large estate owners and between rural and urban masters in Reunion Island were also contributory factors. Major employers were a much more favourable contributor to a fair labour market than small ones insofar as they benefited from economies of scales in the recruitment and exploitation of workers.
A third factor affecting the conditions in which immigrants lived, was the decline of sugar prices in the international market. In the early 1840s average producer prices of sugar were about 39 pounds a ton. By the 1870s they were down to around 22 pounds a ton and, as the glut grew in the 1890s, they fell by another 10 pounds on average, reaching a low of 9.60 pounds in 1896.Footnote 72 Small producers tried to cope with this trend by imposing increasingly harsh labour conditions, which provoked massive absconding (which actually manifested as transfer to large estates) and worker resistance. Many petits blancs sold their properties and moved up to the upper parts of the Island, where the land was of poorer quality,Footnote 73 and where they were joined by immigrants and former slaves who began buying land or, more often, cultivating it under new forms of renting.Footnote 74
We still have to determine whether the case of France and Reunion Island was an exception. Did the status of engagés of colour reflect the long, arduous process of abolishing slavery in France compared with Great Britain?Footnote 75 And was the inferior status of immigrants in the colonies and of day labourers and servants in France a broader consequence of the way the Revolution of 1789 dealt with labour and rights?
To answer these questions, we need to compare labour conditions in France and Reunion Island to those of working people in Britain and Mauritius.
Crossing the economic revolution: Labour constraints in England
The argument of this section is as follows: the ideal wage-earner to which historians and economists often refer actually did not exist in eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century Britain; instead we find different kinds of servants who experienced unequal legal status and social conditions in contrast to their masters. Although these rules were often unenforced in law courts, they served as grounds to conceive of and practise labour relations and social inequalities in the colonies.
The idea that the British Industrial Revolution was made possible thanks to institutions that facilitated free contracts and, according to some, the proletarianization of the peasantry, is supported by a long tradition dating back to at least the nineteenth century and the classical economists. However, these views are not confirmed by close historical examination. Until the mid-nineteenth century dual employment (both on the farm and in town, for example) was the rule rather than the exception. As a result, Lindert and Williamson have recently estimated that the error margins for the larger occupational groupings, such as ‘agriculture’, ‘commerce’, and ‘manufacturing trades’, are probably within the range of –40 to +66 per cent.Footnote 76 Between 1701 and 1831 the absolute number of workers employed in agriculture remained roughly constant at around 1.8 million. Between 1801 and 1851, the number even increased slightly as new techniques in husbandry demanded more labour not less.Footnote 77 This can go some way to explaining the long life of labour institutions in Britain. I have discussed elsewhere Bentham's attitudes and how they were related to the Poor Laws.Footnote 78 Indeed, in Great Britain, the Statute of Labourers (1350–51) was followed by a set of legal rules and laws gathered together under the umbrella of the Masters and Servants acts, which multiplied in the sixteenth century and accompanied the Statute of Artificers and Apprentices (1562).Footnote 79 These measures formed a coherent whole in which an inferior legal status and fewer rights were conferred on apprentices, servants, and any other type of wage earners when compared to their employers and masters. Any untimely breach of contract on the part of a servant was subject to prosecution. The word ‘fugitive’ was clearly employed to describe apprentices and servants who left their employment without giving notice. The measures were justified by several factors: frequent advances on wages, which gave special power to the master/employer who was also a creditor; and advances on raw materials,Footnote 80 particularly in centralized and also decentralized manufacturing. Servants were entrusted with raw materials, which they were supposed to use entirely; they were held accountable in the event of waste and were hence under an obligation to the master-merchant who commissioned the work. Employers requested and received criminal legislation that designated waste as theft.Footnote 81 Despite the existence of a contract, the legal status of the actors mattered and it was not always identical. Labour itself was considered to be the property of the master/employer, but it was also viewed as a resource for the community to which the working people belonged—the parish and society as a whole—and hence the basis of the servant's obligation.Footnote 82
