The history of migration and creating a world market for labour
Knut Kjeldstadli, University of Oslo
In present day debate, we are impressed by the figure of one million migrants coming to Europe in one year. Without making light of the challenges involved, there are historical migrations that far surpass this number. After the First World War, five million people were relocated. During the Second World War, 90 million civilians moved to China. After the Second World War, 11–12 million people went westwards from German-speaking areas in the Balkans, Czechoslovakia and Poland to Germany. In the partition of India and Pakistan, 14 million were on the move. Estimates say that roughly one million died along the road. If we classify according to cause, there are migrations that we might categorize as ‘flights’ for political or other reasons — be it religion, ethnicity, gender, politics or environmental reasons. There is also a long history of migrations for economic reasons: from around 1500, people moved into labour markets or at least quasi-markets for labour power. These migrations may be understood as successive steps towards the creation of a world market for labour.
First there was voluntary migration, in the sense of colonizing from centres to peripheries. Examples are Portuguese trading stations in East Africa, India and South East Asia, the so-called old immigration in the US, other overseas migration from Europe, movements from Russia eastwards into Asia and settler colonies in Africa, such as Kenya and South Africa.
Slavery was the first form. The labourer and his or her labour power were the property of other men. The peak period was from the 16th century, culminating in the 18th century and mainly terminating during the 19th century, being abolished in the United States in 1865, eight years after the Ottoman Empire abandoned slavery. Slavery’s rationale was founded in the plantation economy, which was labour intensive and relied on the gathering of many cheap hands in the same place. The regions for plantations were the western parts of South America, the Caribbean and the southern states in the US. We should also add African and other slaves in the Arab region, more frequently carrying out household tasks than productive labour.
The next form of labour mobility represented a step forwards concerning voluntary migration and legal status. This was indentured labour or contract labour. Now the workers were free to enter into a contract. The agreements were protracted, yet there was a time limit when they expired. There were also strong elements of coercion and no room for proper negotiations. Many workers were never free — they had to buy food in the shops of the company at prices that secured permanent debt slavery. This system actually mobilized more labour than the slave trade and was widely practised in the then British Commonwealth, with large numbers of workers coming from India. These workers also were used on plantations and for railway construction, a reminder that the system was geared towards export of food and raw materials in a global market. From the point of view of the employers, indentured labourers fulfilled some of the same functions as slaves, but saved them the costs of paying for the upbringing and reproduction of new labour: the migrants were young.
Whereas slavery and indentured labour link to mercantile capitalism, plantation economies and colonialism, the fourth type of economic migration links intimately to industrial capitalism, namely labour migrants. The migrants concerned might not have any particular skills in demand, and they usually enter the labour market at the lower rungs of the social ladder. They differed from slaves by being, in principle, free to sell their labour power after negotiations and agreements. Examples of huge labour migrations are the three million contadini who went from Mezzogiorno in Italy to the United States, or the so-called Ruhrpolen, Polish miners and construction workers arriving in Germany at the end of the 19th century. In American history, this is known as the ‘new’ immigration, with people coming from Southern and Eastern Europe and other areas of the world.
From the point of view of the employers, migrants offered sufficient, cheap, often socially subordinate and flexible labour — the classical reserve army. Now — following Marx — we may speak of the wage-earning class as free — from a judicial point of view. They were not bound to the soil and had, in principle, the freedom to enter into an agreement. Yet how free were they? We may speak of wage slavery. Selling labour power was necessary to survive, and having sold the labour power, it belonged to somebody else. Added to this economic coercion is the social and political power of the bosses.
We should also see that, in a market economy, labour might be carried out by unfree workers, a point driven home by sociologist Robin Cohen. He lists serfdom, debt bondage, apprentice labour, child labour, contract labour and penal labour; forms of domestic service; concentration camp labour and so-called corrective labour as “involuntary” labour. Such unfree forms combine with free wage labour in various ways.
The end of the typical era of labour migration dates back to the beginning of the oil crisis in the 1970s. From then on, employment sank in the receiving countries. The so-called “Labour Society” with large amounts of general labour was at an end, and migrants now had fewer job options abroad.
Historical parallels are never perfect. The history of labour migration shows us that integration processes were not without pain. However, by and by things settled down following large migrations. Today an estimated 3 per cent of the world population are migrants, and despite this — important as it is — most people stay in their country of birth. This raises “the immobility paradox” — given the inequalities in the world, why do most stay on? That is another story.
Further reading
Castles, S. and Miller, M. J. 2004. The Age of Migration. International Population Movements in the Modern World. Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan.
Cohen, R. 2006. Migration and its Enemies, Global capital, migrant labour and the nation state. Aldershot, Ashgate.
Harzig, C., Hoerder, D., and Gabaccia, D. 2009. What is Migration History. Cambridge, Polity Press.
Hoerder, D. 2002. Cultures in Contact. World Migrations in the Second Millenium. Durham and London, Duke University Press.
Livi-Bacci, M. 2012. A Short History of Migration, Cambridge, Polity Press.
Lucassen, J., Lucassen, L. and Manning, P. (Eds) 2011. Migration History in World History, Leiden and Boston, Brill.
Manning, P. 2005. Migration in World History, New York and London, Routledge.
Olmert, J. 2012. Globale Migration. Geschichte und Gegenwart [Global Migration. History and the present day]. C.H.Beck Verlag, Munich.
Scott, F. D. (Ed) 1968. World Migration in Modern Times, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
Stalker, P. 2001. The No-Nonsense Guide to International Migration. Verso, London.
Knut Kjeldstadli (born 1948) is professor of modern history at the University of Oslo. He has worked on the history of labour, work and technology, on general societal history, on popular movements, in particular on the labour movement. He has published several contributions within the theory and method of history. The last period he has worked on migration and its result — more complex societies. In 2003 a three-volume history of immigration to Norway appeared, edited by Kjeldstadli. It obtained the national award for best non-fictionbook of the year. Among his later publications are: A History of Immigration, ca. 900 to 2000 (with Grete Brochmann, 2008; revised and updated Norwegian version published 2014), Akademisk kapitalisme (2010) and Mine fire besteforeldre [My four grandparents. A family story on the emergence of modern Norway] (2010).
