Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Labour imperialism'

Like many other African colonies, the Sudan experienced a period of sustained industrial unrest during the late 1940s. The Workers’ Affairs Association (WAA), the representative body for Sudanese railway workers, led a two year campaign of strikes during 1947 and 1948. The escalating labour unrest provoked considerable unease among British officials in the Sudan Government. Not only was there a fear that the strikes might escalate into broader anti-colonial protest but the sustained campaign of industrial unrest also caused significant disruption to the economy. During the strikes the export of cotton - the Sudan Government’s principal source of revenue - was delayed and the movement of other essential goods was severely restricted. The thesis argues that the economic dislocation caused by the strikes, which coincided with growing concerns about rising anti-colonial nationalism and imperial decline, meant that labour discipline among key sector workers was the primary objective for the late colonial state. Although the protests in the Sudan were part of the broader strike wave that was sweeping through the African continent in the late 1940s, it has largely been excluded from the historiography of this period – primarily because of the Sudan’s unique status as a ‘Condominium’ of Britain and Egypt. Through an analysis of the Sudan Government’s labour policy, the thesis challenges this notion of exceptionality, demonstrating that the British officials of the Sudan Political Service (SPS) were animated by similar concerns and motivations to their counterparts elsewhere in colonial Africa. With this in mind, the thesis aims to address two broad research objectives. Firstly, to examine the causes of the industrial unrest: investigating the relationship between the structure of the economy, social organisation, and post-war economic conditions. Secondly, to analyse the Sudan Government’s response to the labour protests, documenting how immediate economic concerns, combined with post-war ideas relating to industrial relations management and social welfare, shaped colonial labour policy.

In this dissertation, I argue that two dominant perspectives on farming in Canada—the technoscientific capitalist perspective on modern industrial farming and the popular vision of hard-won survival on the family farm—both draw on narrative and aesthetic strategies that have deep roots in distinct, but related variations of the georgic tradition, which arrived in Canada in the eighteenth century and continues to shape literary representations and material practices today. Critics of Canadian literature have tended to subsume the georgic under the category of pastoral, but I argue that the georgic is a separate and more useful category for understanding the complex myths and realities of agricultural production in Canada precisely because it is a literary genre that focuses on the labour of farming and because it constitutes a complex and multi-generic discourse which both promotes and enables critique of dominant agricultural practices. I argue that, despite its sublimation beneath the pastoral, the georgic mode has also been an important cultural nexus in Canadian literature and culture, and that it constitutes a set of conventions that have become so commonplace in writing that deals with agricultural labour and its related issues in Canada that they have come to seem both inevitable and natural within the Canadian cultural tradition, even if they have not been explicitly named as georgic. By analyzing a variety of texts such as Oliver Goldmith’s The Rising Village, Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie, Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, Frederick Philip Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh, Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese, Al Purdy’s In Search of Owen Roblin, Robert Kroetsch’s “The Ledger,” Christian Bok’s Xenotext, Rita Wong’s Forage, and Phil Hall’s Amanuensis, I recontextualize Canadian writing that deals with agrarian work within two distinct but related georgic traditions. As Raymond Williams and others have shown, the georgic’s inclusion of both pastoralizing myths and material realities makes it useful for exploring ecological questions. The georgic is often understood in terms of what Karen O’Brien has called the imperial georgic mode, which involves a technocratic, imperialist, capitalist approach to agriculture, and which helped theorize and justify imperial expansion and the technological domination of nature. But as ecocritics like David Fairer, Margaret Ronda, and Kevin Goodman have argued, the georgic’s concern with the contingency and precariousness of human relationships with nonhuman systems also made it a productive site for imagining alternatives to imperial ways of organizing social and ecological relations. Ronda calls this more ecologically-focused and adaptable georgic the disenchanted georgic, but I call it the precarious georgic because of the way it enables engagement with what Anna Tsing calls precarity. Precarity, as Tsing explains, describes life without the promise of mastery or stability, which is a condition that leaves us in a state of being radically dependent on other beings for survival. “The challenge for thinking with precarity,” she writes, “is to understand the ways projects for making scalability have transformed landscape and society, while seeing also where scalability fails—and where nonscalable ecological and economic relations erupt” (42). By tracing the interplay between imperial and precarious georgic modes in Canadian texts that have mistakenly been read as pastoral—from Moodie’s settler georgic to the queer gothic georgic of Ostenso’s Wild Geese to the provisional and object-oriented georgics of Robert Kroetsch and Phil Hall—I argue that the precarious georgic strain has always engaged in this process of thinking with precarity, and that it holds the potential for providing space to re-imagine our ecological relations.

