2 results
3 - Asian indentured and colonial migration
-
- By Mitsuru Shimpo, Japan Women's University, Ong Jin Hui, National University, Steven Vertovec, University of Warwick, Ravinder K. Thiara, University of Warwick, Darshan Singh Tatla, South Birmingham College, Michael Twaddle, University of London
- Edited by Robin Cohen, University of Warwick
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Survey of World Migration
- Published online:
- 05 December 2012
- Print publication:
- 02 November 1995, pp 45-76
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Viewed on a global scale, unfree labour was the predominant form of labour control until a date much later than many might suppose. Even in Europe, Steinfield (cited Brass et al. 1993: 8) suggests that free labour, conceived in the sense of the freedom to choose one's employer, did not become a dominant legal ideal until the later eighteenth century and not the dominant paradigm until the nineteenth. Lucassen (in Brass et al. 1993: 10–18) alludes to three forms of productive unfree labour in the Old World and the Atlantic system – small-scale household, farm and artisan labour; large-scale plantation and mining labour; and unfree service as soldiers and sailors. As the same author notes, a number of scholars (for example, Paterson 1982, 1991; Curtin 1990) have demonstrated considerable continuities in the deployment of unfree labour. Moreover, a link between classical slavery and modern slavery has been established via Syria and Palestine, Cyprus, Sicily, Spain, the Azores and thence to the Americas.
Slavery disappeared in north-west Europe only to be replaced by servitude. The gradual progress to free labour and to independent economic activity in that part of Europe was, however, in marked contrast to the reintroduction of serfdom (the so-called ‘second serfdom’) in eastern Europe. Serfdom was only formally abolished in Poland in 1800 and in Russia in 1861. Naturally, legal prohibition concealed the continuation of other forms of unfree labour, including the ‘industrial slaves’ of the late nineteenth-century.
15 - Emerging trends
-
- By Stephen Castles, University of Wollongong, Allan M. Findlay, University of Dundee, Chan Kwok Bun, National University, Ong Jin Hui, National University, Ronald Skeldon, University of Hong Kong, Mark J. Miller, University of Delaware, Josef Gugler, University of Connecticut, Giovanna Campani, University of Florence, Rainer Bauböck, Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, Gil Loescher, University of Notre Dame
- Edited by Robin Cohen, University of Warwick
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Survey of World Migration
- Published online:
- 05 December 2012
- Print publication:
- 02 November 1995, pp 507-560
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The purpose of Part 15 is threefold: first, to draw attention to new forms and patterns of world migration; second, to cover aspects of migration that gained only passing expression in the previous Parts of the Surveys and, finally, to assess the significance of global migration flows from ethical and political standpoints.
Often, of course, new forms of migration turn out to be older forms in fresh disguise. Thus it is with contract-labour migration, which Castles succinctly defines as ‘temporary international movements of workers, which are organized and regulated by governments, employers or both’. As he notes, such migration has plenty of precedents – from the Asian indentured labour described in Part 2, the ‘foreign Poles’ who were recruited for industrial work in nineteenth-century Germany, the mine workers in South Africa and the Bracero Program in the USA, to the western European ‘guest-worker’ system. The intention of the employers and the government was twofold: to avoid any long-term commitment to the contracted migrants (thus allowing hiring and firing to match the economic cycles) and to inhibit settlement (thus reducing social costs and lessening the chance of resentment by the local workforce). These two desiderata still remain for many firms and governments. Source countries are now mainly in Asia (a region that provided nearly 12 million contract workers worldwide in the period 1969–89), though, as Castles shows, the Middle East has now declined in importance as a destination area in the wake of the Gulf War and the growth of demand in the emerging hothouse economies of Asia itself.