Introduction

Editorial


2
Shahid Antin and Marcel van der Linden produce both a model and an accepted version of history, national as well as international, which ranged from an informal but not very flexible to a formal and highly inflexible orthodoxy". 2 E.P. Thompson became one of the first historians to develop a new approach when he stressed the social variety and heterogeneity of the working class in early nineteenth-century England. 3 About twenty-five or thirty years ago, the old stereotypes created serious problems for the incipient interest among Western scholars in the social history of the so-called "Third World". Robin Cohen, one of the most important protagonists of African and Caribbean labour history, has rightly observed that a restrictive definition of the workers ignores the widespread presence of ambivalent class positions: "There is [ . . . ] a large group of the population which is simultaneously and ambiguously 'semiproletariat' and 'semipeasant' [ . . . ] . Equally, within the favelas and shantytowns, large numbers of individuals who are sometimes described as 'unemployed' or as 'sub-' or 'Iumpenproletariat' are in fact intermittently employed performing services or in small workshops employing a handful of workers and apprentices. In the case of this group, the ambiguity arises from the fact that it comprises people who can at the same time be considered self-employed or employees." 4 In the urban sphere, anthropological and historical studies started to reveal a wide range of so-called "marginals". Surveying the research, Peter Worsley, for instance, identifies not only industrial workers, but also workers in sweatshops, putting-out work in the home, self-employed artisans, domestic enterprises using family labour, street vendors, pedlars, hucksters, domestic servants, casual wage labourers (car-washers, etc.), refuse-collectors and beggars. 3 All these categories are fluid: households may combine several of the activities listed and may alternate between coping strategies.
Studies of the rural world also revealed an increasingly complex picture. As early as the 1960s, Eric Wolf described some of the numerous economic and social variations characteristic of agricultural life in his seminal little book on Peasants. 6 Later studies have added an array of other types of labour relations. The reconstruction of forms of agrestic servitude and the inadequacy of terms such as debt bondage were particularly important in providing a satisfactory explanation for the Introduction phenomenon of bonded labour. 7 Gyan Prakash's article in this volume is a forceful reminder that classificatory systems are fine as long as they do not impede the actual task of comparison by a preoccupation with identical sets of phenomena. Prakash's interpretation of the history of agrestic servitude from the North Indian state of Bihar calls for an "undoing of the discourse of freedom". As he notes: "if servitude was the form that the capital-labour relationship was compelled to assume in the process of its universalization, then colonial servitude must be included in the account of free labour." Gradually, it has become clear that pure "free wage labour" in the double Marxian sense 8 is an ideal type, the conceptual nucleus of far more complicated historical realities. Pure free wage labour -i.e. the exchange of labour power for money implying "no other relations of dependence than those which result from its own nature" 9 -forms a kind of analytical core surrounded by numerous rings of labour relations that we would like to call intermediary. We might construct a triangle with three "poles": pure free wage labour, unfree labour and independent labour (self-employment).

