Category Archives: labor

by | 8 March 2025 · 6:07 am

Railroad Telegraph Duties, 1860s

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 34-35:

He became a messenger-boy and trainee in a railroad company telegraph depot in Norwalk [Ohio], working in a different office than his father’s. He was promoted to the position of telegraph operator and manager at a salary of twenty-five dollars a month. In nineteenth-century America, children did menial and exhausting work in factories, farms, textile mills, and mines. Industrialists regarded the ideal machine as one so simple that a child could operate it. It was rare to give a young boy like George Kennan a serious responsibility like the signaling of trains.

As a train came through Norwalk, small boys peered through the depot’s windows to watch Kennan busily work his instrument to alert a central dispatcher of the train’s passing. The dispatcher then sent orders to the telegraph depot ahead of the train to give to its engineer: speed up, slow down (to arrive on schedule), halt at a siding, or make an unscheduled stop to pick up freight or passengers. At the depot ahead, a hapless employee went out to the side of the tracks and held out a five-foot pole with a large wire hoop, to which the dispatcher’s written order was attached. As the steam-whistling, smoke-belching train barreled toward the “hooper,” the brakeman reached down and, unless the hooper flinched, grabbed the wire hoop.

Initially Kennan functioned in a state of panic. “The excitement and responsibility of taking and transmitting orders upon which depended the safety of trains and passengers were a severe trial, at first, to my inexperienced nerves.” But he made no serious mistakes and “gradually acquired self-confidence, as the routine of railroad business became familiar to me.” Once he set up a field telegraph office at the scene of a train wreck, and on one local election night he helped his father receive the telegraphed tallies and announce them to an excited gathering.

American Morse Code (also called Railroad Morse or land-line Morse) in those days differed from current International Morse Code, which latter is better adapted for transmission through undersea cables.

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by | 10 February 2025 · 6:18 am

Communist Bloc Consumerism, 1960s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 652-656:

When Nikita Khrushchev made his “hare-brained” predictions of the imminent victory of Communism in 1961, he directly invited competition with the West, blithely telling delegates of the twenty-second Party Congress that their country would attain a living standard within two decades that would be higher than that of any capitalist country. Part of his optimism stemmed from the belief that the command economy’s problems lay not in planning but in the crude methods of plan calculation; in the view of party experts, the increased use of mathematical methods and computerization would generate improvements in quantity and quality of production.

But the nature of the competition depended on what was meant by “living standard.” Capitalism featured an endless array of consumer goods: dozens of types of automobiles (in new styles every year); countless varieties of cheese, or bread, or sweets, or consumer durables; fashions of clothing for every imaginable taste—as well as tastes that advertising had made imaginable. Socialism would not replicate this dazzling variety, in part because the provision of luxury goods seemed to contradict the higher proletarian morality. East German Communists called the Western race to buy goods in the latest style “consumption terror.” But once the distortions of suppressing the consumer sector disappeared, what exactly was the right balance between the frugal self-sacrificing ethos of Stalinism and the boundless decadence of capitalist culture? How much living space did socialist citizens require: would families have their own houses, or would they share communal apartments? Did socialist citizens drive cars or ride together in buses? Would they share meals at large common tables in cafeterias or occasionally dine in restaurants? What would those restaurants serve?

These questions were new if not revolutionary. The founders of state socialism had not considered the regime’s purpose to be individual consumption of goods and services; they did not disregard consumption entirely but subordinated it to the building of Communism. State socialism was a society based on productive labor. Once it had transformed the workplace and created a set of modern industries producing wealth, distribution would take care of itself. Communism would be the bounty from which all other goods would flow. But now that Communism was fading to an ever-more distant future, functionaries found themselves focusing on distribution more than ever before. Social scientists have depicted the regimes not as “Communist” but as “centers for redistribution,” and dictatorships “over needs.” Yet the functionaries who dictated needs through the state plan still wanted to know what people desired.

In Hungary, state functionaries began their research during the Stalinist period, when employees in the Hungarian Ministry of Internal Commerce had quietly surveyed the preferences of consumers, asking questions about specific goods whose quality they hoped to improve. East Germany’s Communists studied consumption from within the Ministry of Trade and Supply, but also created an Institute for the Study of Demand in 1961, renamed the Institute for the Study of the Market in 1966.

Beginning in the late 1950s, state planners throughout the bloc conceived of their populations as “shoppers,” and small specialty stores gave way to supermarkets and department stores, with expanded assortments of “nonessential” goods, not only responding to, but in a sense, provoking demand. In 1963 the Luxus department store opened in downtown Budapest. It sold goods of exceptional quality, beautifully presented—often at exorbitant prices. After years of privation, window shopping was again an urban experience, and East Europeans began to differentiate products by quality, reflecting the “growing importance of consumer choice in constituting one’s social identity.” The state provided abundant information on how and what to consume, through advertising as well as advice magazines, whether the topic was home decoration, fashion, cooking, or cars. By 1973, advertising represented 3 percent of national expenditure.