This thesis is about the organisation, character and change of labour relations in expanding capitalist wool farming in the Cape between 1860 and 1950. It is an attempt to analyse labour in wool farming within a transnational framework, based on an expansion of capital from core to periphery of the capitalist world-economy. Wool farming in peripheries like the Cape was part of capitalist production through the link to primarily the British textile industry. This relationship enabled wool farmers to invest in their farms in sheep, fences and windmills. They thereby became agents of capital expansion in the world-economy, which was a prerequisite for a capitalist expansion. Although wool production in the Cape was initially an imperial division of labour, that relation changed during the twentieth century as Britain’s leading role as textile producer was challenged by other capitalist core countries. Capitalism as a transnational production system, based on commodity chains from periphery to core, became the most crucial structure for wool farmers in the Cape, who could increase their exports. The thesis also shows that the pre-capitalist generational division of labour among black peasants, through which farmers acquired labour, especially shepherds, was both discarded and intensified. Shepherding was intensified along with fencing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century due to threat from jackals and lack of sufficient water supplies. Those farmers who invested in technology in the form of jackal-proof fences and windmills managed to change production from herding to rotational grazing in camps, which meant that shepherds were replaced by camp walkers, who controlled fences instead of sheep. Those farmers who did not invest were forced to exploit the pre-capitalist relations more intensively and hire shepherds in order to be able to produce and sell wool to textile manufacturers in capitalist core areas. As the young adult males disappeared from farms to the mines, the role of children and youths as shepherds became increasingly important. By the 1940s almost all the shepherds were children or youths, but they were about to be made redundant, as the number of shepherds decreased during the 1930s and 1940s.

This thesis argues that the colonial ruling class developed its first White Australia policy in 1888, creating most of the precedents for the federal legislation of 1901. White Australia was central to the making of the Australian working class, to the shaping of Australian nationalism, and the development of federal political institutions. It has long been understood as a product of labour movement mobilising, but this thesis rejects that approach, arguing that the labour movement lacked the power to impose such a fundamental national policy, and that the key decisions which led to White Australia were demonstrably not products of labour movement action. ¶ It finds three great ruling class agendas behind the decisions to exclude Chinese immigrants, and severely limit the use of indentured “coloured labour”. Chinese people were seen as a strategic threat to Anglo-Australian control of the continent, and this fear was sharpened in the mid-1880s when China was seen as a rising military power, and a necessary ally for Britain in its global rivalry with Russia. The second ruling class agenda was the building of a modern industrial economy, which might be threatened by industries resting on indentured labour in the north. The third agenda was the desire to construct an homogenous people, which was seen as necessary for containing social discontent and allowing “free institutions”, such as parliamentary democracy. ¶ These agendas, and the ruling class interests behind them, challenged other major ruling class interests and ideologies. The result was a series of dilemmas and conflicts within the ruling class, and the resolution of these moved the colonial governments towards the White Australia policy of 1901. The thesis therefore describes the conflict over the use of Pacific Islanders by pastoralists in Queensland, the campaign for indentured Indian labour by sugar planters and the radical strategy of submerging this into a campaign for North Queensland separation, and the strike and anti-Chinese campaign in opposition to the use of Chinese workers by the Australasian Steam Navigation Company in 1878. The first White Australia policy of 1888 was the outcome of three separate struggles by the majority of the Anglo-Australian ruling class—to narrowly restrict the use of indentured labour in Queensland, to assert the right of the colonies to decide their collective immigration policies independently of Britain, and to force South Australia to accept the end of Chinese immigration into its Northern Territory. The dominant elements in the ruling class had already agreed that any serious move towards federation was to be conditional on the building of a white, predominantly British, population across the whole continent, and in 1888 they imposed that policy on their own societies and the British government.

