Marcel van der Linden. Humanitarian Intervention and Changing Labor Relations: e Long-Term Consequences ofthe Abolition of the Slave Trade. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2011. 556 S. ISBN 978-90-04-18852-5.

Reviewed by Beatriz Galloi MamigonianPublished on H-Soz-u-Kult (September, 2013)

M. van der Linden (Hrsg.): Humanitarian Intervention and Changing Labor

is edited collection, stemming from a colloquiumorganized in Amsterdam in 2008, is a product of the pro-fuse public and academic engagement in commemoratingthe bicentennial of the British and American measuresfor the abolition the slave trade. Instead of exploring theactors and their motives, or the abolitionist campaign it-self - like the bulk of the scholarship produced for the oc-casion -, the authors gathered for this volume provide amulti-faceted view of the long-term consequences of theabolition of the African slave trade and slavery in vari-ous regions of the world, with a particular eye for laborrelations developed aer slavery. Edited and introducedby Dutch labor historian Marcel van der Linden, of theUniversity of Amsterdam and the International Institutefor Social History, the book reflects the rich, ongoing, di-alogue among scholars in the fields of slavery and abo-lition and labor history and demonstrates the potentialcontribution of the “global social history” approach to thegrowing field of post emancipation studies.

In slavery and abolition studies, historians have beenpaying closer aention to the conditions of “freedom”,both during and aer slavery. From works on manumis-sion and free blacks to explorations of post-emancipationlabor organization and protests, recent historiographyhas striven to avoid treating slave emancipation as a wa-tershed that changed conditions overnight, and, this way,has managed to break away from the schematic view ofa “transition from slave to free labor” where “free” oenimplied “wage” labor. A variety of labor arrangementshave thus come under close scrutiny, even if analyzedunder the shadow of slavery. Labor historians, in a par-allel movement, have also been drawn to expand theirsubjects of inquiry and look beyond wage laborers andindustrial labor relations, considering arrangements for-merly perceived as “pre-capitalist” in their analyses. Onboth ends, much effort has been put into exposing thecontradictions and unfulfilled promises of liberal ideol-ogy, accounting for the changes in the forms of exploita-

tion, and identifying the mechanics for the reproductionof inequalities.

Seen through this light, abolitionism serves as a com-mon theme that helps to connect parallel processes hap-pening in different parts of the world from the late eigh-teenth to the mid-twentieth century that culminated inthe condemnation and ultimate abolition of both theslave trade and slavery. Humanitarian Intervention andChanging Labor Relations touches three of the many cur-rents of the scholarship on abolitionism: most chaptersare dedicated to discussing the transformation of laborrelations, but the responses to abolitionist ideology andthe public memory of slavery are also addressed. ebook is divided into four sections that largely reflect thisdivision.

e first section, “Politics of Memory”, puts forward atimely discussion of the contemporary political appeal ofthe history of slavery and emancipation. Taking stock ofthe commemorations of the bicentennial of the abolitionof the slave trade in 2007, James Walvin recognized thatthey spoke to a range ofmodern social and political issueswhich deeply influenced the interpretation of the histor-ical events, the choice of individuals and themes to high-light. Academic history had only limited influence onthe public displays, exhibits and other commemorativeevents, as it turned out, although African agency seemsto have become a central interpretive tool where otheractors and explanations dominated. Social inclusion andthe contours of national identity in a post-colonial set-ting also drive the quest for reinterpretation of the Dutchcolonial past, as discussed by Angelie Sens. e authorsurveys the struggles against racial discrimination thathave been advanced by Surinamese militants and othersfor many decades, and advocates that “liing the histori-ographical veil” on the themes of race and racism wouldallow for the rethinking, rewriting and disseminating of anew, inclusive, narrative of Dutch history. Both chaptersdemonstrate vividly that abolition is as much a contem-