…

Thanks to the reorientation toward consumerism, socialist industries produced wealth that transformed people’s lives. The number of Czechoslovaks with automobiles rose from 19 percent in 1970 to 47 percent in 1985; with refrigerators, from 70.1 percent in 1970 to 96.7 percent in 1985; with color TVs, from 0.8 percent in 1976 to 26.8 percent in 1985.22 In Hungary, the trend was similar: television subscriptions went up twenty-fold from 1956 to 1962, car ownership multiplied by eleven times from 1960 to 1970; and from 1960 to 1980, the number of apartments went up by 50 percent. In the 1960s, Hungary’s population as a whole “enjoyed abundant, nutritious meals for the first time in history.” The rising affluence was reflected in ever higher salaries, which in turn stimulated increasing consumption. The Hungarian government boosted incomes by 20 percent after the 1956 revolution, and then 3–4 percent every year until the late 1970s. In Poland, wages increased by 41 percent between 1971 and 1975; in Czechoslovakia, they went up by almost 20 percent.

Excepting some highly rewarded experts and a few “shock workers” held up as models, Stalinism had aimed at reducing everyone to a common standard. That time of “distortion” was over, but what would follow was not clear. People were rewarded not according to need (though basic needs were guaranteed) but according to the value of what they contributed. But how would a socialist state measure value? Under capitalism, physicians might earn twenty times as much as unskilled laborers; how much higher should their salaries be under socialism? If physicians’ salaries were too low, students might not endure the years of tedium and hard work required for a medical degree. But if the income the state plan budgeted for white collar workers was high, they might come to seem a leading class in a society where class distinctions were supposedly fading.

…

Ultimately, the regimes in question opted against significant differentials in income. The Gini coefficients (statistical measures of social inequality) of state socialist societies were the lowest on earth (the Czechoslovak figure was the lowest measured anywhere). The cream of the intelligentsia and members of the upper party bureaucracy had privileged access to goods and services, but, as we shall see in greater detail, this was modest in comparison with the advantages in consumption enjoyed by Western elites. In the 1980s, physicians and engineers in the Soviet Bloc had salaries not much higher than those of skilled workers, and sometimes lower. Still, gradations emerged, more strongly in Poland with its widespread unofficial or “gray” economy. The power of society to produce and reproduce differentiations by status—if not class—was something the regime did not fully control.

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by | 9 February 2025 · 4:54 am

De-Stalinizing Czechoslovakia, 1960s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 623-625:

The Czechoslovak party leadership had a special fear of questions about Stalinism because they knew questions about that period’s crimes pointed directly to them. Antonín Novotný, Antonín Zápotocký, and Václav Kopecký all supported the purges and judicial murders of their comrades, and a few leaders had personally enriched themselves by taking things from the households of the comrades whom they had sent to the gallows. On festive occasions, some set their tables with the best silverware and linens of their murdered comrades. Yet the Czech Communist Party apparatus over which they presided was well rooted in factories and working-class neighborhoods, and it was able to draw on the deepest, most confident, and disciplined cadre reservoirs in Central Europe. It was not easily shaken.

The party had easily dealt with challenges from within Czechoslovak society. In 1956, after Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes, writers had demanded the lifting of censorship and freedom for authors who had been arrested. University campuses and some state ministries and party organizations were briefly transformed into hotbeds of critical discussion. The regime’s response was to focus criticism on Interior Minister Alexej Čepička for fostering a cult of personality, while resisting suggestions that former leader Klement Gottwald or anyone else was guilty of misdeeds. There was no mention of Rudolf Slánský. More importantly, within days of Khrushchev’s speech, party leaders took steps to improve people’s living standards, especially those with low incomes. The advanced Czechoslovak industrial base continued to churn out high-quality products, and so the population lived in relative affluence thanks to the sacrifices and investments made by earlier generations.

By the early 1960s, Czechoslovak industry began to wobble. Between 1949 and 1964, less than 2 percent of the value of the stock of machinery was retired, and its productivity had declined. For the first time, the Czechoslovak economy registered negative growth. Though the entire Soviet Bloc was confronted with problems of growth in the early 1960s, this was the most extreme case. Some radical rethinking was necessary. In a sense, the sluggish economy combined with impatient calls for destalinization from Moscow to send Czechoslovakia on the path toward serious and wide-ranging reform. Teams of Czech and Slovak economists led by former Mauthausen inmate Ota Šik urgently recommended taking decision making away from party bureaucrats—who calculated success in tons produced and not in terms of efficiency—and placing it in the hands of scientists, engineers, and trained managers. In line with ideas coming out of Yugoslavia and Hungary, the Šik commission stipulated that decisions on production, pricing, and wages should not be handed down from an anonymous bureaucracy, comprising about 8,500 functionaries of the national party apparatus, who were out of touch with local needs. Instead, decisions should be made locally, at the plant and community levels.

