I'm actually gonna read some of this I
don't usually read the papers that that
I'm supposed to read up but I finished
writing this at about 4:00 a.m. last
night and and I haven't actually read it
yet I think it makes sense but I wanted
to say something new having this whole
conference and it's in order to
regurgitate things so what I thought to
do it was to relate some of the themes
that I explored in my earlier work on
debt with some of the more recent
concerns I've had with the history of
labor and particularly wage labor I take
cover rather briefly in the new book on
bullshit jobs and specifically talk
about the commoditization of labor you
know we have this interesting situation
nowadays were waged and to a lesser
extent salaried labor remain the
predominant ways of organizing work them
almost everywhere in the world at this
point but historically if you look at
the sort of broad historical sweep well
such arrangements often existed in many
perhaps most times in places kind of
unusable even considered anomalous and
most and you know while there has been a
lot of very good research on the history
of such labor arrangements
it's actually really uncommon to see
anyone put the pieces together in a any
sort of broad synthetic way I mean you
often see books on different forms of
labor and in a certain region or labor
in the Indian Ocean labor and medieval
Northern Europe but it's surprising how
how rarely they make that many general
points so I thought I would start by
taking up some of the ideas about
commoditization of labor that kind of
came on me when I was pursuing the work
on debt and and thus I want to start
with talking about bride wealth and
bride price and that debate and what I
thought were one of
the more what I thought was one of the
cooler points that I kind of came up
with while I was researching that which
is an intervention in an anthropological
debate about the nature of pride welcome
dowry and about the sort of power of
debt to transform one into the other
transform what are essentially social
social currencies that are used when
social currency is turned into
commercial currencies so uh what are
social arrangements can turn it become
commoditized in ways that must turn them
into the opposite of what they had
previously been and but to go from there
and that's largely about drama
commoditization of women's labor through
much of history through marriage systems
to talking about wage labor itself so
there's three parts there's that going
the role of debt in sort of dislodging
labor from the social nexus is in which
it has been placed it seemed from
marriage systems but then seen from the
perspective of of wage labor itself
which has a very very interesting
history and in many times a place is
probably most seems to emerge above all
from within institutions of slavery and
then finally to look at a case where
wage labor actually didn't emerge from
within institutions of slavery in
Northern Europe and particularly England
and in that case to look at the role of
debt and redefining English agricultural
industrial and commercial workers not as
creditors but essentially as as debtors
to those they worked for now you start
at the beginning
um so part one is bride wealth dowry and
just played in bride price one of the
less remark arguments in debt although
as I say one of props one of its more
ambitious interventions an
anthropological theory I don't think
anybody noticed business largely in the
footnotes was a critique of Jack Goody's
famous argument of the opposition
between bride wealth and dowry I mean I
I would see it as much as an expansion
and slight modification
of goodies argument rather than a
concert in contradiction to it I'm
pretty sure goodie would see it as in
contradiction with it in fact when
people raised some more points he argued
against them so I seem to be on the
other side good goodies core argument I
think everyone has come to accept which
is about the distinction between bride
wealth and dowry and that actually the
whole anthropological debate on the
subject can actually be traced back to a
political question in the 1930s the
League of Nations was holding a series
of debates about whether the practice of
what was then called bride-price
should be banned as a form of slavery
you know is does pride price actually
mean people are selling women and as one
might imagine anthropologists work sort
of called in as expert witnesses
testified it evans-pritchard in
particular entered the argument make a
strong case that even in societies where
people actually say things like yes I am
buying a wife they don't really mean it
such statements are not to be taken
literally because even if payments only
move in one direction as they all as
they didn't necessarily you know there's
some places there's actually payments in
both directions the important thing is
that things are moving around but that
would would be the case off in Southeast
Asia in Africa it was often when things
move just one way from the wife takers
to the wife wife givers no even so he
argued there's no sense of payment and
and there were a number of criteria that
were listed as why this does not
resemble a payment this if you were to
buy say a cow one was on that both
parties continued to have mutual rights
and responsibilities and so did their
lineages and clans another was that if
anything was actually being purchased in
the case of bridewealth and this is a
period where they actually insisted that
we get rid of the word bride-price
entirely the substitute probably well if
anything was really being purchased the
argument was it was not the woman but
her fertility more specifically the
right of the wife take
there's lineage or clan to name any
children of the Union as there
patrilineal descendants so in that sense
woman no way resembled a slaves and
slaves are by definition entirely
detached from their natal love of social
relations whether if I capture a
purchase and of course they don't have
any rights but only responsibilities and
finally this is really the clinching
argument for a lot of people if you're
really buying a wife then you could sell
them right and in fact there's pretty
much no case in which someone who
obtains a wife by bridewealth can then
just sort of arbitrarily pass her on to
others for a similar payment now as a
result doesn't you know provide wealth
payments were not banned anthropologists
basically won the argument the
assumption was that bride wealth was not
buying wife through an exchange of gifts
meant to create social relations or to
transform them to establish a renew and
alliance between two different groups
now Goody's work on production and
reproduction probably wealth and dowry
kind of takes off from that and in
particular good ii was fascinated in
particular by the anomaly of ethiopia
the fact that you know when you talk
about african systems of kinship and
marriage ethiopia seems to be the one
place where almost all the rules that
make africa different than Eurasia don't
apply so no instead of bride Wall fell
and they do dowry and they have plow
agriculture instead of hoe agriculture
there's not any number of different ones
I could go into having to do a cuisine
and everything else but his big point
was that it all has to do with
technology and population density
actually interesting it's a purely
materialist argument at root which has
been widely accepted even amongst
anthropologists who generally don't go
for that kind of thing but he basically
says is that where you have hoe
agriculture others and plow agriculture
you have low population densities you
don't need heavy-duty technologies to
produce
crops and therefore it's less it's not
land but labor that's at a premium
bridewealth seems to correspond to those
societies and and bride walls it's not
the fact that one is transferring a
property in order you know to the wife
takers in order to gain a woman I mean
that is that does happen he says but
actually you know payments can move back
and forth in different directions for
different reasons it sets up a nexus but
it's mainly about the allocation of
Labor and it's the key thing for him is
that bride wealth is passed back and
forth by the generation above the couple
that's getting married so it's actually
the lineages or the descent groups clans
whatever they might be that they're part
of who are rearranging things together
because in such a situation where land
is real are easy to come by and where
women are doing most of the agricultural
work or you're either a lion's share of
it or all of that as as they are in many
African societies female labor is really
important and you know plans basically
have a range of options starting from
trying to keep their daughters around
but which is a matrilineal option in
fact in in such societies where you
don't have a bride bride wealth custom
you tend to have matrimony to ones where
there's various forms of bride service
and finally flat out bride wealth oh it
and polygyny where you're trying to
basically accumulate as many women as
possible for your own clan so
essentially these are arrangements made
between the elders of various descent