Despite the complexities and decentralization that characterize global supply chains in today’s world economy, imperialist relations of exchange continue to prevail, due to the fact that the differences between wages of North and South is greater than the difference of their productivities. This dissertation examines the global exploitation of labor that mostly occurs in the global South, as a form of such imperialist relations, particularly under the domination of multinational firms emanating primarily from the core of the system. I start by laying out the theoretical and empirical groundwork for the labor-value commodity chains framework that puts labor, along with the question of control and class, at the center of its formulation. By incorporating a calculation of cross-national variation in unit labor costs in manufacturing—a measurement that combines labor productivity with wage costs in a manner closely related to Marx’s theory of exploitation—the labor-value chains framework is a means to operationalize exploitation within the framework of the labor theory of value. Findings show that the global organization of labor-value chains is a means to extract surplus value through the exploitation of workers in the global South, where not only are wages low, but productivity is also high. I then show the concrete processes of how global North capital, personified in multinational corporations, captures value from the global South by applying systemic rationalization and flexible systems as mechanisms to exert control over their dependent suppliers in labor-value commodity chains. The burden of such mechanisms is borne by the workers —the direct producers of commodities—employed by these dependent suppliers. Case studies of two Indonesian companies that supply to multinationals are presented to illustrate these phenomena at the point of production. This observation further suggests that labor-value commodity chains are a form of unequal exchange and thus reveal the imperialistic characteristics of the world economy. This dissertation includes both previously published and coauthored materials.
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This research approaches capitalist development in the Southeast region of Goiás State. It`s know that this region underwent deep transformations since 1970`s. The first wave came with phosphate and niobium mining industry. After this, there were three more capitalist waves, agriculture modernization in the 1980`s, neoliberal policies in the 1990`s together with automaker industry and a new dam construction. All these processes aggravated the contraditions and increased class struggle in Catalão city.Here the main focus is Goiandira city. For this reason, several factors which contributed to the formation of this space are taken into consideration. Goiandira is a small town with five thousands inhabitants, located 14 km far from Catalão. Over the time its relation with Catalão has become more intensified and conflicts with the city are surfacing more and more.The production of space in Goiandira started with a railroad construction in 1911. From that moment on land workers found jobs in the town. The railroad construction created the possibility to build a new village. In this context, not only the church appeared with its rigid views controlling the life of the people, but also the idea of socialism and the fight against exploitation came as well.This town emancipated from Catalão in 1931. During a long time due to its workers the railroad left a lasting feature in the town. Despite being small Goiandira was a railroad connection/hub place and had a important amount of commodities circulation.In 1978, the railsroads tracks and train station were removed from downtown area, afterwards passengers transportation came to an end in the 1980`s and later train services were privatized resulting in workers lay off. This process brought important changes to the town landscape. Today, Goiandira is an enormous laboratory providing workforce to capitalism in Catalão with hundreds of people on the road night and day. Policy makers in Goiandira are getting ready to take advantage of the closeness with Catalão and also little by little segregation is growing in Goiandira. Thus, this study argues that Goiandira has taken part in the capitalist economy, but always being subjected.
Esta pesquisa aborda o desenvolvimento do capitalismo no Sudeste Goiano. Sabe-se que esta região passa por profundas transformações desde a década de 70. Primeiro com a indústria da mineração do fosfato e do nióbio, aprofundando as mudanças com a modernização da agricultura nos anos de 1980 e a penetração no curso do modelo neoliberal de desenvolvimento da década de 90 com a chegada das montadoras e a indústria barrageira. Tudo isso agrava as contradições e intensifica as lutas de classe no município de Catalão. O foco mais específico da análise centra-se no município de Goiandira, levando em consideração os diversos fatores que contribuíram para a formação deste espaço e suas transformações mais recentes. Goiandira, uma pequena cidade de pouco mais de cinco mil habitantes, localiza-se a 14 quilômetros de Catalão e a cada dia intensifica suas relações e seus conflitos com esta cidade. A produção do espaço goiandirense começa a se formar desde que inicia a construção da ferrovia no ano de 1911, momento em que trabalhadores do campo passam a ter também tarefa de construir a cidade. A construção da ferrovia possibilita a construção da cidade e a põe de imediato em relação com o mundo. Nessa relação é que chega a Igreja e seu rígido controle da vida das pessoas, mas também chega a ideia do socialismo e da luta contra a exploração. A cidade emancipa-se de Catalão em 1931. Durante muito tempo a ferrovia construída pelo conjunto de trabalhadores aqui presente, marcou a característica da cidade. Goiandira, embora pequena, pelo fato de ser entroncamento ferroviário tinha expressiva importância pelo volume de mercadorias em circulação. A retirada dos trilhos e da Estação do centro da cidade em 1978 e o fim dos transportes de passageiros na década de 80 conjuminados com a privatização dos serviços ferroviários e demissão dos trabalhadores mudam de forma significativa o horizonte da cidade. Goiandira é hoje, um enorme laboratório de mão de obra para o capital instalado em Catalão, com centenas deles viajando dioturnamente. Aos poucos os gestores de Goiandira vão se preparando para aproveitar das vantagens da proximidade com Catalão e também aos poucos encontrando no espaço rastros da segregação espacial. Assim defende-se a tese de que Goiandira por sucessivas vezes insere-se na economia capitalista, mas sempre de forma subordinada.

