Description
Book SynopsisAgricultural workers have long been underrepresented in labour history. This volume aims to change this by bringing together a collection of studies on the largest group of the global work force. The contributions cover the period from the early modern to the present – a period when the emergence and consolidation of capitalism has transformed rural areas all over the globe. Three questions have guided the approach and the structure of this volume. First, how and why have peasant families managed to survive under conditions of advancing commercialisation and industrialisation? Second, why have coercive labour relations been so persistent in the agricultural sector and third, what was the role of states in the recruitment of agricultural workers? Contributors are: Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Josef Ehmer, Katherine Jellison, Juan Carmona, James Simpson, Sophie Elpers, Debojyoti Das, Lozaan Khumbah, Karl Heinz Arenz, Leida Fernandez-Prieto, Rachel Kurian, Rafael Marquese, Bruno Gabriel Witzel de Souza, Rogério Naques Faleiros, Alessandro Stanziani, Alexander Keese, Dina Bolokan, and Janina Puder.
Table of ContentsList of Figures, Tables and Maps Notes on Contributors Introduction Rolf Bauer and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk section 1 The Agrarian Question and the Resilience of the Peasant Family Farms 1 Peasant Households under Pressure Women’s Work and the Cultivation System on Java, 1830–1870 Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk 2 Peasant Life Courses and Social Mobility in Serfdom The Baltic Provinces of the Russian Empire in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Josef Ehmer 3 Escape from New York Gender and the Rural Safety Valve, 1856–1884 Katherine Jellison 4 Landlords and Sharecroppers in Wine Producing Regions Beaujolais, Catalonia and Tuscany, 1800–1940 Juan Carmona and James Simpson 5 Co-producers of Architects The Role of Farm Women in the Reconstruction of Farmhouses in the Netherlands after the Second World War Sophie Elpers 6 Hoeing the Land and Shifting the Cultivator Labour, Land and Environment in the Eastern Himalayas Debojyoti Das 7 Agrarian Change in the Hills of Northeast India The Unlikely Story of Shifting Agriculture A. Lozaanba Khumbah section 2 Coerced Labour Relations in the Global Countryside 8 Cassava, Cacao and Catechesis Agriculture and Extractivism in the Jesuit Missions on the Amazon in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Karl Heinz Arenz 9 A Laboratory of Colonial Agricultural Modernity Environment, Sugar and Slavery in Cuba Leida Fernandez-Prieto 10 Dynamics of the Plantationocene Finance Capital and the Labour Regime on British Colonial Plantations in Nineteenth-Century South Asia Rachel Kurian 11 The Mistress of the Coffee Markets of the World Slavery in Brazil and the Kangany System in Ceylon, c. 1815–1878 Rafael Marquese 12 A Contract with Many Facets Sharecropping and Credit Interlinkages in Southwestern Brazilian Plantations, 1840–1940 Bruno Gabriel Witzel de Souza and Rogério Naques Faleiros section 3 State Intervention and Agricultural Labour Mobility 13 Vulnerability beyond Revolutions Rural Workers, Former Slaves and Indentured Migrants in the French Empire Alessandro Stanziani 14 Between Community Development Effort and Hidden Colonial Forced Labour The Long History of “Communal Labour” in Gold Coast/Ghana, 1927–2010 Alexander Keese 15 Agricultural Labour Regimes of Im_Mobilisation On the Legacies of Internal and External Colonisation within Europe Dina Bolokan 16 Cheap Labour, (Un)Organised Workers The Oppressive Exploitation of Labour Migrants in the Malaysian Palm Oil Industry Janina Puder Index