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porary theme as any other.e second section, “Abolitions”, engages the re-

sponses to British and American abolitionism and the ef-fects of the campaign to suppress the slave trade. Recentresearch - and particularly on the Transatlantic SlaveTrade Database - has allowed for a revision of each coun-try’s participation in the trade, and origins, destinationsand volumes, and thus a more detailed assessment of theimpact of legal measures taken against the slave trade.As David Eltis pointed out, 1807 has meant a great dealfor the North Atlantic trade, but very lile for the SouthAtlantic one. Abolition did not prevent three major plan-tation systems from emerging in the United States (cot-ton), Cuba (sugar) and Brazil (coffee), all based on slavelabor. Yet he rejects treating abolition as void and sim-ply ineffective, arguing that without it the demand thatgenerated the internal slave trades in the United Statesand in Brazil in the nineteenth century would have beenmet by a renewed flow of transatlantic coerced laborersinstead of European immigrants. Stanley Engerman andDick Geary address the impact of abolition in the UnitedStates, the British West Indies and Brazil and expose theuneven treatment of those areas by the historiography.e abolition of the slave trade to the United States re-mains very lile studied, despite the classic work by W.E. B. Du Bois, while in Brazil the theme is being revisited.Geary’s chapter tries to tackle the very difficult questionof the longevity of the Brazilian slave system, yet failsto sort through outdated and revisionist interpretations.By aributing the longevity of Brazilian slavery to its so-cial complexity - widespread slave ownership, diverse de-mographics, high manumission rates - the author over-shadows the political dynamics launched by abolitionistpressure, which le a long-lasting conservative legacyin the South American country and may well hold moreexplanatory power than is acknowledged. Robin Black-burn and Andreas Gestrich’s chapters address preciselythe wider social and political context in which abolition-ism developed in the Americas and in Continental Eu-rope and expose the varieties and alliances of the move-ment. is exploration of local responses, oen brokendown by class, and engagement with counter-discourseson slavery and emancipation holds a strong comparativepotential that has yet to be fully explored. Nicole Ul-rich’s chapter looks at yet another angle of this theme:the impact of abolitionism on subaltern classes. rougha revolt that united seafarers, servants and slaves in CapeColony in 1808, the author demonstrates that ideas aboutantislavery and revolution were at the basis of the rebels’demands. Ulrich’s claim that the revolt stands at the be-ginning of the cycle of protest that culminated with slave

emancipation in the British Empire requires supportiveevidence of their connections, but is highly suggestive.

e third section of the collection, “Consequences”deals more directly with transformations in labor rela-tions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Itbuilds on the literature on post-emancipation labor inthe Americas, Africa, and Asia as well as on unfree la-bor more generally. Working under the assumptions thatslave emancipation was not followed by the spread ofwage labor and that capitalism was in no way incompat-ible with coerced labor, the chapters address the effectsof abolition on labor relations from a variety of perspec-tives. e role of colonial states in sponsoring or sup-porting coercive labor systems is discussed in almost ev-ery one of them. Andreas Eckert exposed the intricateconnections between German abolitionist rhetoric andthe extensive exploitation of coerced labor in Germancolonies in Africa, Julia Seibert discussed the implica-tions of the use of the “colonial labor force” in the BelgianCongo, and Pieter Emmer addressed in comparison theBritish, French and Dutch policies regarding colonial la-bor. Both Roger Knight and Claus Fullberg-Stolberg callfor a fresh approach to old narratives. Fullberg-Stolbergsurveys land policies in Jamaica for the century follow-ing emancipation and identifies in the historiography avoid opposition between peasantry and wage labor, forthe combination of the two systems (“occupation multi-plicity”) was prevalent as a strategy of economic survival.Knight questioned the use of “indenture” as a blanket def-inition for most post-emancipation labor contracts andcalled for a closer look at the terms and conditions for amore nuanced understanding of labor in the Dutch EastIndies in the last decades of the 19th and early decades ofthe 20th century. e microhistorical approach is alsoadvocated by Michael Zeuske and Norbert Finzsch intheir piece on post-emancipation in Cuba and the UnitedStates. Suggesting a person-oriented perspective ratherthan a state-oriented one, they list three sets of prob-lems that could guide researchers in comparisons of post-emancipation societies: investigations into the spaces offreedom, the meanings of freedom and the limits to free-dom.

e last section, “Perspectives” is a fiing end tothe collection, as Susan Zimmermann’s chapter dealswith the trajectory of anti-slavery as a social movementfrom a long-term view. Even if abolitionism cannot beconsidered the sole motor for the changes discussed, inthis volume the British-led international campaign servesas a unifying thread for thought provoking and path-breaking research on the transformations in labor rela-tions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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One gap should be noted: a discussion of urban laboris largely missing from post-emancipation and coloniallabor narratives included in this volume, and could well

help bring the fields of slavery and abolition and laborhistory even closer together.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at:hp://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.

Citation: Beatriz Galloi Mamigonian. Review of van der Linden, Marcel, Humanitarian Intervention and ChangingLabor Relations: e Long-Term Consequences of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net Reviews.September, 2013.URL: hp://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=40149

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