Before the Spanish conquest, the town of Porco, in the Department of Potosí in modern-day Bolivia, was the site of one of the most important Inca mining projects. During the viceregal period it became the focus of the first Spanish silver mining operations of the in the Andes. This region offers an excellent opportunity for historical archeology to ask questions about the relationship between the states that organized such mining projects and the workers who exploited the ore. Such an undertaking grants us a better understanding of the dynamics that had a profound impact on the origins of the modern Andean economy. This article presents ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence in order to discuss the organization of colonial labor categories, and the development of the changing social roles and status of skilled workers associated with the south-central Andean mining industry. In doing so, I trace the regional transitions in labor from the Inca to Spanish empires. Excavations at the colonial site of Ferro Ingenio, a silver refinery in the San Juan Valley, southwest of the village of Porco, shed new light on labor in the first century of Spanish colonialism and how skilled indigenous workers negotiated their positions within colonial society.
Antes de la conquista española, el pueblo de Porco, en el departamento de Potosí, Bolivia, fue uno de los asientos mineros más importante de los incas. Durante el virreinato, fue el foco de las primeras operaciones de minería de plata española en los Andes. Esta región ofrece una excelente oportunidad para que la arqueología histórica plantee preguntas acerca de la relación entre los estados que organizaban dichos proyectos mineros y los trabajadores que explotaban el mineral, que nos ayuden a entender esa dinámica que tuvo un profundo impacto en los orígenes de la economía andina moderna. Este artículo presenta evidencia arqueológica y etnohistórica para examinar la organización de ciertas categorías laborales coloniales, y el desarrollo de los papeles y posiciones sociales de trabajadores asociados a la industria minera andina sur-central para trazar la transición de la mano de obra en la región del imperio de los incas al de los españoles. Las excavaciones en el sitio colonial de Ferro Ingenio, una refinería de plata en el valle de San Juan, al sudoeste del pueblo de Porco, arrojan nuevas luces sobre el tema de la mano de obra en el primer siglo de colonialismo español y de cómo los trabajadores calificados negociaban sus propias posiciones en la sociedad colonial.

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This work aims to recover the contributions of Marxist theory of dependence in the 1960s and 1970s in order to understand the dynamics of peripheral capitalism in Latin America. Ruy Mauro Marini and Theotonio dos Santos, as the main authors of this line of studies of dependence, seek in the analysis of the contradictions of the capitalist system the explanation for the dependent status of Latin American countries. Thus, the dependence would be seen as a conditioning situation attributed to the development of the central economies due to the underdevelopment of peripheral economies. This is due to the transfer of values produced in the periphery toward the center economies, which would lead within the economies dependent on the formation of "deformations", both in its production process and the cycle of capital that it presents. Focussing on the region's economic integration can be evidenced the reasons for the condition of dependence on the movement of capital accumulation in Latin America, highlighting the relevant factors in this case the characterization and the basis for examining the state of dependence in its various manifestations . Thus, besides the presentation of this theory, the waves of criticism will that sought to refute the explanations constructed by Marxist dependency theory be highlighted and at the same time, accompanied by their replies, generating a debate that has enriches the dialectics of dependence and the conclusions moving towards the development alternatives for the countries of Latin America
Este trabalho tem o propósito de recuperar as contribuições da teoria marxista da dependência, na década de 1960 e 1970, para a compreensão da dinâmica do capitalismo periférico latino-americano. Ruy Mauro Marini e Theotônio dos Santos, como os principais autores desta vertente dos estudos da dependência, buscam na análise das contradições do sistema capitalista a explicação para a condição dependente dos países da América Latina. Assim, a dependência seria entendida como uma situação de condicionamento dada pelo desenvolvimento das economias centrais devido ao subdesenvolvimento das economias periféricas. Tal fato decorre da transferência de valores produzidos na periferia em direção as economias centrais, o que levaria no interior das economias dependentes a formação de deformações , tanto em seu processo produtivo quanto no ciclo do capital que apresenta. Tomando como foco a inserção econômica da região podem-se evidenciar as razões da condição de dependência no movimento da acumulação capitalista na América Latina, ressaltando neste processo os elementos pertinentes a sua caracterização e as bases para o exame da situação de dependência em suas diversas manifestações. Assim, além da apresentação desta teorização, serão evidenciadas as ondas críticas que buscaram refutar as explicações construídas pela vertente marxista da teoria da dependência e, ao mesmo tempo, acompanhadas por suas réplicas, gerando um debate que enriqueceu a dialética da dependência e as conclusões a que chega sobre as alternativas de desenvolvimento para os países da América Latina