groups about the allocation of women's
ira cultural labor he argues now now is
completely different because you know
it's not just a reverse that dowry is
it's it's the woman's family that's
providing the wealth again sometimes
that's not even the case what's really
going on with dowry he says is that
power ease premature inheritance and
when you have a plough agriculture
that's usually be very high population
densities
land is at a premium and there's various
strategies to bring land together
thoughts of all Bridewell societies tend
to be exact I miss dowry societies tend
to be in dogmas we tend to marry within
the group you tend to try to form
marriage alliances which will keep
property together and women well the are
not nearly as important as the dominant
labor force and I recall agriculture
which means that in many ways they're
seen more as a mouth to feed he argues
then as you know the core of your
agricultural labor force so so as a
result daughters are typically had to be
provided of some kind of resources when
married off either land of their own or
something else that would take the
burden of supporting her away away from
the husband's family all right now there
are a lot of cases which are kind of
interior meaty area I actually was in a
society like that when I did my own
fieldwork in Madagascar for example they
had both bride wealth and dowry and in
fact it came from the same thing my
husband's parents would pay a sum of
money it's called the booty wound ray or
rump of a shape it actually was a sum of
money to the bride's family and then the
bride's parents would then immediately
use that money to buy furniture bedding
pots and pans and other necessities for
the new household which they would then
give to the bride oh goody this would
just be a form of indirect dowry the
point is that the money ends up in a
conjugal fund for the newly married
couple so anyway that's the broad broad
argument which you know isn't in our
audience of anthropologists I thought
I'd go over it and I can't assume that
people know the details now and where
the argument hits the shoals I think is
in its treatment of social class or
really it's non treatment of social
class Stanley tebya who co-wrote one of
the key original tax bride wealth and
dowry with goodie in 1973 very soon
began to raise objections to certain
aspects of this based on his own
detailed knowledge of the South Asian
that's nog Rafi where he pointed out
that there's a lot of urban societies in
Eurasia
or or rural societies which are part of
larger urban civilizations where you
have dowry at the top of the social
ladder and and something that looks a
lot like bride wealth on the bottom as
he points out the you know the sort of
magnificent seclusion of upper caste
women in India who haven't often had to
be provided of astronomical dowry is to
keep them you know kept in the style to
which they were accustomed was only made
possible by the industrious labor of
lower caste women who necessarily had to
have completely different marriage
arrangements and as a quote quote from
tamiya it should be appreciated as good
he failed to do in production and
reproduction that high caste male
freedom from menial labor and the
conspicuous removal of high caste
females from public view are only
possible because the system of rural
production is predicated on the
availability and exploitation of the low
caste agricultural labor both male and
female
moreover women of these lower orders
enjoy much greater freedom of movement
outside their homes bridewealth rather
than dowry payments are exactly done
their marriages the success accenting
the greater economic value of their
labor and divorce separation and
remarriage including remarriage of
widows is frequently open to them so in
some ways they are more free on most
other ways they are more oppressed um
good he actually rejected this argument
insisting that what seemed to be bride
wealth here wasn't really bribe although
actually indirect dowry it ultimately
ends up in the conjugal fund of the
family in question and there's a heated
debate about this but I think actually
tomba it doesn't really go far enough
because at times anyway within these
what he calls lower order circles
transactions really did come quite close
to simply buying and selling women and
sometimes it actually did you know there
was buying and selling wound because
slavery was practiced in fact these were
precisely the women who would otherwise
be most likely to become sex workers
debt peons or wage laborers so that that
is who are subject
being commoditized in other ways this
allowed members of the elite to denounce
the poor for buying and selling off
their daughters and justified
ever-greater sequestering of upper caste
women who of course had to be protected
from any possible association with such
lowly practices and what Tom bhaiyya is
sort of alluding to here otherwise I say
he doesn't take it as far as he might is
a pattern that can be observed in almost
all the great grades and civilizations
there's a kind of a double push and pull
of a commoditization on the bottom and
greater seclusion on the top the
greatest detailed evidence we have for
merged transactions from anywhere is
from Bronze Age Mesopotamia starting
them Sumer going on through old
babylonian material where in the
earliest tax there seems to been
something like the what i observed in
madagascar actually a gift by the
groom's family to the bride's which is
ostensibly bride wealth was actually
used to provide for a lavish wedding
feast and for silver jewelry which the
bride would then wear so basically she
would like show up at the wedding sort
of dressed in money and she would have
this as her fun to you know if he in
case of emergencies or if she wanted
investment capital for business ventures
she just used that as the example
implies in this early period women had a
great deal of economic and social
autonomy over time however this is one
of the remarkable things about the
middle-eastern texts as time goes on
that autonomy and freedom of women to
take part in public or even private life
is this continually declines that
freedom is steadily eroded wealthy women
were sequestered even veiled poorest
women really were actually simply bought
and sold now one thing that I argue in
the book is that in societies that don't
have commercial markets but merely
social currencies as I call them it's
really only physical violence war if you
viewed slave raids that can act as a
kind of wedge that dislodges women
sometimes also children from the webs of
data mutual responsibilities in which
they're typically embedded allowing
you know what levy Stroh's famously
called the exchange of women that turned
into something that actually did
resemble commodity exchange in societies
that do have commercial markets monetary
dat which of course is packed up
ultimately by the threat of force can
have the same effect and certainly that
appears to be what happened in the case
of Sumer and Mesopotamia more generally
where you know at first there would have
been no question of a man whose family
had paid the traditional summon grain
and silver to acquire a wife then being
able to transfer her to someone else you
know so you could say as they did in the
bride wealth argument he wasn't actually
a buying wife because he couldn't sell
her right um however all of that changed
the moment he took out a loan since in
the event of default you could lose your
wife um in fact the normal practice was
first they go for your fields and
vineyards if you have those they go for
your flocks after that you know it's it
you have children and ultimately one
spouse who were taken away a sureties
now that of course means assigning a
monetary value to human beings which
which in turn was made conceptually easy
easier by the existence of chattel
slavery there wasn't demographically
that important but I think was
conceptually very important at that time
so what I suggested in the book was that
this threat of alienating human beings
from their families and communities set
off a series of other changes which had
disastrous consequences for the freedom
of Mesopotamian women more generally
first of all using family members of
surety for loans gradually became a
precedent for other forms of
commoditization stall for instance
remarks that quoted in newsy the bride
price was paid in domestic animals and
silver-mounted into a total value of
forty shekels of silver there are some
evidence that it was equal to the price
of a slave girl so you're actually
paying the same thing in bride prices
you would if you're just buying someone
now this conference is not surprising
since in that same city we have evidence
of rich men paying cut right bride price
to impoverished families to acquire a
daughter
who they could then adopt so you pay the
same price to adopt a daughter who you
can then use pretty much as you like as
concubine nursemaid servant or simply
marry her to one of your slaves another
quote the poorer of the girl's parents
the more marriage resembles a real sale
marriage arrangements in a city like New
Zealand heed look like sales due to the
poverty of the girl's parents and giving