The ‘wage earner’, as we understand this today, did not exist, and careful attention should be paid to the definition of ‘servant’. Macpherson and other scholars maintain that this term referred to all forms of wage labour,Footnote 83 whereas Laslett argues that it applied only to domestic servants in the strict sense.Footnote 84 However, as Steinfeld has thoroughly documented, the word ‘servant’ took on different meanings at different times, especially when the labour relationship was between actors with different legal statuses. For example, between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the sources seem to limit the use of the word ‘servant’ to people who resided with their master; labourers and artificers were still excluded from such categorization. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the word ‘servant’ increasingly referred to all types of wage earners, and included artificers, day labourers, and any other sort of travailleur.Footnote 85 In a rather confused way, the case law of the second half of the eighteenth century began to exclude domestic servants in the strict sense from decisions based on Masters and Servants laws, at least in Great Britain; they were included in them in the colonies.Footnote 86
In the agricultural sector in the same period, we find important similarities with France: it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between domestic servants and day labourers as they were both included in the more general category of ‘servants’. Agricultural workers were paid their wages at the end of their contracts to ensure their labour during harvests. At the same time, domestic servants in the strict sense had longer term contracts that lasted for at least a year and often much longer. As in France, these annual contracts, which were frequently renewed, were signed on conventional dates that varied from one region to the next depending on local agricultural calendars as well as fairs, which offered a prime opportunity for massive hiring of these wage earners.Footnote 87 Although the Masters and Servants legislation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries emerged from the framework of the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers, it also marked a departure from it. The Masters and Servant acts were not an attempt to keep a pre-industrial model of household employment in place. Instead, they aimed to impose a more rigorous system of work discipline upon the growing numbers of labourers, artisans, and outworkers employed in manufacturing, as well as maintain control of the agricultural labour market at a time of considerable upheaval.Footnote 88 These measures also applied to insubordination and failure to comply with workshop rules, both of which were assimilated into an implicit, unilateral breach of contract.Footnote 89 Worse still, from the 1720s the measures of the Masters and Servants acts grew stricter, when penalties against servants who broke their contracts were reinforced. Between 1720 and 1792, ten acts of Parliament imposed or increased terms of imprisonment for quitting or for misbehaviour. They established ground rules for bargaining, usually concerning wages (and from this standpoint they provided the background for the ‘new’ Masters and Servants acts), but also for other issues, as the emphasis on unfair competition confirms. Specific groups promoted these changes, including tailors, shoemakers, leatherworkers, mariners, and lace makers.
All these statutes responded to the increasing demand for labour created by expanding markets. In thriving sectors of the economy, employers wanted to be able to retain workers.
To a certain extent, compulsion and criminal sanctions reflected a widespread idea common at the time, which was that higher wages would reduce workers’ willingness to work and therefore only compulsion could force servants to honour their commitments. Tighter constraints were also applied to anyone who refused work,Footnote 90 which shows how closely labour contracts came to be connected to the Poor Law from the late seventeenth century, when the Masters and Servants acts were supplemented with a larger code of laws directed against the disorderly poor. Penalties against workers were bolstered by those imposed against vagrancy and disorderly behaviour.Footnote 91 As Tawney notes, the Poor Law began where serfdom stopped.Footnote 92 In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, freedom to choose one's employer did not imply the freedom to remain unemployed. Opposing tensions were thus expressed: on the one hand, employers tended to retain the ‘good’ workers; on the other hand, some workers were encouraged to move on in order to lower the expenses of the district concerned.Footnote 93
When historians encountered criminal sanctions in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, they depicted them as anomalous rules in a market society with a large population of ‘proletarians’. They believed that the rules were scarcely enforced. However, detailed analyses have recently been carried out on the rate of penalty enforcement in the courts of England, Great Britain as a whole, and the colonies. This outstanding quantitative work clearly shows that harsh penalties on servants in the legal rules and case law did not reflect inadequate enforcement but, on the contrary, was an extension of it. Rules were not only increasingly enforced, but also covered a broader cross-section of labourers and working people and grew distinctly tighter between 1750 and 1875 (when they were finally abolished).Footnote 94 County and police district records are available from 1857 to 1875. They show that about 10,000 people were prosecuted each year for Masters and Servants offences. Of these, 7,000 were convicted, 1,700 served a sentence in a house of correction, 2,000 were fined, and 3,300 received other kinds of punishment (for example, abated wages and cost assessments). Whipping was extremely rare (11 people in 1857, two in 1858 and 1859, one in 1860, and another one in 1866).Footnote 95 However, most conflicts were resolved out of court; usually, the masters wanted ‘to set an example’ and have their workers and servants come back to work. There were no significant differences in the rate of prosecution under the Masters and Servants acts in rural and urban counties, in agriculture, putting-out or manufacturing areas.Footnote 96