Abstract: A CASE STUDY: U.S. LABOUR RELATIONS WITH THE TRADE UNION COUNCIL OF SOUTH AFRICA 1960-1973 The aim of this study is to examine US policies towards the South African labour movement through the American Federation of Labour - Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and US official institutions, such as the State Department and the Labour Department of the United States, US universities etc. with particular focus on the period between the 1960s and mid-1970s. The study is shaped as a case study. In the study, the labour relations between the US and South Africa in the beginning of the 1960s and the middle of 1970s are examined by specifically focusing on TUCSA. The study is composed to six chapters. Following the first two chapters devoted for introduction and literature review, the developments of the post-Second World War era, such as the internationalization process of capital accumulation around the world, the cold war and the formation process of new international organizations are dealt with. The re-structuring process of the international labour movement under the cold war conditions and the development of overseas labour policies of the ICFTU and the AFL-CIO are also handled in this chapter. In the fourth chapter, the capitalist development process of South Africa in the post Second World War Era is discussed. The capital accumulation process under the apartheid and the developments within the labour movement are the main issues dealt with in this chapter. In the fifth chapter, US investments in South Africa between the beginning of the sixties and the mid seventies and the effects of these investments in the capital accumulation process of South Africa are evaluated. In the last chapter, the main focal point of the study, US labour relations with South Africa between the 1960s and the middle of the 1970s is focused on with particular reference to the relations between TUCSA and the US labour institutions including the AFL-CIO and other official organizations of the US. In the study, a historical framework is developed by focusing on developments in international scale and South African scale. In the third, fourth and fifth chapters, extensive literature on international labour, capitalist development of South Africa, labour history of South Africa and US investments in South Africa is given to elaborate the issue. The sixth chapter, which is the main chapter of the study, is relied principally upon archive materials of TUCSA.

This dissertation traces Chinese migration to and settlement in Colombia from the 1890s through 2020, and situates immigrants' experiences within a larger racially-attuned economic story of a commercially integrating transpacific Caribbean immediately before and after the consolidation of American hegemony. It specifically traces Chinese migration and commercial activities in key sites and regions increasingly drawn into financial and trade systems shaped by the US, including: the Colombian Pacific port of Buenaventura; Panama and the interoceanic canal which connected transpacific Caribbean communities and commerce; the Colombian Caribbean port cities of Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Santa Marta; and Bogotá, the political seat of power which oversaw externally-oriented national economic development and international trade. Though they were racially and economically marginalized and their entry and movements were restricted in Colombia as elsewhere in the Americas, Chinese were nevertheless able to carve out commercial and migration opportunities that connected regions of nations together. Bridging Anglophone and Spanish-speaking, agricultural and industrial, Pacific and Atlantic, their particular migration paths and economic niches enabled them to play unrecognized but integral integrative roles in larger commercial integration processes—whether as merchants who connected the Colombian Pacific to markets in the United States and Europe; truck farmers whose production of food for domestic consumption supported agricultural export and industrialization efforts; or restauranteurs whose expansion of Chinese restaurants from the Caribbean coast to the western coffee axis and Andean interior later became the basis for a new import-export role of distributing goods cheaply made in China within Colombia’s urban centers. Continually adapting to new structural constraints and opportunities, Chinese created a persisting and evolving migrant and migration economy sustained by and sustaining familial and commercial connections that spanned what I term a transpacific Caribbean. Their (often serial) transpacific and circum-Caribbean historical migration trajectories took them from villages, cities, and counties mostly in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong province and Hong Kong to the Greater Caribbean region (Panama, Trinidad, Cuba, Jamaica, Venezuela, etc.), the United States, and the coastal Caribbean, Pacific, and Andean interior regions of Colombia. What facilitated such migrations (and what attracted Chinese migrants)—the anticipated economic opportunities that followed the building of integrative transportation and trade infrastructure that connected interior to port cities and port cities to international (mainly US) markets—is as important to Colombian economic development history and US overseas commercial expansion as to Chinese immigration history. By showing how Chinese built a migrant and migration economy within this broader imperial and national economic structure, “A Transpacific Caribbean: Chinese Migration, US Imperialism, and the Making of Modern Colombia” weaves these interconnected strands of history together.