a dowry there was a luxury of the
wealthy so not only it is about is it
dowry em and bride price you know dowry
for the rich and bright buys for the
poor it's actually the bride price
enough right well I'm in other cities
adopted daughters adopted in quotes here
were employed in industrial pursuits or
set to work as prostitutes who provide
an income for their adopters and
retirement daughter's were sold or taken
as who were SATs older taken his debt
sureties Roth ins actually exploited
became temple prostitutes or commercial
sex workers and this in turn set off a
kind of puritanical reaction as men
began to judge one another's honor by
their ability to safeguard just the
sexual purity of their women folk and
protect them from being taken away like
this virginity is never actually
mentioned in the early Texan so it
becomes an issue steadily in the midst
of all of this bride wealth even among
wealthier families by the old babylonian
period came to be referred to as the
price of a virgin and this was
increasingly meant literally because
illegally illegal deflowering of a
virgin came to be considered a property
crime against her father you could pay
an equivalent fine for compensation
marriage came to be referred to as
taking possession of a woman the same
word one would use for the seizure of
goods so this tendency to commoditize
the bodies and services of poor women
led to the sequestering even of rich
women who largely lost the ability to
separate even from abusive husbands and
by the late bronze age would often not
go out unveiled I mean their ever lost
saying they had to go veiled they're
actually lost saying that poor women are
or prostitutes couldn't wear veils but
nonetheless there was a clear dynamic
whereby the commoditization of some
women led to increasing sequestering of
others and I think they're almost all
the great Eurasian civilizations
witnessed a similar dynamic but
roughly 2500 and 1500 Fit BC and 1500 AD
the class war between men was
essentially fought out over the bodies
of women and the daughters of both rich
and poor couldn't daughters of both rich
and poor continually lost ground as a
result to take just one well-documented
example Chinese legends recorded Huang
Shi and elsewhere how to pronounce that
report that coined money was first
invented by benevolent emperors to
redeem poor children who had been sold
or taken away his debt pledges by the
rich during times of famine so such
practices existed predatory lending
breakup of families was seen as a social
issue in the state was seen as taking an
interest in fighting it and in fact
while the landed classes provided their
daughters of dour ease bride-price here
to continue to be practiced by the poor
and it overlaps so strongly with slavery
that state bureaucrats who periodically
tried to ban both a long of debt peonage
could hardly be blamed for concluding
that all three were basically the same
thing one of the interesting things
about Chinese slavery and this was even
more true of Korean slavery in Korea in
certain periods they passed laws that
men could not be enslaved only women
could be enslaved in China they never
went quite that far but very often but
it was typical that slavery was seen as
something that happens to women and not
to men now it's interesting if you look
across Eurasia and make the point that
and I called the sort of long Axial Age
chattel slavery was extremely common
drove over the course of the Middle Ages
it's largely eliminated at least as a
factor in production and it's
transformed you could say him to serfdom
in the Christian West restricted largely
the household slavery in the Middle East
or military slavery debt peonage and
other forms of caste domination in South
Asia and in China it's largely
restricted to women this is partly due
to the peculiar nature of the Chinese
patrilineal system whereby men were
actually members
of a lineage and have ultimately
belonged to their ancestors and women
belong to the men as James Watson put it
where to the household which was
dominated by the men it was therefore
considered increasingly unacceptable to
sell sons as slaves even in case of
extreme debt or poverty but perfectly
acceptable to sell daughters or even
some places wives on the event of the
death of their husbands so you could
sell the son to be adopted but you had
to make sure they ended up in a
relatively advantageous situation but
there are actually markets in in
daughters and many times in places which
the daughters could be bought
pretty much for whatever you want the
daughter's slave concubine wife or a
prostitute depending on the buyers whim
it was not impossible says James Watson
for a girl to be purchased as a daughter
in infancy exploited like a slave during
adolescence and married off to one of
her buyers own sons in adulthood as I
say there was constant attempts by the
government to suppress this kind of
thing as indeed there still yes because
you know there's periodic scandals about
the sort of things still break out about
the sale of sale of girls often they
were quite young and they seemed to
especially correspond to those periods
which where commercial life was most
could be said to be most flourishing
particularly the song and Ming dynasties
and which were also the periods where
where women's status and women's freedom
generally as seen as declining something
like that that dynamic along one him
commoditization of the poor in this very
literal sense of poor women and and
seclusion in reaction to that of richer
ones seems to be happening almost
everywhere and commercial DAP
you know plays a key role in affecting
that I mean most of these people were
ultimately sold because of the need to
pay dance now so thus wall for the land
and classes marriage became
unsurprisingly largely but largely about
control of land for the labouring
classes are made largely about the
control of labour and women's labor in
particular
commercial debt played a key role in
affecting the transition between older
marriage arrangements which largely had
to do of renegotiating relations between
social groups and the incipient
commoditization of labor now considering
the way the debate began of this League
of Nations our debate about whether
bride wealth should be considered a form
of slavery and made illegal and European
colonial dependencies perhaps not
entirely surprising that anthropologists
have tended to be a little bit squeamish
about following such matters through to
their logical conclusions as evidence by
Goody's largely holding back from
dealing with marriage arrangements among
the Eurasian poor at all he has this
huge fat book and there's almost nothing
about you know lower caste people in
India poor people in Mesopotamia it's
almost all elite examples it's largely
being marxist and feminist
anthropologists been willing to explore
such territory systematically and in
fact one could very easily make the case
that one reason kinship has sort of
disappeared as the primary sub-object of
anthropology and I've always felt that
this is a bit of a scandal you know it
used to be thirty forty years ago if
there's like this special thing that
anthropologists have it's kinship you
know yeah we can do these diagrams that
no one else can understand it's sort of
our equivalent of equations for
economists um you know it's our thing or
special knowledge it's like anthropology
threw that away you know he talked to
him the average person trained in
anthropology nowadays with a PhD they
probably never had a kinship course he's
talked about matrilateral prescriptive
marriage customs they just don't know
what you're talking about um so how did
that happen and and I think that the
answer to that is that you know starting
in the 70s and 80s
no feminists made a very strong case
that you can't talk about this stuff
anymore except you know without taking
into consideration power and domination
sexism pulser ii heterosexuality
you know the whole series of issues that
hadn't really been discussed that these
are really power systems and systems of
exploitation so so the result was that
most male anthropologists just said okay
we won't talk about them at all anymore
you girls can go talk about them and as
a result it's sort of faded away rather
embarrassingly in my opinion all right
so that's one um
so debt is sort of the wedge which
allows social relations to be turned
essentially commoditized in particularly
women's labor now I also want to talk
about the deep genealogy of wage labor
that's part two in this essay I want to
pursue the relation of debt and
commoditization of labor by looking at
the history of the wage relation itself
considering the dominance of the wage
system today it's actually remarkably
under-researched I mean there's a lot of
studies of slavery and we'll just
compare how many studies of slavery
there are to how many studies of wage
labor in antiquity or the Middle Ages
you realize okay it's true slavery was
actually a more important institution
but it's just like you know 50 to 1 you
know there's enormous amounts of one and
and surprisingly little unli on the
other I can't think of a single
