The Transformation of the World (153 page)

After roughly 1830, this opposition became more and more glaring in the United States as criticisms of slavery proliferated. There had been free labor in the American colonies as far back as the early eighteenth century, but for a long time it remained the exception rather than the rule across the spectrum of contractual labor services. The existence of a time-specific contract was the most important difference between indentured service and slavery or serfdom. Nor was indenture seen as a relic from archaic times; in fact, from the point of view of social and legal history, it was a thoroughly modern form of labor relation. All this made it easier to overcome. The critique of slavery called into question whether indentured service could really be considered a relationship that workers entered into of their own free will. This was the key issue, not the way in
which indentured workers were actually
treated
. And since, unlike in the case of slavery, no one openly defended the practice, it was effectively wound up in the decade following its discursive delegitimation in the 1820s.

Legal thinking in the Anglo-American world henceforth considered free labor the self-evident norm. American courts first began in 1821 to rule that labor obligations must be freely entered into, and that such was not the case if a worker, having decided to leave his place of work, was physically prevented from doing so. This interpretation then fed back into the debate on slavery, and in the Northern states “free labor” became a rallying cry in the fight against Southern secessionists. At the same time, the use of physical violence against workers was defined as fundamentally illegitimate. The US legal practice moved ahead of England in the further sense that it no longer distinguished between a worker with a home of his own and a bonded laborer, maid, or servant kept as part of the master's household.
¹¹³

The development of the concept of free labor in postrevolutionary France, as expressed in the Code Napoléon and echoed elsewhere in Europe, might be the theme of another story. And yet another could be told about domestic service law (
Gesinderecht
) in Germany, where, long into the high age of industrialization, “domestics” in Prussia and elsewhere remained subject to a number of extra-economic fetters on their freedom. It is true that the preamble to the Civil Code of 1896/1900, applicable throughout the Reich, ended the right of masters to chastise their servants. Yet in a weakened form (“indirect” powers of chastisement, etc.) it continued to haunt many areas of the law until the very end of the imperial period. Such chastisement must have continued to exist on a large scale.
¹¹⁴

Robert Steinfeld's interpretation is especially interesting because it makes the nineteenth century the decisive period for the development of free labor. But decisive in what sense? For Steinfeld, free labor did not become dominant immediately after the end of indenture. As in the case of slavery, or Russian serfdom, there was a transitional phase. Even in English industry, nonmonetary coercion did not vanish from one day to the next. Statutory law and the actual administration of justice gave entrepreneurs and agrarian employers the means to enforce a continuation of the labor relationship. For many decades, relics of coerced labor lingered on within relations of free wage labor.

In a celebrated study published in 1974, Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman claimed that, contrary to the view of classical economists, slave labor was hardly less efficient and rational than free labor on plantations and in crafts or industry.
¹¹⁵
Since then, the idea of a linear progress from the one to the other has become hard to credit. We should therefore give up the notion that free labor and coerced labor had nothing in common, belonged to distinct eras, and represented completely different social worlds. It makes more sense to think in terms of a continuum in which workers were subject to various forms and combinations of coercion.
¹¹⁶
This would push the great watershed further into the
century, since even in England extra-economic coercion disappeared from the industrial wage relationship only after 1870 or thereabouts. Moreover, many of the functions of indenture did not immediately become redundant. Migrants to neo-European societies sought the help of fellow countrymen already living there: the Chinese soon had their Chinatowns, while southern Europeans, for example, had semilegal patrons who combined the roles of recruitment, protection, and exploitation, similar in this respect to the contractors who often organized the influx of first-generation workers into cities outside Europe.
¹¹⁷
This was not free labor in the sense of liberal theory. Besides, the kind of indirect labor relations mentioned above, with the contractor acting as a buffer, were not peculiar to areas outside Europe. The impresario, for example, who supplied singers to Italian opera-house owners until late in the nineteenth century, was nothing other than a contractor of this kind.
¹¹⁸

Labor Market Imbalances

A new factor that appeared toward the end of the century was the rise of the organized labor movement. Little by little the growing capacity of collective demands to counter the power of the owners of capital corrected a fundamental imbalance in the labor market, the real breakthrough coming only when legislation created the scope for nationwide collective bargaining.
¹¹⁹
The difficult ascent of free labor led to a paradox: only the restriction of market freedom through monopolistic negotiations on the workers' side enabled individuals to free themselves from the instruments that the purchaser of labor had at his disposal—above all, the power to play workers competing for jobs against one another and to dismiss them at a moment's notice. Free labor, in a substantive sense of the term, arose out of the curbing of unlimited contractual freedom that came with the development of the welfare state. Contractualization of the labor relationship was not by itself capable of preventing or overcoming the “indignity of the workers” condition” (as the French sociologist Robert Castel put it). Endowed with nothing other than his physical labor power, the worker was a creature lacking rights or guarantees and was in this respect comparable to the slave; the pure freedom of the labor market was therefore inherently unstable.