The study of Indian indentured servitude in the British Empire has largely been confined to the histories of slavery or free labor. Few scholars have connected indenture to larger processes in the British Empire. This dissertation examines the global nature of Indian indenture to find how trends in colonial power were inflected in the relationship between the state and the indentured worker. This dissertation uses the colonial experience in South Asia as a basis for its global history. It contends that the history of the colonial rule of law in the subcontinent was of deep importance to the mechanisms of indenture. By looking at archival records from the United Kingdom, Trinidad, Fiji, and elsewhere, this dissertation finds that officials in the indenture colonies were attempting to transform indebted Indian peasants into indentured workers. This process was inflected by the experience of colonial rule elsewhere. At first, this meant the implementation of ideas tied to imperial liberalism. Following the challenges to British colonialism in the mid-nineteenth century, the indenture colonies mirrored a wider movement towards conservative governance. The ways in which the colonial state attempted to control and manipulate workers underwent a dramatic shift. In the indenture colony, colonial power exerted both authoritarian and paternalist tendencies. This dissertation uses the governorships of Arthur Hamilton-Gordon in Trinidad and Fiji to explore this shift. This dissertation makes its argument by focusing on the indenture colonies of Trinidad and Fiji. In doing so, it moves beyond the model of studying indenture that has looked at the British Empire as a whole, or otherwise in specific colonies or sub-regions. Using Trinidad and Fiji allows for a deep understanding of continuity and change. For example, Trinidad can be used to examine indenture’s beginnings, as the colony began to import Indian indentured labor in 1842, while Fiji can be used to understand late indenture. Furthermore, colonial officials, ideas of authority, capital, labor, and goods were always circulating throughout this global empire. The study of Trinidad and Fiji allows for a critical understanding of such exchanges and this dissertation uses both to explore bureaucratic offices, law, financial systems, governance, protest, medicine and health, and global agitation in Indian indenture. “The Currents of Restless Toil” is an in-depth study into the nature of colonial governance in the indenture colonies of Trinidad and Fiji. It explores the nuances of colonial power, providing a window into the theory and practice that shaped the restless toil of Indians across the world.

This dissertation proposes and tests a theory that investigates the political process of modern property formation in land in postcolonial societies of the New World. Specifically, it examines how land tenure systems of private property -- that is, a statutory tenure in which individual property rights are specified, allocated, arbitrated by the state -- are designed and executed in contexts of limited state capacity and land abundance. It draws on extensive, under-tapped archival evidence from Imperial Brazil (1822-1889), the largest postcolonial state of the southern hemisphere. The data, collected over a year of rigorous and systematic archival research, include original ledgers of rural estates surveyed and recorded at the parish (i.e., sub-municipal) level; church inventories of slaves; economic and health-related data of slaves populations; agricultural and land prices; roll call votes and transcripts from parliamentary sessions; and biographical information on Brazil's most prominent elites. My dissertation argues that exogenous, disruptive events that abolish labor-repressive relations of production, such as slavery or the slave trade, open up an opportunity for central governments to bargain for the creation of systems of freehold tenure with local traditional elites. Many countries of the New World were unable to pursue liberal reforms that commodified land and dismantled land-related colonial privileges because of the lack of professional surveyors and cadastral technologies to survey, title, and register parcels accurately. Moreover, high land-to-man ratios turned land into a factor of production with little commercial value and did not offer clear incentives to local elites to demand secure and complete property rights. My dissertation argues that, when local elites' depend on forced or servile labor for production, abolition can make them prone to support a statutory yet highly stringent system of freehold tenure that legally blocks access to land to wage laborers. A system of freehold tenure in times of abolition can attain two goals. First, to close off alternatives to wage labor in the agricultural sector by assembling ownership statutes that exacerbate conditions of tenure insecurity. Second, as local elites controlling servile labor have higher stakes in the survival of labor dependence in agriculture, it can enhance quasi-voluntary compliance with new property rules that intend to avert squatting and keep rural labor inexpensive and abundant. By willingly demarcating boundaries, titling, and paying taxes, local elites cooperate with the new land statutes. In