"An Odious Feudalism"

Abstract

Forced wage labor was a common feature of late nineteenth-century colonial systems. Under the impetus of Liberalism and the Free-Traders' search for markets, slavery and convict labor gave way to the use of coerced but paid workers. This coercion took varied forms: head and hut taxes pushed the black residents of English-dominated Africa into wage labor, state agents emptied whole villages to build the Congo Railroad, blackbirders ravaged the Solomons for the Lever Brothers, and debt servitude in various manifestations flourished over wide areas. Debt peonage was common in Latin America, but in most of the new republics it remained a semivoluntary condition, the result of need and deception or of individual efforts to secure a better, or at least more stable, life situation (Bazant, 1973, 1974; Bauer, 1979; Blanchard, 1979). In Mesoamerica, however, servitude for debts evolved into a much more rigorous and oppressive system, with the state taking a central role. Faced after mid-century with rising demands for labor to service the new coffee export industry, the Liberal government of Guatemala that came to power in 1871 began to intervene directly in the worker recruitment and control process not only to enforce private debt contracts but to force increasing numbers of the rural population into such labor debts. The chief instrument of this policy was a system of labor drafts called mandamientos (orders) modeled on colonial repartimientos. Although the standard history of agricultural work in Guatemala suggests that by the 1870s mandamientos were gone, or perhaps only going (Jones, 1940: 152), quite the reverse was true. The use of forced drafts for the export sector grew to

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 45 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.