They urged that market mechanisms (above all, prices) be employed, so that enterprises would gain incentives to produce things that people wanted. They would do so by retaining profit (which in the command economy went to the center), and by rewarding employees according to their contributions. Basic changes like this were meant to have far-reaching consequences, for example, creating incentives to apply modern technologies to production. They would be a way of returning Czech lands to earlier prominence. But making plants more productive would also mean letting less-productive—indeed, unneeded—workers go.

These ideas for reform represented a growing consensus among leading economists throughout the bloc, extending to the Soviet Union. The ultimate problem, everywhere, was that workers as well as large production facilities were protected from market pressures and could not be fired or closed even if radically inefficient. In the post-Stalin period, outright terror was no longer an option. But for the time being, there was optimism. In the mid-1960s, economists felt that central planning would be qualitatively improved by employment of advanced mathematical models and computerization. They thought the deeper problem lay in the crude methods used in plan calculations.

As Stalinists were edged out of the leadership, younger, more enlightened figures entered the cultural bureaucracy, some of whom felt remorse and shame for the recent period of Stalinist extremism. A harbinger of new openness was an international Franz Kafka conference in Prague in 1963 under the aegis of Eduard Goldstücker, a professor of literature and former diplomat who had been condemned to death under Stalinism but had his sentence commuted for work in uranium mines. Now he was now minister of culture. Kafka (1883–1924) had spent his short life almost entirely in the city’s center, working in a law office during the day and writing all night after a nap. His stories evoked the disorienting anonymity of modern life, and by depicting human ciphers caught in webs of inscrutable and merciless bureaucracies, his writings seemed to foretell the fate of the region. Up to this time, Kafka had been a nonperson in Czech cultural life, and to discuss his work seemed to be a move toward waking up from the nightmares he had foreseen. Some of the hardline East German Communists invited to Goldstücker’s conference registered discomfort because they sensed that once unleashed, Kafka’s challenge would act like acid on the power of the state socialist bureaucracy.

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Filed under Czechia, democracy, economics, industry, labor, nationalism, Slovakia, USSR

by | 7 February 2025 · 6:24 am

Indian Slavery in California

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 248-250:

Foreign visitors who ventured out of Don Guadalupe’s home and onto his nearby Rancho Petaluma were able to gain a great deal more insight. At its peak in the early 1840s, this 66,000-acre ranch was tended by seven hundred workers. An entire encampment of Indians, “badly clothed” and “pretty nearly in a state of nature,” lived in and around the property and did all the work. As Salvador Vallejo recalled, “They tilled our soil, pastured our cattle, sheared our sheep, cut our lumber, built our houses, paddled our boats, made tiles for our houses, ground our grain, killed our cattle, dressed their hides for the market, and made our unburned bricks; while the women made excellent servants, took good care of our children and made every one of our meals.” The Vallejos were quick to paint a picture of benevolent patriarchy. “Those people we considered as members of our families,” Salvador Vallejo remembered. “We loved them and they loved us. Our intercourse was always pleasant: the Indians knew that our superior education gave us a right to command and rule over them.”

But what seemed pleasant and natural to the Vallejos was decidedly less so to the Indians. Some workers at Rancho Petaluma were former mission Indians. As administrator of the mission of San Francisco de Solano, Don Guadalupe had ample opportunity not only to dispose of mission lands and resources (in fact, his Sonoma home, the military barracks, and the entire plaza lay on former mission lands) but also to bind ex-neophytes to his properties through indebtedness. Faced with dwindling resources and loss of land, former mission Indians had little choice but to put themselves under the protection of overlords like the Vallejos. Other Indian laborers had been captured in military campaigns north of Sonoma. As comandante (commander) of the northern California frontier, Don Guadalupe had a guard of about fifty men to keep order in the region and prevent Indians from stealing cattle. He also used his guardsmen to procure servants. He was not alone in doing so. Especially after the secularization of the missions in 1833, Mexican ranchers sent out armed expeditions to seize Indians practically every year—and as many as six times in 1837, four in 1838, and four in 1839.

