Bound for Work is a study of labour in central Mozambique during Portuguese colonial rule between the 1940s and 1960s. However, unlike most studies of African Labour History, Guthrie's book does not focus on a single workplace, on a single form of employment (either paid or unpaid, free or coerced), or on a single employer. Nor does it emphasize “traditional” pull and push factors in Southern African labour migration history. Instead, Guthrie looks into the history of labour in colonial Mozambique, Southern Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa through the lens of labour mobility and the voices of African workers.
The book is divided into six chapters, plus an Introduction and Conclusion. The first three chapters examine labour from the perspective of the workers. These chapters explore three key aspects that governed workers’ lives at the time: the contrato labour for the Portuguese colonial state, entrepreneurs, and settlers; access to free wage labour in other Mozambican regions and neighbouring African colonies; and the rationale behind workers’ choices in terms of employment, paying special attention to emotional ties and family bonds in shaping workers’ employment trajectories.
The three following chapters look at central Mozambican workers, their labour, and mobility from the perspective of the colonial state. Here, Guthrie examines colonial mechanisms of control over people's labour and labour mobility, exploring the rift between the ethos and praxis of the law and exposing the limitations and strengths of colonial power. The author also examines how workers, the colonial state, local chiefs, and private recruiters and employers tried to benefit from the loopholes in the law and its enforcement, and navigate their way through the colonial labour market and capitalist economy. The final chapter analyses the reforms put in place by the colonial state to stabilize the labour force in the 1960s, highlighting their limitations post-implementation on the ground, and evidencing the multiple continuities between forms of coerced employment under state rule and forms of labour coercion through private recruitment agencies.
In the Introduction and the Conclusion, on the other hand, Guthrie discusses the main merits of his labour mobility approach and the contributions of his study from a methodological and content point of view to the history of labour in Mozambique, Southern Africa, and the field of Labour History (LH) at large and the Global Labour History (GLH) approach in particular. By demonstrating the advantages of studying labour and interactions between workers and employers (either public or private) through the lens of labour mobility, this books makes a significant contribution to the field of LH and the GLH approach. Another major contribution of this book is that it clearly demonstrates the importance of studying the fluid boundaries between free and coerced labour and the high levels of mobility of workers in between different workplaces and jobs, and, more importantly, in between multiple labour relations throughout their working lives. By so doing, this book clearly shows labour historians the importance of examining not only combinations of multiple occupations and respective labour relations, but also the frequency and the facility with which workers moved across different employments and labour relations during their life cycles.
A third main contribution of this volume to the field of LH and the GLH approach is that it makes clear the importance of family and emotional ties in informing workers’ choices in terms of employment in the short and long terms. This way, Guthrie draws our attention to the importance of integrating these emotional factors into the analysis of workers’ motivations in their decision-making processes during their working-life trajectories alongside the appeal of accessing material goods.
Additionally, Guthrie's work emphasizes the importance of gender in the LH of Southern Africa, even when women were not wage workers and forerunners in the emerging colonial wage labour market and capitalist economy. By doing so, his work encourages labour historians to pay more attention to the analysis of the weight of the invisible hand of women and family in male workers’ decisions in terms of labour in their life trajectories.
Finally, Bound for Work shows the methodological and analytical gains of combining archival research with fieldwork and interviews with workers. In this way, this study is a call to labour historians to move beyond the paper trail of labour and workers deposited in archives and embrace the key role of oral history in the study of labour and labour relations not only in Africa, but worldwide.
Overall, by approaching the study of labour in central Mozambique through the lens of labour mobility, and by adopting a bottom-up approach following the life trajectories of migrant workers and their interactions with the colonial state, private entrepreneurs, settlers, local chiefs, and their families, Guthrie offers a new and refreshing look into the history of labour in Mozambique, Southern Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. But the merits of Bound for Work are far-reaching, as this book also makes several key methodological contributions to the field of LH at large and to the GLH approach in particular.