In contrast, masters and employers were not subject to these measures; the first rulings in this sense occurred in 1844, exactly at the time the Poor Law was eliminated. Until that time, masters were never threatened with imprisonment for breach of contract.Footnote 97 After that, it is unclear whether official statistics include worker-initiated proceedings; Steinfeld claims they did not. However, archival investigation shows that some percentages of prosecutions under the Masters and Servants acts were initiated by workers against their employers, primarily for back wages or wrongful dismissal.Footnote 98 As regards day and rural labourers, the rate of prosecution was seasonally determined: it was highest during harvest periods, when people moved from towns to the countryside. This corresponded to the terms of contract for agricultural labourers who were paid only at the end of their contract, precisely to avoid such problems at the harvest season. Masters constantly prosecuted servants engaged in occupations that were half-agricultural, half in trade who, in their eyes, did not provide the promised service. From this standpoint, the enforcement confirms that the Masters and Servants rules were tools for reducing turnover costs.
Thus, the long-term movement of labour and the rules governing it in Great Britain hardly confirm the traditional argument that early labour freedom in the country supported the Industrial Revolution. On the contrary, the latter was accompanied by increasingly tough regulations and sanctions on workers. The Masters and Servants acts were a powerful tool in the hands of masters/employers to cope with increasing demand for labour in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rules became harsher for workers during the Industrial Revolution and the rate of prosecution also increased.
However, opposite trends were also at work. Masters were united in criticizing unreliable servants and workers, but they were also in competition among themselves and did not hesitate to seize others employers’ workers. This attitude, together with increasing pressure from trade unions, ultimately changed the balance of power in the labour market. The new trend began in the 1840s when another attempt by masters’ representatives in Parliament failed to extend the Masters and Servants acts to other categories of workers. In that same year, the Poor Law was repealed and masters began to be prosecuted as well. In 1875, the Employers and Workmen Act decriminalized employment offences. This was soon followed by the first welfare state legislation.Footnote 99
Were the same dynamics found in the colonies? To be sure, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the rate of prosecution of workers under criminal rules was around 5 to 8 per cent in Britain, whereas the percentage rose to 20 per cent in the British colonies, reaching particularly high peaks in Mauritius in the plantation and mining areas.Footnote 100 In the following section, I will turn to explaining the analogies, differences, and mutual influence of labour rules and their enforcement between England and one of its colonies, namely Mauritius.
From servants to indentured immigrants: the case of Mauritius
The indenture contract, usually considered by historians to be a form of forced labour, did not fall into the latter category until the middle of the nineteenth century. In contrast, since the seventeenth century and until that point, indenture had been viewed as the expression of free contract: the individual bound by the contract was just a servant whose travel expenses were paid in advance and who committed himself for a longer period of time than a labourer but a shorter one than a domestic servant in the strict sense. Like the others, however, he owed all his time to his master, who could sell the indentured servant along with any debts he owed to someone else. As a master in Great Britain had the right to recover fugitives, so too in the colonies, and indentured servants who fled were subject to criminal penalties. Without the Masters and Servants acts, indenture would not have been possible. This means that the labour contract was not a ‘fiction’ but a real tool in the master's hands. This is all the more important as masters in the colonies gradually obtained broader rights than those held by masters in Great Britain. They could exercise corporal punishment, authorize the marriage of indentured servants, and so on.Footnote 101
An innovation occurred around the middle of the eighteenth century in the American colonies: magistrates decided that indentured servants (but not Native Americans) could be subject to criminal penalties. This was the first colonial innovation in relation to English case law. Indenture contracts nevertheless continued to provide for criminal penalties for whites until the 1830s. For the others, that is, Indians, Africans, and Chinese, indenture contracts and the corresponding forms of servitude continued to be practised until the early twentieth century, several decades after the abolition of slavery.Footnote 102 The same situation prevailed in other English colonies in Central and Latin America and, above all, in Asia. We can therefore distinguish two periods: the first, from the seventeenth century to the 1830s, concerned about 300,000 European indentured servants. It took place while slavery was still legal and the slave trade was operated by European traders. Indentured servants were intended for work in tobacco plantations and, to some extent, in manufacturing.