Mexican ranchers pioneered the other slavery in California, but American colonists readily adapted to it. They acquired properties of their own and faced the age-old problem of finding laborers. Their options were limited. No black slaves existed in California, at least not in the open, as Mexico’s national government had abolished African slavery in 1829. Asian workers were still rare. In the early 1840s, Don Guadalupe kept four Native Hawaiians at Rancho Petaluma, as did a neighboring American rancher named John Sinclair and some others. The “coolie” (Asian) trade began after the gold discoveries of 1848 and would reach significant numbers only years later. Indian labor was the only viable option. Although the indigenous population of Alta California had been cut by half during the Spanish and Mexican periods—roughly from 300,000 to 150,000—Indians still comprised the most abundant pool of laborers. Short of working the land themselves, white owners had to rely on them.

Traces of the earliest Euro-American settlers are still visible in northern California. John Sutter was the proprietor of a large fort by the junction of the Sacramento and American Rivers that is now a major tourist attraction in midtown Sacramento. George C. Yount was the first Euro-American to settle permanently in the Napa Valley; the wine-sipping town of Yountville is named after him. Pierson B. Reading was the recipient of a huge land grant that would give rise to the city of Redding. And Andrew Kelsey, a ruthless entrepreneur, built a ranching operation just south of Clear Lake that is now the town of Kelseyville. These foreigners were acquisitive, possessed good business sense, and were quick to appreciate the advantages of coerced Indian labor.

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by | 6 February 2025 · 1:59 am

Rise of Debt Peonage in Mexico

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 238-240:

The trappings of debt peonage were in place in Mexico as early as 1587, when an Indian from Michoacán recounted how some Spaniards had advanced him money “at a far higher price than it was worth and then seized my possessions and took me and my wife and children, and they have kept us locked up for twelve years, moving us from one textile factory to another.” The Indian did not know the amount he still owed or how much money he and his family had earned during their twelve years of forced servitude. But he was certain that peonage was worse than slavery because unlike the Africans with whom he toiled, he was not allowed to wander the streets freely even on Sundays. Over the centuries, debt peonage spread. As the Spanish crown abolished Indian slavery in 1542, prohibited the granting of new encomiendas in 1673, and phased out repartimientos after 1777, debt peonage gained ground.

After Mexico declared its independence from Spain, the process gained momentum. States throughout the country enacted servitude and vagrancy laws. The state of Yucatán, for example, regulated the movement of servants through a certificate system. No servant could abandon his master without having fulfilled the terms of his contract and could not be hired by another employer without first presenting a certificate showing that he owed “absolutely nothing” to his previous employer. In Chiapas the state legislature introduced a servitude code in 1827 allowing owners to retain their workers by force if necessary until they had fulfilled the terms of their contracts. Lashes, lockdowns, and shackles were commonly used. The same was true in Coahuila. In 1851 the state legislature there allowed owners to flog their peons. Interestingly, the governor opposed the measure because it would affect more than one-third of all the people of Coahuila, according to his calculations. Peonage in neighboring Nuevo León may have been just as common and was especially galling because it was customary to transfer debts from fathers to sons, thus perpetuating a system of inherited bondage. In these ways, servitude for the liquidation of debts spread all over Mexico. Although Mexico’s faltering economy kept the demand for workers in check in the early decades after independence, once economic growth resumed later in the century, employers went to great lengths to procure and retain coerced laborers.

A muckraking American journalist named John Kenneth Turner had unique access to this expanding world of servitude and provided the most detailed portrait of its workings. Posing as a millionaire investor, Turner traveled to Yucatán in 1908. He made his way to Mérida, a town that boasted extravagant mansions and was surrounded by about 150 henequen haciendas. The planters there received the American warmly. These “little Rockefellers,” as Turner called them, had grown rich by selling rope and twine made from the henequen plant. In the early years of the century, Yucatán’s total exports of henequen had reached nearly 250 million pounds a year. But a panic in 1907 had cut severely into their profits, “so they needed ready cash, and they were willing to take it from anyone who came,” Turner explained. “Hence my imaginary money was the open sesame to their club, and to their farms.”

Turner’s disguise as a prospective investor also allowed him to ask freely about how workers were hired. “Slavery is against the law; we do not call it slavery,” the planters told him again and again. They generally referred to the Mayas, Yaquis, and even Koreans working at their haciendas as “people” or “laborers,” never as slaves. The “henequen kings” were quite forthcoming about how debt served as a tool of coercion. “We do not consider that we own our laborers; we consider they are in debt to us,” the president of the Agricultural Chamber of Yucatán told Turner. “And we do not consider that we buy and sell them; we consider that we transfer the debt, and the man goes with the debt.” In spite of this verbal obfuscation, the fact was that an Indian worker could be acquired for $400 (400 pesos) in Yucatán. “If you buy now, you buy at a very good time,” Turner was told. “The panic has put the price down. One year ago the price of each man was $1,000.” Obviously, the reason the going rate was uniform was not that all peons were equally in debt, but that there was a market for them irrespective of their debt. “We don’t keep much account of the debt,” clarified one planter, “because it doesn’t matter after you’ve got possession of the man.” After paying the price, Turner was told, he would get the worker along with a photograph and identification papers. “And if your man runs away,” another planter added reassuringly, “the papers are all the authorities require for you to get him back again.”