book-length study tell me nobody told me
if I'm wrong about forms of wage
contract in the ancient or medieval
worlds and insofar as information about
which contracts is to be found it's
largely inside the literature that's
about slavery and that's of course
significant in itself since for most of
history the two institutions were in
fact closely related this is well
documented in ancient Greece although I
think often people draw the wrong
conclusions
essentially Jonathan Friedman came to
the famous conclusion that ancient Greek
slavery was really a form of capitalism
whereas I would rather make the argument
that capitalism is really a
transformation of slavery but it is
certainly certain that slaves and wage
laborers were essentially overlapping
categories in in most of ancient Greek
history
Freeborn Athenian Corinthian for that
matter of the 4th or 5th centuries BC
didn't consider you know being paid to
work for a government as in any way
shameful right that's because if it's
one's own government one is essentially
working for oneself if one's doing jury
duty or building a monument
Athens wasn't considered an abstraction
Athens it was a via Theni incent if I am
an Athenian I'm working for the
Athenians I'm working for myself even
hiring oneself as a mercenary Oh foreign
potentate was sort of an honorable thing
to do
however hiring went solve out to a
private citizen in the same community
was totally different and people really
avoided that is you know it essentially
marks you as a slave as a result almost
all early wage labor contracts that we
were aware of appear to have in fact
been contracts for slave rental um these
arrangements could as Friedman pointed
out be quite sophisticated involving the
allocation of money wages split between
slave and owner to workers maintains and
workshops producing for the market in
many ways they did approximate what
we're used to thinking of as capitalist
arrangements but they were an extension
of the institution of slavery itself now
some of the world systems theorists have
generalized from this some chase done
and halt in their book rise and demise
argue that capitalism and like most
world systems analysts are defining
capitalism in broad le in terms as
basically use the use of money to make
more money capitalism they say tends to
develop within what they call autonomous
capitalist city-states on the semi
peripheries of world systems the
examples they give her Dillman byblos
tire seat on carthage melaka venice
florence genoa antwerp and the cities of
the Hanseatic League even that point is
actually an extension of something that
a point bro Dell had made that if
capitalism can only emerge of merchants
and financiers are able to allow
themselves with governments then small
mercantile states is where that's most
likely to happen what's interesting for
my own purposes is that these are also
the kind of places where it's a story
when us historically most likely to
encounter the densest concentrations of
chattel slaves even in periods where
child slavery had largely been
eliminated elsewhere such as the Middle
Ages
and and also particularly as a factor of
production so it's those areas where you
find sort of nascent capitalists or a
lying we're taking over governments it
does place where you see the most
chattel slaves but it's also where you
see something that resembles wage labour
emerging from within the institution of
slavery in much the way as you saw
happen in ancient Greece I think the
story ins a largely missed this because
now if you look at the exceptions to
this they're mostly in in in northern
Europe European mercantile city-states
were somewhat anomalous in this regard
southern Europe actually still fits the
pattern fairly well Italian city-states
like Venice Genoa Florence Pisa were not
only centres of Commerce and finance as
we know they were precisely the part of
medieval Europe where slavery classic
chattel slavery held on the longest it's
true it was contested in the 12th
century for example the slaves that had
been employed making cloth by
monasteries in louvers in Venice were
largely replaced by guild labor actually
this is across Italy after that Italian
slaves were rarely employed for
producing for the market but that's
largely because that was around the time
that the use of servile labor for
producing for the market shifted away
from Italy itself to what were
essentially colonial possessions
particularly sugar plantations and
Cretan cyprus in what many believe
provided the model that was later proved
exported first of the canary islands and
then to the Caribbean I think all of
this happened because in Europe much
unlike the rest of the mercantile
mercantile city-states
elsewhere in the world at that time
almost all of which were part of the
larger Islamic a Cuban if you want to
call it that where Islam and Islamic law
was a sort of medium of trade or arbiter
of trade and and enforce a strict
division between war and commerce in
Europe
war and commerce was kind of mixed
together in a way that um really didn't
happen elsewhere talk about this a bit
and the debt book which is why there's
our exploitation of servile Abril for
market purposes by I they're funded by
directly by mercantile city-states
tended to happen as part of like
military and colonial ventures whereas
such things um in other places happen if
in the city-states themselves if you go
back to the trading role of the Indian
Ocean during the same period you know
one finds remark with remarkable
consistency labor arrangements similar
to those of the ancient world where it's
actually almost entirely slaves who are
doing wage labor insofar as we observe
wage labor contracts they are actually
slave rental um either because the
owners would rent their slaves out
directly or because slaves um would
achieved a certain amount of autonomy
would be allowed to find work on their
own and then be expected to turn over a
share of the proceeds to their owners
and again going back to my own fieldwork
in Madagascar which has sort of marginal
part of that larger Indian Ocean trading
world um well the port cities were part
of it and I was in the highlands we just
sort of plugged into that that was
actually the principal way of organizing
labor in the 19th century um it began in
port cities like kama Tov and expanded
to the highlands and you know by the
19th century even Quaker missionaries
active in the abolition movement had to
like protest abolitionists at home that
who complained that they were all
basically having all their work done by
slaves or being carried around by slaves
on palanquin and whatnot they you know
say look you know we would employ free
labor but it's impossible because you
know nobody who isn't a slave is willing
to work for wages you know we pay these
guys and in the 19th century the
transport industry throughout Madagascar
was entirely dominated by slave porters
who formed effective unions and those
porters in theory had turnover
percentage of their wages to the owners
but in practice they often didn't this
is one contemporary missionary source
they found slaves enjoy considerable
freedom of action while theoretically
without rights practically they enjoy a
good man
as there are no made roads and no
wheeled vehicles in Madagascar travelers
are carried in palanquins
and baggage is conveyed by men slaves
are permitted by their masters to hired
themselves out of servants and laborers
to carry baggage and messages to and
further from the coast to go on long
journeys of travelers back to do
anything for which they can obtain wages
sometimes the master receives a portion
of the wages earned sometimes he
receives nothing at all but in that case
the slave is frequently to hire someone
else to take his place and fulfill his
share of the personal service when
required so you here you have slaves not
only hiring themselves but hiring other
slaves so only slaves look for wages to
work for their own master and this you
know provides a fascinating glimpse for
one way that slave labor labor could
become commoditized another thing would
shock always fascinated me about
Malagasy system I've never had a chance
to write about this but it will someday
is is that they had partible inheritance
system and in madagascar which meant
that slaves quickly came to be divided
up so you know if you have eight
children each one gets one-eighth share
of the slaves so it's not at all
uncommon to see contracts for the sale
of one sixteenth of a slave or a slave
to owns like three quarters of himself
like slowly buying himself back from his
various owners what this actually meant
in terms of labor arrangements is really
unclear from the sources there is
occasional references to division of
days that slaves would have to like sort
of wander around from one place to
another if their various owners lived in
different places but you know it's easy
to see how under such conditions and
slaves were tender in anyway you know
systems of substitutions like that could
become commonplace and and and slavery
was already broken in two units and
commoditized in various ways which may
lent itself to further doing so through
through the payment of wages um anyway