The second phase, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, concerned two million indentured servants, mostly Chinese and Indians but also Africans, Japanese, and immigrants from the Pacific islands. They were employed in sugar plantations and in manufacturing. Unlike the indentured servants in the first phase, these new bonded labourers seldom returned to the world of free labour once their period of commitment ended as their indenture contracts were usually renewed.Footnote 103
In this context, Mauritius is of particular interest for several reasons. After an initial period when the island belonged to the Dutch (1638–1710), it became a French colony, and then, starting in 1810, part of the British empire. The first engagés arrived in Ile de France (the French name for Mauritius) in the 1720s; they were artisans from India and other French colonies.Footnote 104 In the late eighteenth century, 40 per cent of free men of colour and just 15 per cent of the servile population in Mauritius were of Indian extraction.Footnote 105 The English administration that succeeded the French in 1815 consistently encouraged the arrival of indentured servants from Madagascar and India and, increasingly, of Swahilis from East Africa.Footnote 106 There were many intermediaries in India, Mozambique, Madagascar, and West Africa, ranging from local sultans to village chiefs as well as Indian, Arab, and Portuguese middlemen, in addition, of course, to the French and English landowners and traders.Footnote 107 The commitment terms were as varied as those we have identified in Reunion Island: in many cases, contracts were signed by force or fraud; at the same time, many Indians signed up quite voluntarily.Footnote 108
In Mauritius, between the official abolition of slavery in 1834 and 1910, 450,000 indentured servants arrived from India and from Madagascar. Two-thirds never returned home and, as a result, the Indian population grew constantly (from 35 per cent in 1846 to two-thirds of the population in 1871).Footnote 109 Numerous observers continually drew attention to the inhumane living conditions of these immigrants.Footnote 110 These figures must be expanded to include other indentured servants from South Asia and Africa: 30,000 in 1851, and twice that number ten years later. These two forms of immigration to Mauritius led to protests from English landowners and from sectors such as the railways in India and East Africa, who complained of unfair competition on the part of the Mauritians, aided by the French who contributed to this human trafficking both before and after 1848.Footnote 111 Female immigration to Mauritius remained secondary, at least initially, and had to be overseen by the state.Footnote 112 It did not develop rapidly until the middle of the nineteenth century, after the abolition of slavery, as a result of the arrival of new indentured servants who came with their families in response to considerable demands for domestic and some urban labour as well more traditional labour on sugar plantations.
Similar uncertainty surrounds the relationships between former slaves and new indentured servants. Some scholars think that the former were marginalized in Mauritian society,Footnote 113 while others, on the contrary, emphasize that their status changed to that of small landowners or shopkeepers and they were therefore much better integrated into Mauritian society than Indian ‘coolies’ after the abolition of slavery.Footnote 114
At the same time, even with equal legal status, differences emerged between former slaves and the new indentured servants. These two groups were sometimes of different ethnic origin: the former slaves were African and sometimes Indian; the engagés were usually Indians, but as time went by, African immigration also increased. Along with ethnic origin, how long an individual had been on the island was an important factor as it indicated whether or not they were a former slave. Newcomers often agreed to work for lower wages than former slaves, causing the latter to protest, playing into the hands of the landowners.Footnote 115
As in Reunion Island, the conditions that workers experienced depended not only on how long they had lived in Mauritius and their ethnic origin, but also on the estates on which they worked. Small plantation owners were more concerned about fugitive, insubordinate, and vagrant indentured servants.Footnote 116 Large plantation owners, on the other hand, who complained of the excessive cost of slave surveillance, often imposed a liberal ideology on the colonial systems; they found support for the indenture system in humanitarian and anti-slavery associations by emphasizing the benefits of free immigration (indenture) as opposed to slavery, as well as the threat of ‘famine’ in India and Africa.Footnote 117