Turner asked candidly about how to treat his workers. “It is necessary to whip them—oh, yes, very necessary,” opined Felipe G. Canton, secretary of the Agricultural Chamber, “for there is no other way to make them do what you wish. What other means is there of enforcing the discipline of the farm? If we did not whip them they would do nothing.” The American journalist witnessed a formal beating, with all the workers assembled, during one of his hacienda visits. The young man received fifteen lashes across his back with a heavy, wet rope. All henequen plantations had capataces, or foremen, who carried canes to prod and whack the Indians. Turner wrote, “I do not remember visiting a single field in which I did not see some of this punching and prodding and whacking going on.”

Slavery in Mexico in the twentieth century? “Yes, I found it,” wrote Turner in his extraordinary exposé, published on the eve of the Mexican Revolution. “I found it first in Yucatan.” According to him, the slave population of Yucatán consisted of 8,000 Yaqui Indians forcibly transported from Sonora; 3,000 Koreans, who had departed from the port of Inchon and were on four- or five-year labor contracts; and between 100,000 and 125,000 Mayas, “who formerly owned the lands that the henequen kings now own.” Turner estimated that in all of Mexico, there may have been 750,000 slaves, a figure that is almost certainly exaggerated but that underscores the expansion of the other slavery during the last few decades of the nineteenth century.

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by | 3 February 2025 · 5:17 am

Miners in Latin America, 1573-1820s

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 123-124:

Beyond northern Mexico, coerced Indian labor played a fundamental role in the mining economies of Central America, the Caribbean, Colombia, Venezuela, the Andean region, and Brazil. Yet the specific arrangements varied from place to place. Unlike Mexico’s silver economy, scattered in multiple mining centers, the enormous mine of Potosí dwarfed all others in the Andes. To satisfy the labor needs of this “mountain of silver,” Spanish authorities instituted a gargantuan system of draft labor known as the mita, which required that more than two hundred Indian communities spanning a large area in modern-day Peru and Bolivia send one-seventh of their adult population to work in the mines of Potosí, Huancavelica, and Cailloma. In any given year, ten thousand Indians or more had to take their turns working in the mines. This state-directed system began in 1573 and remained in operation for 250 years. Other mines of Latin America, such as the gold and diamond fields of Brazil and the emerald mines of Colombia, depended more on itinerant prospectors and private forms of labor. But even though the degree of state involvement and the scale of these operations varied from place to place, they all relied on labor arrangements that ran the gamut from clear slave labor (African, Indian, and occasionally Asian); to semi-coercive institutions and practices such as encomiendas, repartimientos, debt peonage, and the mita; to salaried work. Mines all across the hemisphere thus propelled the other slavery.

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Filed under Caribbean, industry, labor, Latin America, Portugal, slavery, Spain

by | 2 February 2025 · 6:36 am

Rescinding Emancipation in Manila

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 144-146:

The backlash against the campaign to free the Indians was strongest in the Philippines. The royal order of June 12, 1679, specifying that “no native could be held as a slave under any circumstance” and that “all Indians enslaved up to now are hereby set free as well as their children and descendants” caused a great deal of turmoil in Manila. As in Chile, the first recourse in the Philippines was to stall using the traditional formula: “This cédula [royal order] is of the kind that must be obeyed but not complied with,” observed the members of the Audiencia of Manila, “and we must write back to the Prince so that better informed he could send us his orders.” Their displeasure was patent. “When royal orders are so far apart from the natural law, they cannot be executed,” wrote an irate audiencia member to Charles II, “and with all due respect, even less so when that natural law is for the benefit of those who have been vanquished in war, for the victors would have a right to take their lives but only choose to take away their liberty.”

Yet even in the distant Philippines, there were some courageous crusaders. While waiting for the king’s reply, the audiencia’s attorney prodded his reluctant colleagues to make public the emancipation decree. The immediate result was a flood of requests: “So many were the slaves who crowded around this Royal Audiencia to claim their liberty that we could not process the multitude of their papers, even when being extracted in brief and summarily.” Many slaves around the capital abandoned their masters, who were left “without service,” as the archbishop of Manila, Felipe Pardo, observed.