After a few decades, the rudiments of the welfare state were laid through the interplay of workers' protests, elite moves to head off revolution, and a moral sense among small reform-minded groups. Philanthropic businessmen were the first to realize that a bare “freedom of labor” did little to further social integration, and the social welfare measures that began to be introduced in the 1880s systematized such concerns into a truly novel principle of compulsory insurance.
¹²⁰
Behind this was a view of society as a tension-ridden plurality of collectives rather than an aggregation of individuals—a view shared in principle by conservatives and socialists. This alone made it possible to develop a conception of the welfare state that went beyond classical liberalism. On the other hand, not all the theoretical and political representatives of classical (essentially British and
French) liberalism had been extreme individualists adhering to the “Manchester School” of unfettered competition. The “new liberalism” could therefore attach itself to the general trend of the times toward state protection. In the last two or three decades before the First World War, definitions of the “social question” in the industrialized countries of Europe rested on a certain basic consensus. Social insurance—which in Germany was primarily a conservative project to stabilize the system—was taken up by a
liberal
government in Britain after 1906.
¹²¹

Free wage labor, which appears to us today as such a natural relationship, did not appear desirable under all circumstances; “proletarianization,” especially in agrarian societies, was seen with good reason as a move down the ladder. In Southeast Asia, for example—where work was held in high esteem, people had a strong attachment to their land, and traditional patron-client relations were not thought of as particularly exploitative—the idea that it was worthwhile voluntarily to “seek” work developed only gradually with the emergence of local urban labor markets. For a long time, employment in wealthy households and other nonmarket forms of dependence were considered preferable.
¹²²
Only two basic survival strategies are open to weaker members of society: either reliance on the strong or solidarity with others who are weak. The first option generally offered greater security. It is true that colonial governments were often willing to abolish slavery, but they hesitated to allow the formation of a politically restive class of landless laborers—except in strictly controlled enclaves of the plantation economy. In the late nineteenth century, the sedentary farmer without political ambitions or pent-up grudges, working hard for subsistence or export and regularly paying his taxes, was the ideal subject for most colonial and other regimes around the world; “free wage labor” in the countryside was a suspect innovation. The picture was different in industry, although socialists were not alone in their doubts about completely individualist freedom in asymmetrical market conditions.

CHAPTER XIV

 

Networks

Extension, Density, Holes

“Network” is a metaphor, at once vivid and deceptive. Networks produce two-dimensional connections: they are flat, and they structure level spaces. A network has no relief. Network analysis in the social sciences, useful as it is, always risks overlooking or underestimating hierarchies, the third, vertical dimension. This is associated with the fact that networks are in a way democratic; all their nodes initially have the same value. Even so, a historian cannot do much with them unless the possibility is allowed that a network has strong centers and weak peripheries, that the nodes therefore vary in “thickness.” Not every network has to be constructed like a spider's web, with a single center holding everything in place. The basic form of urban networks or trading networks is just as often polycentric as monocentric. The network metaphor is useful mainly because it permits the idea of multiple points of contact and intersection—and hence also because it draws attention to what is
not
networked. Each network possesses structural holes, and the current fascination with unfamiliar, previously unnoticed connections and relations, especially over long distances, should not make us forget the somber surfaces on the map indicating uninhabited nature or thinly populated countryside.

A network consists of relations that have attained a certain degree of regularity or permanence. Networks are traceable configurations of a repetitive relation or interaction. Hence they are structures with “medium” consistency: neither one-off chance relations nor organizationally entrenched institutions—although the latter may grow out of networklike relations. One of the outstanding features of the nineteenth century was the multiplication and acceleration of such repeated interactions, especially across national boundaries and often between regions and continents. Here we need to be more precise about dates: the six decades between midcentury and the First World War were a period of unprecedented network building. This is all the more striking because many of the networks were dismantled during the First World War, and particularist forces grew stronger in the decades following it. If the formation of worldwide networks can be described as “globalization” (a broad definition of this colorful
term), then the period from roughly 1860 to 1914 witnessed a remarkable surge of globalization. We have already discussed two examples: intercontinental migration and the expansion of colonial empires.
¹
This chapter will consider other global aspects that emerged here and there: transportation, communications, trade, and finance.

To think in terms of networks was a nineteenth-century development.
²
In the seventeenth century the English physician William Harvey discovered the body as a circulatory system, and in the eighteenth century the French doctor and “physiocratic” theorist François Quesnay applied this model to economy and society.
³
The next stage was the network. In 1838 the politician and scholar Friedrich List mapped out a railroad web—a “national transportation system”—for the whole of Germany: it was a bold vision of the future. Before 1850, however, it was not possible to speak of a railroad network in any European country. Friedrich List proposed the fundamental planning schema, and when the railroads were actually in place certain critics took up the web image and presented them as a dangerous spider stretched out over its victims. Later, the web came to stand for a way of visualizing a city, competing for a time with “labyrinth” or, especially in the United States, with “grid.” The self-image of societies as networks thus has its roots in the nineteenth century, even if the full range of meanings—up to today's “social networks”—appeared only much later.

Perhaps the strongest everyday experience of a network, and also of dependence on functioning networks liable to break down, came with the linking of homes to centrally managed systems: water from a tap, gas from a pipe, electricity from a cable.
⁴
There was a difference as to the extent to which the private sphere was invaded: for instance, between the telegraph, an office machine that no one put in their living room, and the telephone, which after a slow start became a domestic fixture and an object of private use. At the beginning of the twentieth century, only a tiny minority of the world's population was linked to technical systems. “India” was said to be part of the international telegraph network, but the great mass of Indians had no direct experience of this—even if the influence of systems such as the railroad and telegraph on flows of products and information also made itself felt indirectly in daily life. Virtual opportunities must be distinguished from things that can actually be achieved. In the 1870s it was possible to circumnavigate the globe north of the Equator by steam-powered means of transport, without porters, horses, or camels, and without the effort of traveling on foot: London—Suez—Bombay—Calcutta—Hong Kong—Yokohama—San Francisco—New York—London. But who undertook this journey, aside from the gentleman Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne's novel
Around the World in Eighty Days
(1872; his model was the eccentric American businessman George Francis Train, who tried to set that record in 1870 and later cut it to sixty-seven days in 1890) and the American reporter Nellie Bly, who in 1889–90 needed no more than seventy-two days?
⁵