Despite the efforts of the British abolitionists, who were on the lookout for any form of disguised slavery, the conditions of these immigrants remained quite harsh and the law, difficult to enforce. Indenture contracts were governed by the provisions of the Masters and Servants acts in the colonies,Footnote 118 strongly informed by practices in Great Britain. It was undoubtedly extremely challenging for workers to make use of the law: the local magistrates were corrupt and had close ties to the plantation owners. The terms for reimbursing travel expenses to Mauritius were often complex and only vaguely explained to workers when they entered into their contracts, thus leaving many of them indebted for life.Footnote 119 This drew protests from the anti-slavery movement in Great Britain, as well as from the Indian colonial authorities.Footnote 120 The Free Labour Association replied that the landowners had the right to recover travel expenses they had advanced and that the market price did not allow them to raise the wages of the engagés to the level of other wage earners.Footnote 121 All the same, the immigrants often complained of ill treatment, withheld wages, and poor food.Footnote 122 Estate inspectors, who were introduced specifically to oversee these relationships, confirmed the abuses;Footnote 123 however, the courts seldom ruled in favour of the immigrants, in spite of the creation of a body of magistrates appointed by London in the early 1840s. Planters generally succeeded in convincing magistrates that the indentured servants had invented ‘malicious’ complaints against them and should be punished for it.Footnote 124
The number of cases in which indentured servants brought proceedings against their masters, which rarely happened in the 1850s, rose sharply thereafter. Between the 1860s and 1870s, about 10 per cent of indentured servants sued their masters, in virtually every case for non-payment or insufficient payment of wages, and they won in more than 70 per cent of the cases.Footnote 125 However, this result, partly due to pressure from England, did not indicate that the ‘march to equality’ was under way. In subsequent years, the percentage of cases brought by ‘coolies’ declined first by 5 per cent overall (at the end of the 1870s) and later dropped to a mere 0.3 per cent between 1895 and 1899, with the success rate falling to less than 40 per cent.Footnote 126 This can be explained by that fact that, after the successes of the 1860s—and thanks to a new law on labour contracts adopted in 1867—contracts tended to take the form of oral agreements and it was therefore more difficult for the ‘coolies’ to produce proof of their grievances. Above all, contracts were no longer drawn up with the plantation owners but instead with Indian middlemen, which no doubt helped to stifle many of the conflicts.Footnote 127 The retention rate of workers increased, as both the result and source of this process, with the percentage of contract renewals rising from 40 per cent in 1861 to more than 70 per cent 20 years later.Footnote 128
The law was largely wielded to sue immigrants. Any unjustified absence was subject to criminal prosecution. In particular, the law against vagrancy took on particular importance in Mauritius; several restrictive laws were adopted between the abolition of slavery and the 1870s. Their adoption testifies to the same concerns that prompted legal rules limiting the mobility of workers and peasants in the rest of the British empire, and also, as we have seen, in the French empire: considerations of public order—monitoring movements, knowing the exact location of the immigrants, and the amount of their wages—converged with those involving competition among employers. Small landowners complained of runaway engagés, a problem that also stemmed from lack of cooperation on the part of large landowners. Between 1860 and 1870, about 70,000 complaints were filed each year by landowners and employers against Indian immigrants; in 80 per cent of the cases, they pertained to desertion or illegal absence.Footnote 129 If the other landowners refused to collaborate, these complaints often came to nothing, which is why many of them preferred to resort to employing newcomers.Footnote 130
To sum up, the status of bonded labourers, indentured servants, and others was modelled on the status of apprentices and servants in Great Britain. As this status was inferior to that of the masters’, indentured servants, apprentices, and domestic servants had equally limited legal rights. The gap separating servant and master was not as great as that between indentured servants and their masters, which continued to increase during the nineteenth century. In Mauritius, 14,000 indentured and domestic servants were prosecuted each year in the 1860s; during the same period in Great Britain, proceedings were brought against 9,700 servants per year for breach of contract and almost always resulted in convictions. In contrast, masters were seldom indicted and even more rarely convicted for breach of contract, ill treatment or non-payment of wages.
At the same time, even though the living conditions of indentured servants were not necessarily better than those of the slaves who preceded them, the rights they enjoyed and—above all—the fact that their status was not hereditary constituted essential differences that were to play an increasingly important role in the twentieth century.