It was in the provinces that the situation became truly critical. Native Filipinos faced total ruin, as they had most of their wealth invested in their slaves. Moreover, the slaves supplied much of the rice and other basic foodstuffs of the islands, and now “agitated and encouraged by the recent laws setting them free [they] went to the extremity of refusing to plant the fields.” The greatest threat of all was that “by setting these slaves free, the provinces remote from Manila may be stirred up and revolt, such as those in the Visayas and Nueva Segovia; and in the island of Mindanao, the malcontent Caragas and Subanos might well join forces with the Muslim insurgents there.”

In Chile the governor had taken the lead in opposing the Spanish campaign, but in the Philippines all branches of the imperial administration, including the governor, the members of the audiencia, the city council of Manila, members of the military, and the ecclesiastical establishment beginning with the archbishop, sent letters to Charles II requesting the suspension of the emancipation decree. Among the petitioners were Native Filipinos, for whom slavery had been a way of life since time immemorial. “When a principal native walks around town or visits a temple,” observed a Spanish chronicler, “it is with great pomp and accompanied by male and female slaves carrying silk parasols to protect their masters from the sun or rain, and the señoras go first followed by their servants and slaves, and then come their husbands or father or brothers with their own servants and slaves.” The emancipation decree came as a great annoyance to these Native slave owners. Those of Pampanga, a province on the northern shore of Manila Bay, in central Luzon, resolutely opposed the liberation of their slaves, whom they regarded as “the principal nerve and backbone of our strength.” They wrote a long letter to the king of Spain explaining how the Spanish galleons were built in the nearby shipyards of Cavite with teak and mahogany supplied in part by slaves: “And while our women together with our slaves plant the seeds, we men are up in the hills cutting wood for the royal yards.” By emancipating the slaves of Pampanga, the empire stood to lose its ships.

In the end, the Audiencia of Manila rescinded the king’s emancipation decree on September 7, 1682, and replaced it with a new decree: all previously liberated slaves had to return to their duties within fifteen days upon penalty of one hundred lashes and one year in the galleys (forced service as a rower aboard a galley, or ship). Charles II continued to press his case for liberation, but ending formal slavery in the Philippines proved very difficult.

In 1674, the Governor of Chile similarly resisted emancipation (p. 143):

The tenor of the governor’s letter was defiant, but it was consistent with a medieval legal tradition that can be summed up in the curious dictum “Obedezco pero no cumplo” (I obey but do not comply). In a vast empire such as Spain’s, royal officials used this response to show both their respect for royal authority and the inapplicability of a decree or order to a particular kingdom.

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by | 1 February 2025 · 4:24 am

Gold Rush vs. Silver Marathon

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 102-103:

THE CALIFORNIA GOLD rush transformed the western United States. Within one decade of James W. Marshall’s discovery of a few flecks of gold in a ditch in 1848, some three hundred thousand migrants had moved to California. These Chinese, Italian, German, Chilean, and other newcomers turned the remote and picturesque Mexican outpost of San Francisco into a bustling port. They also fanned out into the Sierra Nevada to build cabins, divert rivers, and pan for the yellow metal. This is a familiar story of long journeys, ethnic conflict, broken dreams, and explosive growth.

Yet the California gold rush was neither the largest metal-induced rush of North America nor the most transformative. By any measure, that title belongs to the earlier Mexican silver boom. In terms of duration, for instance, the California gold rush was like a hurricane. Gold production skyrocketed in 1849 but peaked as early as 1852, only four years after the start of the rush, and declined markedly thereafter. For all practical purposes, the rush was over by 1865, lasting less than twenty years. The use of pressurized water to wash down entire hillsides—a process known as hydraulic mining—kept gold production from declining even faster than it did. By contrast, Mexico’s silver boom started in the 1520s and grew through the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, reaching a plateau at the end of this period. Remarkably, it gained a second wind in the late seventeenth century and kept increasing during the eighteenth century, not attaining its high-water mark until the first decade of the nineteenth century—almost three centuries after the boom had begun. By then silver was the principal way in which empires and nations around the world stored their wealth, and the Spanish peso had emerged as the first global currency, used throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia, where it was often countersigned (authenticated by the treasury or other monetary authorities) and employed in everyday transactions. It remained legal tender in the United States until 1856.