Malagasy slaves in the late 19th century
achieved an unusual level of autonomy
but similar arrangements usually more
strictly enforced could be observed in a
lot of other places as sue Healy
city-states
are a good example most of our sources
are pretty late 19th century early 20th
but they're very consistent here the
main employers appear to have been HOD
Romi's small-scale entrepreneurs
originally from Yemen
notorious for purchasing slaves so as to
hire them out as either craftsmen or
dock workers then collecting a share of
the wages so it's the same deal and
precisely the same pattern appears in
most of the major cosmopolitan port
cities of Southeast Asia where early
European sources almost always describe
the bulk of the population as slaves
this as we'll see might be exaggerated
because most of them most of the
population of these port cities seem to
have been made up of people in the
slightly more ambiguous condition of
debt bondsman or personal dependents of
large magnates and rather than say war
captives and it's often they made a
distinction they were all sort of
collapsed as slaves for but the real
slaves are the ones who were armed
captured in war who had fewer rights and
lower status nonetheless legal documents
make clear that wage labor contracts
were basically consisted of agreement to
rent one servile dependence or four
servile dependents to rent themselves in
this is Anthony Reid in none of these
trading cities in the 16th and 17th
centuries can we identify a class of
independent urban artisans or laborers
free to work for wages or not to work if
we compare wage rates given in European
sources of the cost of the day's rice we
find a very high labour cost so people
were paid a lot but this is not a free
market wage paid to the worker but the
cost of hiring bondsman from a master
this is a quote that read quotes it was
their custom to rent slaves they pay the
slave a sum of money which he gives to
his master and then they use that slave
that day for whatever work they wish the
loss of Malacca similarly give many
examples of the legal implication of
hiring or borrowing slaves but none of
any other type of labor contract some
same thing in colonial Java there were
actually free wage laborers in colonial
Java appears around Batavia in the early
colonial period but it's almost
exclusively confined to this sort of
semi criminal master list men from the
countryside who are available for
seasonal agricultural labor during the
colonial period people who were
otherwise abused by the
authorities as derelicts and thugs the
bulk of wage labor however continue to
be formed by slaves there as well so it
finally it hardly seems coincidental
that plantation slavery which in
historical terms is one of the rarest
forms of the institution tends to appear
precisely in the same context where one
has mercantile city-states and the
emergence of wage labor from William
slavery outside of the ink from the
ancient world one might point here to
the slave plantations encouraged by the
Oman ease in 19th century East Africa
the pepper plantations in sumatra
managed by merchants from Aceh Malacca
still was only really unlucky on free
laborers who ended up working on
plantations and here's where debt comes
in this is very interesting in Southeast
Asia at least and I suspect that is true
in a lot of places most wage labourers
actually got themselves into that
situation sometimes intentionally by
manipulating debt since debt peons both
maintain many of the rights of free
people but were formally dependent on
some local notable who were typically
see and and we're typically seen as far
higher status than the sort of criminals
and vagabonds were available for casual
hire if indeed anyone was the logic
seems to have been this since working
under another's orders particularly on
an ongoing basis is by definition a
relation of dependency and non freedom
only those informally dependent state
could really do it as a result it was
not at all uncommon for someone
attracted you know to work in a bustling
port city like Malacca Racha makasar to
take out a loan so as to render
themselves dependent on some local
grandi who would then hire him out and
collect a share of the proceeds so if
you want it like come to town and kind
of sort of get get a piece of the action
you intentionally take out a loan to
make yourself into a debt peon and then
the guy who let alone will becomes your
agent um in fact he might even take the
money that he got on the loan and higher
debt peons of his own or servants or by
people who are already slaves according
to the Cambridge world history of
slavery debt
was by far the most common form of
slavery slaves are both hired and traded
on open markets and slaves themselves
could participate in such markets by
purchasing slaves to themselves thereby
lessening their own labour obligations
much like the Malagasy people are hiring
slaves to fill in for themselves of
course debt bondsman could also be sold
off by their masters but there was a
social obligation not to sell that bonds
people outside their own natal society
so as you might imagine these things
could become really complicated very
quickly with the same individuals acting
as both creditors and debtors masters
and slaves employers and employees often
in the same transactions and at the same
time much like the Malagasy slaves but
debt was absolutely critical in in sort
of effecting the transformation from one
status to another I think that the root
of all these complicated machinations
however there's a really simple paradox
and I think the fundamental
contradiction in is the very idea of a
free contract in which two parties agree
not to be in a relation of equality
anymore because you know any contractual
arrangement assumes two parties at least
some kind of formal or legal equality
exists for them to enter into a
contractual agreement to begin with but
it how do you frame it if what they're
agreeing to is not to be an operation of
formal equality anymore and at least of
all the terms of the contract apply in
that way in purely formal terms debt
contracts and wage labor contracts are
actually very similar because they're
both you know agreements between two
ostensibly equal part part
parties to enter into relation of
extreme inequality for a specific period
of time under certain specific
conditions and I think it's this
similarity which allowed that to be the
conceptual wedge through which Labe wage
labor became socially morally and
politically possible after all in most
societies the idea of temporary
voluntary reduction to his status that
was only otherwise familiar in relations
of either patriarchal Authority within
the household or outright chattel
slavery
um an institution which was always at
least on principle conceived to be
founded on right of conquest would have
been either morally outrageous or simply
inconceivable one does not normally
think to rent oneself out as either a
daughter or a slave it was the absolute
quality of the moral power of dad and
this is the thing that always fascinated
me when I was writing the book is how
the morality of debt seems to have this
astounding capacity to to trump any
other type of morality so that people
will accept things that they would have
never accept under any other
circumstances if it's what's necessary
to pay ones debts made it that's what
made it so well suited to transform
labor itself into a tradable economy
either through the manipulation of
marriage payments in the case of women's
labor or the case of wage contracts
which were mostly if not exclusively
undertake but although not exclusively
undertaken by men okay so now part three
wage labor it's in in northern Europe or
free labor as we like to call it the
notion of free wage labor creates of
anything an even greater conceptual
challenge because in a purely technical
sense in fact the usual credit
creditor-debtor relation is actually
reversed right and we don't really think
about it this way but like who owes who
unless you have a company store and you
intentionally in debt your workers which
was often done but in the classic
scenario where you sign on you got a
good job you do the work you got paid at
the end of the week well you know most
of the time you're doing the work you're
actually the creditor and the boss is
the debtor if he owes you money for your
what you've already done the work and
he's owing you money so you know if
anybody's the debtor it's the boss right
but in fact you know during during that
time you're actually subordinated to the
will of your debtor now this creates a
rather confusing situation which is one
reason we don't even like to think about
it that way
well what I like to argue is there was a
certain amount of conceptual work had to
be done in order for a for it not to
occur to us that actually the boss is
the debtor who owes something to do the
worker and so I want to end by talking a
little bit
that and how that happened and the very
interesting history of of what wage
labor actually is in social legal and
political terms how it was that in
Northern Europe one area which didn't
have chattel slavery in the late Middle