Unfree labour
Independent labour Here we are especially interested in the "grey zones" A and B surrounding double free wage labour. The number of variations within these zones is probably infinite. On line A we may, for instance, distinguish: • formally "free" wage labourers tied to a particular employer through loans (truck systems, etc.), housing facilities, etc.; • indentured labourers tied to a particular employer through long-term contracts; • unfree labourers hired out by their owners to other employers in exchange for wages. • disguised wage labourers whose work products are regularly appropriated partly by an employer without these persons being official employees of the firm; • dependent workers who do not perform wage labour but are dependent upon an employer for credit, rental of premises, etc.
Although it can be argued that "proletarianization is the most significant process in the contemporary world", 10 developments in the socalled "Third World" can be understood only if these intermediary forms of wage labour (indicators of partial proletarianization) are taken seriously. History in general and the history of labour in particular is not a unilinear process embodying an ongoing transition from "traditional" to "modern" forms. "Modern" capitalism may involve the reconstitution of slavery (as can be seen in countries as diverse as Burma, Brazil, or India), as well as the reconstitution of older forms of industry." The careful study of these intermediary forms may also shed new light on the history of the labouring classes in the so-called core countries. Not only have the debates on proto-industrialization 12 and worker-peasants" shown that intermediary forms of wage labour have been of continuous importance in European history over the past three or four centuries, but "pure free wage labourers" in advanced countries are at times clearly forced back into alternative activities through which they can sustain their subsistence margins in times of unemployment. 14 Alain Faure's contribution on Parisian ragpickers in the nineteenth century is a fitting case study of a partially proletarianized occupational group usually considered typical of the "Third World".
It probably makes sense to regard the intermediary forms of wage labour not as relationships existing outside the true working class, but as articulations of a worldwide segmentation of the labour force. In this segmented labour force, some workers (mostly in the core countries) are relatively free, well paid and secure, while other workers, both in the core countries and especially along the periphery, are less free, poorly paid, and "float-Introduction ing". 15 The boundaries between the two segments are vague and constantly shifting. Further exploration of the differences between segments might benefit from additional class criteria, like Max Weber's notion of the "market position of labour" and the worker's control over the work process. These criteria may also enable us to analyse gender-specific aspects more accurately. 16 Recent work in labour history has stressed the question of "multiple identities" among the working class. 17 Starting with the classic issues of the development of capitalism and of "abstract labour", historians in the "Third World" have begun to emphasize the historical and analytical relevance of Marx's notion of "concrete labour" and of labour power "as it exists in the personality of the worker". 18 This approach requires careful consideration of both the culture and the material conditions of the working class.
Religion, caste, gender and region (long-distance migrants from culturally dissimilar catchment areas to mines, plantations and factories) have become important issues in recent works on "Third World" labour history. 19 This interest has given rise to particularistic histories, where the operation of familiar Western machinery in far-flung corners of the globe is often pushed aside by accounts of specific groups of working women and men struggling to reproduce their cultural selves away from "home". The value of such histories lies not just in enriching the study of labour in different "Third World" locations -accretions to knowledge that can be accessed when the need arises to understand the working-class history of one or several non-Western societies. Some scholars have argued boldly that the experience of industrialization and proletarianization along the "periphery" has the potential to reveal the cultural characteristics of much of Western labour history itself. 20 Erick Langer's perceptive study of nineteenth-century Bolivian mine labour addresses three crucial issues: the implications of mechanization, the sources of labour and the effects of agrarian rhythms on labour supply. One of the author's striking observations is that "modern" mining enterprises were combined with haciendas and maintained a kind of peonage arrangement in which resident workers were obligated to pay for their access to lands by toiling in the mines. Such an arrangement obviously contradicts simple models of unilinear progress.
Juan Giusti-Cordero's essay on canefield labour in early twentiethcentury Puerto Rico describes another example of the intricate unity of the historical peasant-proletarian relation. In a careful analysis of the Pinones region, Giusti-Cordero argues that the sugar cane workers were neither "peasants", nor "rural proletarians", nor a combination of the two. Rather, they were a social group sui generis demanding a fundamental reconceptualization.
The "Indian" papers in this volume also contribute to the rethinking of categories. Each focuses on grasping the colonial situation from a slightly different perspective. Dilip Simeon's detailed reconstruction of the life, work and hazards of coal miners in Jharia is predicated on an engagement with that "historical and moral element" that Marx identifies as a factor in determining the value of labour power. Though deeply concerned with one set of coal pits (the largest in India), Simeon's essay is a plea for situating the concept of "relations of production" within the "histories of given societies".
The two papers by Madhavi Kale and Samita Sen deal with the imperial and colonial contexts within which large-scale, long-distance migration was organized from the north Indian villages to the sugar plantations of the British Caribbean and the tea gardens of Assam. Kale touches upon a host of important issues in Caribbean history: the link between the planters' and the empire's interests, the crucial role played by Indian indentured labour in the plantation economies, the essentialist categories through which the coolie was perceived, and the fluid socialization that sea voyage and plantation life facilitated and encouraged. She highlights the plight of and the opportunities available to single woman migrants on board the ships and in the colonies. Samita Sen applies important new theoretical insights in her investigation of the question of migration by single women to the Assam tea plantations within India. Faced with the difficult problem of facilitating migration by "good women" from north Indian villages without unsettling patriarchal control over females (both married and unmarried), the colonial state opted for an ingenious compromise. While the freedom to enter into wage contracts independently of male guardians was denied to women in law, the magistrates were "encouraged to wink at [ . . . such . . . ] illegal recruitment". The alternative of facilitating family migration was not seriously entertained, as this choice would have stripped peasant agriculture and the colonial economy, more generally, of its widespread familial base. Such a process would have been contrary to the interests of both colonial capital and the colonial state. As Dilip Simeon remarks, "the hut in the village and the colliery lines became adjuncts of a household in which the rural location of one effected savings on infrastructure for capital in the other." Shahid Amin and Marcel van der Linden