…

Not only did the Mexican silver boom last longer than the California gold rush, but it was more extensive. The gold rush was confined largely to the northeastern quadrant of the state, with a few additional mines sprinkled along its border with Oregon and in southern California. Prior to the gold rush, there had been small strikes in the southern Appalachians (North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia), and after the California discoveries, new goldfields emerged in some of the Rocky Mountain territories. Mexico’s centuries-long silver boom surpassed these gold strikes in both geographic scope and sheer density. Historians usually refer to the mines of northern Mexico, but in truth the silver boom started in southern and central Mexico. Present-day tourists driving from Mexico City to Acapulco still stop at Taxco (1534), a silver town that Hernán Cortés himself developed. Taxco was part of a cluster of mines in southern Mexico that included Sultepec (1530), Amatepec (1531), Zacualpan (circa 1540), Zumpango (1531), and others. Only gradually did prospectors venture north into the lands of the Chichimecs, along the Pacific coast and up into the escarpments of the Sierra Madre Occidental. They had to bring in Indians from central Mexico as workers and overcome other tremendous logistical problems, but they succeeded in establishing a string of mines throughout western Mexico. After this initial push, prospectors crossed the Sierra Madre, proceeding on to the central plateau, where they founded some of the richest mines in the world, including Zacatecas (1546) and Guanajuato (1548). But even these mines were not sufficient. Spaniards next explored the present-day states of Durango and Chihuahua, as well as parts of northeastern Mexico. Altogether, they founded more than 400 mines (143 in the sixteenth century, 65 in the seventeenth century, and 225 in the eighteenth century) scattered throughout much of Mexico, from the semitropical regions of the south to the deserts of Chihuahua, and from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast.

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Given its longer duration and more extensive geography, it is no wonder that Mexico’s silver boom produced roughly twelve times as much metal as the nineteenth-century gold rushes in the United States—44.2 million kilograms (48,722 tons) of silver compared with 3.7 million kilograms (4,078 tons) of gold (see appendix 4). This massive production is even more impressive considering the work and danger involved. The gold of California lay in placers, or surface deposits of sand and gravel, which had resulted from mountains eroding and yielding nuggets or flecks of gold, which collected at lower elevations along hillsides and in streams. Mining these bits of precious metal required a great deal of superficial digging, carrying, and washing. As we saw earlier in the Caribbean, that could be very hard work, but it was not nearly as daunting or dangerous as mining silver. Instead of lying in open-air deposits, the silver had to be extracted from deep underground. The main shaft in the mines of San Luis Potosí was 250 yards long, and that in the Valenciana mine in Guanajuato plunged 635 yards down. When this shaft was completed around 1810, it was considered the deepest man-made shaft in the world. Digging to such depths required an untold amount of work, and yet this was only the beginning of a long, involved process that required bringing the ore to the surface (frequently on the backs of humans), crushing the rocks into a fine powder, and mixing that powder with toxic substances such as lead and mercury.

If the silver boom had occurred in the nineteenth century, Mexico would have become a worldwide magnet, like California. In an era of newspapers, steamboats, and widespread transoceanic travel, there is little doubt that the great Mexican silver mines would have lured immigrants from all quarters of the globe. But because the boom predated these communication and transportation conveniences and unfolded at a time when the Spanish monarchy prohibited all foreigners from going to the silver districts, Mexico had to make do with its own human resources. Whereas California attracted three hundred thousand people, colonial Mexico had to satisfy a hugely greater labor demand with no access to volunteers from the rest of the world.

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by | 31 January 2025 · 3:47 am

Redefining New World Slavery, 1500s

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 74-75:

In spite of the crown’s insistence, New World liberations were few and extremely difficult to accomplish. The specific application of the New Laws in the various colonies differed, but the results were much the same. In Venezuela, for example, the laws, and specifically the prohibition against Indian slavery, were made public but not enforced. Slave raids continued in Cubagua and Margarita even though royal officials were well aware that such activities were strictly forbidden. Colonists in Venezuela generally refused to give up their Indian slaves and insisted that the brand on a slave’s face was sufficient title and reason to keep him or her in bondage. They also retained the service of a class of Indians known as naborías, who were indigenous servants attached to them for life. The only difference between naborías and outright slaves was that naborías could not be legally bought and sold.

In contrast, in Central America an uncompromising and vigorous royal official named Alonso López de Cerrato embarked on blanket liberations of Indian slaves. Next to Bartolomé de Las Casas, Cerrato ranks as the most ardent champion of Indian liberty of the sixteenth century. As president of the Audiencia of Central America, Judge Cerrato prosecuted slave takers, criticized officials who “preferred to make friends with the colonists rather than applying the New Laws,” and refused to make invidious distinctions among Indians to justify the enslavement of some of them, as happened in Mexico. Cerrato’s vigorous reforms ended formal Indian slavery in Central America, restricted the use of naborías, and regulated the use of Indians as tamemes, or load bearers. But even these victories proved temporary. Cerrato acquired a reputation of being an overzealous crown official and died in 1555 largely repudiated by his fellow colonists. After his passing, subsequent officials reversed some of his policies. The naborías returned, Indian load bearers proliferated, and many Indians, though technically free, were compelled to render “personal services” to the Spanish colonists under various guises.