Ages are very little and debt peonage
was actually fairly limited was also the
place where free labor came to be seen
as alienable and the bubble was
considered normal for free men and women
to place themselves completely under
another person's authority and under
their orders in contemporary law that
principle of subordination is sometimes
referred to as the principle of control
or the phrase you see a lot is the the
open-ended duty of obedience that a
hired labor arose to their employer and
it still provides a profound conceptual
challenge for these very reasons
according to the sage handbook of
industrial relations for example the
term contract of employment or in fact
France contracted to revive only entered
general usage in the 1880s relate the
main impetus for its adoption was an
argument by employers in larger
enterprises that the general duty of
obedience should be read into all
industrial hirings and the core of the
concept was a notion of subordination in
which the open-ended duty of obedience
was traded off in return for the
acceptance and absorption by the
enterprise of a range of social risks so
this open-ended duty of obedience
implied that a hired worker was obliged
to do whatever he was told to do by his
or her employer insofar as those orders
didn't involve either violating some
other existing law or some specific
provisions of their contract and in
exchange the enterprise accepted
responsibility for consequences of
decisions that the worker could no
longer make for example if he got
injured in fact even this formulation
was not really accepted in the
Anglophone world that this was a free
contract until much later and such
really surprising um in in the United
Kingdom employment disputes at least for
industrial and manual
we're not generally treated under
contract law until the rise of union
power in the welfare state in the 1940s
before that they were largely treated
under common law traditions governing
relations would need masters and
servants which traced back to the Middle
Ages in the u.s. actually that's still
the case you're still dealing with a
common-law tradition that goes it's
still masters and serving law basically
that governs labor relations so in fact
the principle of open-ended obedience as
legal historians like Simon Deakin
emphasized itself can be traced back to
the obedience that medieval servants
owed to their masters which were again
tempered only by force of custom social
expectations of reasonable treatment and
any particular arrangements among the
parties that to a service contract that
might have been made however in the
Middle Ages and well into the early
modern period the responsibilities
involved in such arrangements were
assumed to be a lot more mutual most
notably service contracts tended to be
yearly and during the year masters were
expected not only to provide agreed on
wages bed and board for workers but to
do so whether or not they actually found
any work for the guy to do this is very
important so you know if you're a master
craftsman you brag you get three
apprentices and you know there's a bad
market nobody wants to buy your gloves
on you you know maybe you're just
sitting around but you still have to pay
the people you also had to take care of
them if they were sick or injured became
pregnant whatever might happen the
importance of this medieval concept of
service actually in the eventual
emergence of capitalist labor regimes
I think cannot be underestimated
something I've been banging on about for
years in various ways but I think it
really should be underlined here um you
know even though it's a it's weirdly
neglected by a lot of economic
historians not all but if you look at
all the sort of various Marxist
transition debate straw guess starting
with Swezey job I guess was the first
one and you know leading up at least the
Brenner debate which is all about
whether capitalism starts as a top-down
or
bottom up phenomena you know is it do
you have to look at Commerce and Finance
and transformations are in which
gradually affected on the ground
relations or did it happen from the
bottom up was it a transformation of
rural collapse relations from below
you'd think that like in in that
argument you'd serve endless discussions
of what the from below work arrangements
actually were right no there's almost
not you have these like statistical
discussions and and the constantly
throwing around the word wages wage
rates but it's assumed that like what
the word wage means is self-evident
which is very clearly not the case at
the same time detailed studies that have
been made of you know what wages could
have meant and the late Middle Ages an
early modern period so that it actually
could mean a lot of different things the
often cited statistic that about a third
of the population of late medieval
England was dependent on wages for at
least a large share of their livelihood
and this appears to have been true but
what wages meant in that contact could
be a lot of different things and if you
look at you know the details of the
arrangements often people would be hired
to do a specific job and they would
bring their their apprentices or their
servants or their kids along with them
they would actually have their own
hirelings so you know it looks a lot
more in many of these cases like
something you know the modern equivalent
would be hiring a plumber or something
like that you know he's not exactly a
wage laborer who's under your direction
they're people with their own skills
mysteries as they were called at the
time which you didn't know how that what
they were or even if you didn't know
what they were they were formed their
own teams and negotiated with you and
we're essentially independent
contractors we would now call them more
than anything else the ones who weren't
were servants or hired for certain
periods of time typically a year but
there are also day laborers that's
important but day laborers tended to
avoid ongoing contracts and move around
from job to job preferring short term
engagements but they were famous for
being
hardcore negotiators in terms of terms
of conditions and employment and often
to their great advantage in the distress
of moralists we're constantly
complaining that these guys were
overpaid especially disturbing
tomorrow's because they to some degree
overlapped with the mercury population
of debt I said described as beggars
harlots cat purses hawkers peddlers
fortune tellers minstrels and other such
masterless men and women of ill repute
sort of like the ones in Java who did
the day labor sort of merged with the
criminal classes and as a result they
could extract quite a bit so you have
that you have the sort of independent
contractors men you have actual service
contracts service contracts were
typically young people not always um you
know manorial the states would have your
league servants or adults but all over
Northern Europe at least since the
Middle Ages what's been called the North
European marriage patent pattern was
characterized by what's been called life
cycle service and the majority of
population male and female not just
crafts people but peasants even Nobles
were expected to spend most of their
adolescence laboring as a servant and
another family's household typically in
a household just slightly wealthier than
their own as an coos Maul writes about
servants and husbandry master and
servant customarily sealed their
agreement with the offering and taking
of a token payment the earnest hiring
penny fastening penny or God's penny
always like that phrase cons penny the
contract implicitly bound the servant to
serve the master for a year and to obey
his reasonable commands and it bound the
master to maintain the servant for the
year and to pay the wages agreed upon
whether or not there was daily work for
the servant and whether or not the
servant remained fit to work
masters Authority was tempered by custom
word reasonable appears a lot in these
things servants are expected to obey
reasonable orders in exchange for a
reasonable wages so sort of communal
standards was held to settle to these
matters in much the way that sort of Jim
Scott's idea of a moral economy you know
there was ongoing communal feeling about
what's a reasonable about
to have a reasonable lifestyle during
this time of course servants were
literally considered members of the
Masters family since family was
conceived not as a kinship unit so much
as a household unit of authority under
the aegis of a single head of household
they're also of course learning their
future trades and how to comport
themselves as proper adults and finally
trying to accumulate enough of a nest
egg so they could eventually marry and
create their own farm shop or household
as a result did the bulk for the bulk of
the medieval English population this is
I think critical and it really hasn't
been thought about enough wage labour
under the supervision of an employer was
something one does for the first ten or
fifteen years of one's working life and
has little to do the way adults were
expected to treat one another remember
most of these other wage laborers are
not really being supervised um