Conclusion
Instead of a history made up of slaves, bonded people, and free wage earners, or analogously, an old regime and capitalism—with a triumphant passage from one to the other—our findings suggest something altogether different. The French Revolution did away with enforced lifelong domestic service, while during the nineteenth century, slavery was progressively abolished in British and then in French colonies. Still, this process was not matched by the rise of a free labour market involving legally equal actors.
In Britain, as in France, and in their colonies, workers and indentured immigrants were absolutely not disguised slaves (as much literature of the nineteenth century has argued),Footnote 131 but they had an inferior legal status and far fewer rights than their masters. All the same, the Industrial Revolution in Britain actually strengthened rather than reduced legal constraints on labour. In both Britain and France, this issue was linked to several factors. Over the long term—from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries—the demand for labour rose as a result of territorial and colonial expansion, along with the growth of agriculture and trade, proto-industrial and later industrial development, despite demographic growth and slavery, which increased the available labour force.
This dynamic was consequently accompanied by stronger legal constraints on the free movement of workers, ranging from criminal penalties in contracts to workers’ records books to widespread servitude. From this perspective, there is no reason to contrast guild-based France with liberal Britain. Yet, working people benefited from competition between masters/employers who, precisely because of the existence of rules limiting workers’ mobility, were ready to employ ‘fugitives’. The same competition was in play between colonial authorities who protected the rights of immigrants and local labourers against the practices of competitors, which were judged to be contrary to human rights, treaties, and so on. In short, ‘unfair’ competition helped to smooth out inequalities.
Differences between Britain and France concerned the timing and the scope of labour rights. In the early nineteenth century, Britain quickly granted freedom of association but preserved criminal punishment for breach of contract. France quickly eliminated criminal penalties in labour relations, while sanctions against working people were harsher in the countryside and in small industrial units than in large urban firms. The protection of urban workers was nonetheless counterbalanced by the prohibition of trade unions and associations until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In Britain, instead of an opposition between rural and urban, the logic of local markets and the technical specificities of industries (including harvest techniques) played a crucial role in defining and enforcing legal rules of labour.
The similarities and differences between Britain and France were reflected in labour and labour rules in their colonies. Colonies were territories not only of slavery, but also—and above all—of forms of bondage inspired by status inequalities entrenched in Europe. The forms of bondage in the colonies would have been inconceivable without the inequalities of status existing between ‘wage earners’ and their masters in Europe. Again, local conditions played an important role. In Reunion Island, indentured immigrants met with constant difficulties in availing themselves of the law. When they were successful, it was usually due to British and French political intervention and depended on unfair competition between employers. At the same time, the crisis in the sugar market, followed by successful competition from Mauritius, lack of capital, and competition from sugar beets in northern France finally swept away most of the small planters and small units. Former indentured immigrants partially benefited from this trend and gained access to marginal land. ‘Small whites’ and former indentured labourers shared their social inferiority and distrusted each other.
In Mauritius, former indentured immigrants enjoyed greater social mobility, more favourable economic trends, and political support among British and colonial elites. Paradoxically, the protection of labour arrived later in Britain than in France, yet the defence of the rights of immigrants improved in Mauritius sooner than in Reunion Island. The anti-bondage movement in the British colonies was much more closely connected to the pro-worker movement in Britain than its counterpart in the French colonies was to greater protection of workers' rights in France.
If labour and its rights in the colonies were an extreme form of those that existed in Europe, this commonality weakened from the last quarter of the nineteenth century onwards. Whereas labour (above all in large plants and union trades) in Europe and in the United States (at least of white labour) received increasing protection, the legal and real conditions in which indentured servants and immigrants in the colonies lived, remained difficult. In 1916, the indenture contract was repealed for Indian emigrants. However, at a broader level, the movement did not bear fruit until the interwar period with the creation of the International Labour Organization and the signing of labour agreements.Footnote 132 The welfare state, which brought about increasing protection of labour in certain industries in Europe (usually large industries), mostly ignored labour rights and conditions in small units, agriculture, and, above all, in the colonies. If there was a ‘great divergence’ between labour conditions in Europe and in its colonies, it is to be found in the twentieth century and the welfare state rather than in classical liberalism and colonialism.