All over Spanish America, Indian slave owners and colonial authorities devised subtle changes in terminology and newfangled labor institutions to comply with the law in form but not in substance. Frontier captains no longer took “Indian slaves,” but only “rebels” or “criminals” who were formally tried and convicted; forced to serve out sentences of five, ten, or twenty years; and sold to the highest bidder. Colonists in Venezuela and the Caribbean resorted to naborías, while those in Central America continued to receive “personal services” throughout the sixteenth century. Ranchers in northern Mexico relied on encomiendas that, unlike those of central Mexico, often amounted to cyclical enslavement as they gathered their “entrusted” Indians at gunpoint and forced them to work during planting and harvesting time. Miners in many parts of the New World relied on the repartimiento system, in which Indians received token salaries but were otherwise compelled to work. In short, Spaniards adapted Indian slavery to fit the new legal environment, and thus it became the other slavery.

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by | 28 January 2025 · 6:57 am

Indian Slaves in Spain, 1500s

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 48-51:

To understand how the law shaped the lives of Indian slaves, we need to begin in Spain. During the first half of the sixteenth century, upwards of 2,500 Natives were shipped to the Iberian Peninsula and spent years there toiling in obscurity. Locked up in houses and shops in various towns and cities in southern and western Spain, they would have died without leaving a trace had it not been for the New Laws of 1542, which specifically required all Spaniards already in possession of Indians to show their legitimate titles of ownership and if they did not have them, to liberate their slaves at once. By all accounts, the Spanish king Charles I was very serious about enforcing this provision. Immediately after the promulgation of the code, he directed royal officials to make inquiries and look for Natives held in bondage improperly.

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Who were these Indians? They hailed from the areas colonized by Spain, first Española and the other Caribbean islands, then coastal Mexico, Florida, and Venezuela, as well as elsewhere. The most striking observation about them is that a majority were women and children. When we think of the Middle Passage, we immediately imagine adult African males. This image is based on fact. Of all the Africans carried to North America from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, males outnumbered females by a ratio approaching two to one, and they were overwhelmingly adults. The “reverse Middle Passage,” from America to Spain, was just the opposite: the slave traffic consisted mostly of children, with a good contingent of women and a mere sprinkling of men. The main reason was that Indians going to Europe were intended for work in homes, not on plantations, and European heads of household largely regarded children and women as better suited than men for domestic service. Children were more adaptable than adults, learned new languages quickly, and they could be trained and molded with greater ease. Women were less threatening than men and could be sexually exploited. These preferences had enduring demographic consequences. Most slaves held in Italian and Spanish households in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries—whether Slavs, Tartars, Greeks, Russians, or Africans—were women. Females comprised an astonishing eighty percent or more of the slaves living in Genoa and Venice, the two leading slave-owning cities in Italy. The situation was similar in the Iberian Peninsula. Contrary to what one might expect, women accounted for a majority of the African slaves in cities such as Granada and Lisbon.

Thus it is no wonder that Europeans would also demand women and children from the New World. Slave prices in the Caribbean already implied such preferences. Women were easily the most expensive of all Indian slaves. On average, adult Native women in Santo Domingo or Havana cost sixty percent more than adult males. Girls were next, followed by boys in the middle of the price range, then full-grown men, who were considerably cheaper (see appendix 3). It is difficult to know exactly what determined these prices. One possibility is that the supply of women and minors was less abundant due to restrictions on their capture and enslavement. But the most likely explanation is simply that the demand for women and children was much greater. Indeed, scattered price information indicates that the premium for Indian women and children spanned the entire hemisphere, from southern Chile to northern Mexico, and endured from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century.

Indian women and children were carried to Europe primarily because customers wanted them. Additionally, the well-intentioned but ultimately deleterious royal policies regarding Indian slavery played a role. As we have seen, the Spanish crown originally prohibited Indian slavery except in a handful of cases (cannibalism, ransomed Indians, and slaves obtained in “just wars”) but closed those loopholes in 1542 with the passage of the New Laws. As a result, Spaniards who wished to transport Indians to Europe had to demonstrate that they were taking legitimate slaves—branded and bearing the appropriate documentation from the time when slavery was legal—or were accompanied by “willing” Native travelers. Faced with these circumstances, traffickers went to great lengths to procure “willing” Indians, particularly children, who were more easily tricked and manipulated than adults. Years later, when these Indians appeared in court and recounted their lives, they often began with how they had been taken to Spain by “deception” and “trickery” when they were twelve or thirteen years old. Some enslaved children may have been even younger. Since Native children did not come with birth certificates, traffickers determined age by height, by the presence of pubic hair, and, undoubtedly, by the need to comply with regulations that prohibited the enslavement of children below age twelve.

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