turn, central state officials can secure the logistical resources they need (i.e., fiscal revenue, documentary evidence of ownership, spatial coordinates of rural estates) to distinguish occupied from unoccupied tracts, police the hinterlands, carry out evictions, and formulate policies (e.g., employer subsidies) that would bias labor markets in favor of elite interests. I test these propositions by examining how a powerful class of plantation owners in Imperial Brazil supported the creation of, and quasi-voluntarily complied with, the Land Law of 1850 (the country's first modern property law in land) in response to the exogenous abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1831. I show that parliamentarians who were also planters favorably voted for the bill that introduced the Land Law in the Chamber of Deputies. Moreover, I show that, once the new law had been approved, local parishes that had a greater proportion of slaves were more likely to experience higher rates of regularization. Untaxed and unbounded plantations that long benefited from Portuguese medieval traditions ended up being regularized as self-demarcated, taxable private freeholds. My analysis of Imperial Brazil yields three main insights about how property formation in the New World was carried out. First, and in contrast to the European experience, the advent of private property in land in polities of Australasia or Latin America was not a top-down phenomenon but the result of an arduous political negotiation and patterns of societal co-production between rulers and traditional landlords from the colonial era. Second, land abundance, not scarcity, threatened landlords' material wealth: by promising independent, small-scale cultivation to free rural workers, it threatened landlords with labor shortages. Finally, and even though individual and absolute proprietorship was made the hegemonic form of tenure, national policymakers enacted provisions that neglected property rights to marginalized populations such as freed slaves, immigrants, convicts, or peons. Therefore, the recognition of individual property rights in these societies was highly selective and did not follow the liberal, egalitarian principle of equality before the law.

Avery Island, Louisiana and McIlhenny Company provide a lens through which to understand how performances of masculinity and paternalism operated in the New South and were deployed for U. S. empire-building projects. Focusing on the tenure of Edward Avery McIlhenny as President of McIlhenny Company, this paper utilizes primary documents from the McIlhenny Company & Avery Island, Inc. Archives to construct a narrative based on correspondence between E. A. and his Wall Street investment banker, Ernest B. Tracy, revealing how E.A. confronted disaster capitalism and influenced the production of cultural tourism amidst environmental and economic crises in the 1920s and 1930s.
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This essay attempts to propose an art practice based on an ethical and aesthetic relation of author, subject, and viewer. This relationship is productive of results that are seen as critical to a precise, useful, and ethical representation of social problems.
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This thesis is a study of British colonial policy in southern Afiica in the 1 gill centwy. More specifically it looks at how British imperial policy, in the period 1875 to 1881, played itself out in two British colonies in southern Africa, Wlder the direction of a British imperial agent, William Owen Lanyon. It sets Lanyon in the context of the frontiers and attempts to link the histories of the people who lived there, the Africans, Boers and British settlers on the one han~ and the histories of colonial policy on the other. In doing so it also unravels the relationship between Lanyon and his superiors in London and those in southern Africa. In 1875 Owen Lanyon arrived in Griqualand West, where his brief was to help promote a confederation policy in southern Africa. Because of the discovery of diamonds some years earlier, Lanyon's administration had to take account of the rising mining industry and the aggressive new capitalist economy. He also had to deal with Griqua and Tlhaping resistance to colonialism. Lanyon was transferred to the Transvaal in 1879, where he was confronted by another community that was dissatisfied with British rule: the Transvaal Boers. Indeed, in Pretoria he was faced with an extremely difficult situation, which he handled very poorly. Boer resistance to imperial rule eventually came to a head when war broke out and Lanyon and his officials were among those besieged in Pretoria. In February 1881 imperial troops suffered defeat at the hands of Boer commandos at Majuba and Lanyon was recalled to Britain. In both colonies Lanyon was caught up in the struggle between the imperial power and the local people and, seen in a larger context, in the conflict for white control over the land and labour of Africans and that between the old pre-mineral South Africa and the new capitalist order. He made a crucial contribution to developments in the sub-continent and it is remarkable that his role in southern Africa has thus far been neglected.
History
D.Litt. et Phil. (History)