I think one must be careful because the
concept of service was used in a lot of
different ways you think about it's a
very conceptually richer term it can and
and it was already a very conceptually
rich term of a lot of different meetings
already by the 12th and 13th centuries
I've spent a lot of time poring over the
OED and looking at different you know
ways the word serve service servant were
used basically all hierarchical
arrangements were imagined as forms of
service starting with divine service of
course directed at God but continuing
through feudal service which is the
basic framework of the political order
vassals owed various carefully specified
services typically the provision of a
certain number of service knights but
also non military sergeants in exchange
for tenure peasants of poor so the
variety of services to their own Lords
but the interesting thing about all
those forms of service is the exact
nature of feudal and memorial services
tended to be really really carefully
specif specified they weren't really
open-ended they're often like you know
exactly custom set them down to the
exact detail in other words feudal
arrangements tended to be the very
opposite of this kind of open-ended duty
of obedience character characteristic of
lifestyle servants and later of
employees and commercial or industrial
enterprises but the
fact that even highborn families were
expected to send their teenage sons and
daughters to serve at court so that even
the powerful all had some experience of
domestic servants must have ensured that
that's what remained the paradigm for
all other forms of service the word was
used really broadly but the sort of the
sort of conceptual center of it was
domestic servants and this is why you
know common usage at the time again a
calling on the OED includes if you look
at the verb to serve and medieval
examples to be a servant to perform the
duties of a servant to attend upon to
render habitual obedience to to become
the extension of another's will or
purposes but also to wait upon a person
at table hence to set food before or to
help a person to food there's a million
different variations of serving as in
giving food to the latter of which is
already by at least 1362 extended to to
attend to the request of a customer in a
shop so to serve a customer actually
comes before say serving one's country
becoming a public service serving and
the Armed Forces which is all rather it
comes later the absolutist state so the
paradigm attak active services serving
food and and you know you look at the
history of the word waiter is actually
really telling there it's one common
term for a domestic servant but among
particularly among the elite serve
circles you have ladies and waiting
gentlemen waiters not only waited at
their Lord or lady's table but really
waiting for their inheritance so they
didn't have to do it anymore
to acquire the means to marry and become
the master or a mistress of their own
household and get servants of their own
so I think what's important here is that
it brings together three key features
that I think are intrinsic to the notion
of service as it existed at the time
which is still kind of lingering in the
background of the term used now when we
use the terms like goods and services
right first of all that it involved an
open-ended duty of obedience second that
it was educational in the least in the
sense of being formative of character
and third that it was conceived in terms
of what we would now call carry
labor right the servant well attended to
the physical needs visitor master of
mistress of fed him or her who in turn
was expected to care for the servant as
required as they would any other member
of their family so the transition from a
system like that to one marked by
permanent wage labor has began to happen
with the breakdown of the guild system
in the 16th and 17th centuries meant
that a very large number of servants
particularly apprentices in journeyman
suddenly found themselves in a position
where they could never become masters
and thus found themselves trapped in
permanent social adolescence this had a
number of really profound social effects
some some of which I've written about
elsewhere for example I point out there
it's I'm almost certainly no coincidence
I think that it's exactly the period
where employment could no longer be
conceived as a process of character
formation education leading to one's
eventual full moral person that one gets
a household of one's own this is exactly
the time when the employing classes know
who have essentially shot the
proletariat out of such social adulthood
suddenly develop an intense interest in
the moral reformation of the poor so
they're basically trying to do the same
thing through other means I mean you
look at medieval texts middle-class
people really couldn't care less about
the world you know behavior of the poor
but suddenly it becomes an obsession
right right around the period with us
old service system breaks down legal
historians I have gradually been able to
reconstruct how the terms and conditions
were transformed in the centuries
leading up to the Industrial Revolution
government played a key role here and
it's actually and now very much
analogous to what happened with debt in
the depth book I observed and I was
basically following the research here of
craig mull drew in most english
communities in the late Middle Ages cash
was very rarely deployed in everyday
transactions villagers in towns look
alike preferred to rely on complex
credit systems which meant that it's
sort of considered normal for everybody
to be at least a little bit in debt to
everybody else that was sort of seen as
the lifeblood of sociability and an ass
there's a material or material no aspect
of community itself
or of communal love and at the same time
starting in Lisa Elizabethan times more
and more members of the emerging middle
classes began to turn to the courts to
enforce stats and people used to lodge
the debts in the courts but they
wouldn't actually go to the courts to
enforce them one reason for that was
simply because the law was really harsh
in fact I truly persistent creditor
could have debtors imprisoned or even
executed and starting in the late 16th
and early 17th century a lot of people
started doing that which had those crazy
paradoxical effect of something that had
been considered the very substance of
sociality itself we suddenly have
actively criminalized now around that
same time local courts also became
really interested in regulating labor
which there had been some interest in fo
the government in the wake of the Black
Death but it only and you don't really
starts kicking in then with a statute of
artifice resistance but as deacon points
up for example the initial impulse to do
so had to do with the peculiar nature of
English welfare system at the time the
settlement act centrally insisted that
elderly incapacitated Labor's anyone in
need of relief had to go to their own
parish um
they couldn't you know demand relief in
someone else's parish exceptions were
granted only for those who could
demonstrate they dunder take in yearly
contracts as servants in the parish in
which they currently resided now
obviously that meant that it was up to
the courts to decide who had a real
contract and who didn't which is
interesting because previous to that is
as Cosmo and others have pointed out and
Cooper or the whole domain of service
which was you know basically the entire
adolescent population we're essentially
off the books in terms of as far as the
government was concerned they had almost
nothing to do with there was some
occasional interference in in
apprentices contracts and things like
that but basically they don't even know
who these people were suddenly you know
we
welfare legislation being what it was
government local courts and magistrates
had to decide who was really employed
the conditions of employment were put
under the microscope in effect and this
was happening at the same time as the
famous enclosure movements and all this
sort of endless Marxist scholars have
documented Cottagers are being driven
from their natal natal villages the
existing fluting summons I mean criminal
population casual laborers sort of
swollen by those guys were seeing
suppressed by ever harsher vagrancy laws
which are essentially trying to force as
many people as possible into these
one-year household servant contracts at
the same time since welfare
responsibilities were being shifted to
the parish the service relation came to
be defined in much more one-sided
fashion as being defined around the
Masters unconditional Authority and
here's a quote in this way the
settlement laws helped to initiate the
open-ended duty of obedience which later
came to characterize the contract of
service although a servant could not be
made to work quote unreasonable hours of
the night and he is punished if he
profanes of Sabbath day it was with it
was determined that a rate of control
and authority at least so far as it
relates to the general discipline and
government of the servant must reside in
the master at all times during the
continuance of the service is one of the
criterias per who actually was a servant
and actually lived where so this was the
primary criterion for judging whether a
relationship of employment existed it
meant that this that element of
unconditional obedience you know became
both extremely important and enforced by
the state and this increased
dramatically over time by the 18th
century when households in workplaces
increasingly separated and owners of
mills mines and somewhere enterprises
began employing large numbers of wage
laborers working regular hours
you know they that was the criteria and
they chose for who's really working for
who control authority at the same time
though magistrates were being granted
ever more powers to intervene in
different types of employer-employee
relationships you know under the statute
of artificers was large
it was pretty limited and courts have
been given the right to set up maximum
wages and regulate relations between
masters and servants in husbandry since
Elizabethan times but it was really just
right before the Industrial Revolution
that it was extended to everyone else
with the masters and servants law of
1747 in a series of other laws that
followed in the decade or two afterwards
so that same supervisory function was
extended to artificers handicraftsmen
miners Colliers Killman Pitman Glassman
Potter's and other laborers employed
frees any certain time or in any other
manner which not only that's extended
the principle of open-ended obedience to
skilled craftsmen who had previously
been more of the you know dependent
contractors but allowed the courts
intervene on the employers behalf by
imposing fines and even up to three
months imprisonment on any workers found
to have absconded from their yearly
contractual responsibilities so suddenly
these people who had been hired you know
because they had certain skills that you
didn't have on a part-time basis that
were being forced by courts to take on
these year-long contracts where the
employer no longer really had any
responsibilities to them but they were
expected to have an absolute right of
obedience to their employer now what
does this all have to do with that here
I can only make a series of suggestions
but I think it's really interesting and
significant that well what effect of
punitive government interference in
these master-servant laws was to nullify
the advantage gained by workers from the
fact that they were as I pointed out you
know creditors their employees rather
than the other way around you look at
that God's penny you know it was
presented to the servant as it just sign
a contract it's now called a material
consideration in the same way that you
know even if you have a contract for you
know pay someone money you have to give
them like you know one piece so that you
can say money changed hands there's a
real contract well that goes back to
this which was a sort of pledge where
you give them God's penny or an earnest
and as a promise of future payment but
that's exactly the same thing that a
debtor does to a creditor
it was the same thing you give cons
penny so essentially employers a masters
would actually pose themselves as not as
the creditors but as the servants I mean
as sorry as the debtors to their
servants um in least in that formal way
now this might not have had a lot of
practical implications but about certain
moral ones and it did and it probably
had something to do with why it was that
servants weren't such relatively
advantageous situations that people are
constantly complaining in the late
Middle Ages that essentially they were
in like a really advantageous
negotiating position we're constantly
getting overpaid and coddled and
sparking endless and apparently only
unevenly successful government attempts
to hold down wages government
intervention in the 17th and 18th
century particularly aim to destroy both
the moral and economic basis of
working-class power at the same time as
it also aimed to reinforce the absolute
right of employers to dispose of workers
as they wished for instance a key 18th
century ruling held that if he workers
fired for any act of disobedience or
quit before the agreed on date he
forfeited the right to collect any wages
owed for work he might already have done
and it's really important because it
would often took them ages to pay people
and um you'd be waiting and waiting
sometimes six months to a year so so
they would forfeit anything the moment
like the judge agreed that you did
something you were that disrespected
your absolute you know obligation to
obey orders in other words so the
employers Authority was held to trump
the employees status as a creditor such
precedents were maintained and even
augmented when the masters and servants
law was replaced in Victorian times by
the employers and workmen Act of 1875
which continued to give the courts the
rights to intervene in the terms of
employment contracts in a way that
almost entirely unprecedented in any
other form of contractual law she's a I
don't know if anyone's heard Carole paid
Munro to book called the sexual contract
where she points out that marriage and
employment contracts are we similarly
weird because any other form of
contract you can get the two parties and
negotiate the contract to basically make
up the terms and marriage is extremely
significant considering we've been
looking at marriage transactions and and
employment transactions these those are
the two forms of contract where you
can't do that you know you can't say I
these two people want to marry those
three people I mean even if they want to
they can't you know almost everything
about the marriage contract is already
set out and can't be changed by the
people actually making the contract it's
completely different than a commercial
contract rates so so similarly
employment contract you know there's no
way that like a government would come
and impose fines and law or lock up
somebody who was a business partner who
like somebody complained it violated the
contract it might make them pay pay
something but they wouldn't you know
impose punitive sanctions they did that
all the time to employ employment
contracts and the nature of what could
be done or there's a whole part of the
duty you couldn't negotiate that away
the duty of obedience I was already
there similar to the marriage contract
so and in fact they would regularly
impose fines on workers for
insubordination
which would cancel out any debts of
unpaid wages that the employer might
have owed them workers who insisted on
attempting to withdraw from or
negotiating contracts were not only
stripped of what they'd already earned
but could be threatened with debtors
prison so in that way it was a reversal
of the debt relation which actually made
this kind of generalize relation of
subordination which lies in the heart of
what we call free labor possible so Dan
then these are only provisional notes
for what could be and I ever have the
time
much more ambitious and systematic
project of research I'd like to very
much pursue this someday but I think
it's enough to reveal a persistent link
between debt and the commoditization of
Labor European case unfree labor in the
colonies became the basis for the
creation of fortunes that were to become
the main object of the first stock
exchanges in financial markets while
back at home the rise of free labor as
it was termed they term only used to
refer to three wage labor it was made
possible largely by a legal regime that
effectively that effectively redefined
creditors as debtors
as in the case of the transformation of
local credit systems that occurred
around the same time this squared a
great deal of government intervention
and to what had previously been
considered market transactions but
markets which if left to their own
devices led to outcomes almost precisely
the opposite of what modern-day market
enthusiasts imagined they would have
produced modern labor law which assumes
a free contract between employer and
employee is really very recent um it
allows for such things as negotiated job
descriptions periods of notice on that
sort of thing is really actually not a
product of industrial or commercial
workers at all since they fell under the
master-servant laws it's actually comes
out of clerical or administrative
workers who didn't fall under master
servants laws so it's really the clerks
who worked for the bosses who started
demanding to have some rights as part of
a labor contract you could call this the
bob cratchit effect if you like because
they were yeah you couldn't find them
for breach of contract and gradually
with unionization yeah Industrial
Workers started demanding the same thing
although that process was really only
completed in the UK after World War two
and in the u.s. wasn't really completed
at all the achievement a full
contractual status for industrial
arrangements was not only historically
quite recent
it was also historically quite brief
being followed by the rise of what's
tellingly called the service economy
which appears to be driving the
commoditization of labor up to including
that of thought and feeling in
unprecedented directions and I'll end on
that
