Across Empires: Plantation Labour in the Aftermath of Abolition

 COMPTE-RENDU  >>  Launch Event: Prof. Cristiana BASTOS, "Across Empires: Plantation Labour in the Aftermath of Abolition" (TEAMS, 21 OCT 2022)

On October the 21^st, Cristiana Bastos, Professor at the University of Lisbon, presented her research Project called “Colour of Labour”, involving thirteen other researchers, in the context of the Launch Event of the EUTopia University Legal History which includes partners from six European Universities (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, CY Paris, Warwick, Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, Ljubljana, and Nova Lisboa). This event brought together professors and students from these universities on Teams and will be available for asynchronous viewing to project partners.

Bastos studies how 19th and 20th centuries plantations produced race. If the notion of race has, since the ravages of 20th century authoritarianism, become taboo in Europe, as it is finally recognized not to be a biological reality, it is, however, a central concept for the anthropologist, who uses the notion to designate a social reality as a shared experience. In this perspective, racism is considered as producing race and not the other way around.

It is with this in mind that Bastos studies Portuguese migration, especially of Madeirans, to show that Portuguese became a race in the context of their work in Guyana, Angola, Hawaii and the United States in relation to the modes of recruitment of "free" or contract labour, i.e., labour relations after the abolition of slavery. Bastos introduces us to a paradigm that emerged during her contact with the sources, which show the same effects of plantation on the racial categorisation of Portuguese people. Hence the Portuguese in the context of their labour immigration were not considered as white but as an intermediate group, who, although subordinate, enjoyed advantages compared to the descendants of Afro-American slaves, notably in relation to business and commerce.

She supports this historiographic and anthropological study on labour migration with field research and empirical cases that help her complexify history. The methodological innovation of her research project also lies in focusing on flows across empires by overcoming borders limitations and exploring the plantation-factory continuum. The study of this Portuguese work migration for the sake of massive labour, shows the common dynamics of the hierarchisation of ethnic groups while highlighting the differences between the geographical areas studied, for example the tensions that break out in Guyana and that did not appear in apparently more harmonious in Hawai’i.

The recruitment of Portuguese people is the third step in the historical dyad between plantation and race, taking place after the colonial plantations based on the African slave-trade and the post-Abolition indentured labour calling on workers from South and East Asia (notably China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines South Pacific islands) for the plantations in the Americas, the Caribbean, Pacific and Indian Ocean. Portuguese first started moving to Colonial Guiana in the 1830s to work in the sugar plantations then settle Hawaii for the same reasons from 1870s.

Bastos describes a family immigration that led men to bring numerous children and relatives through those dangerous travelling and living conditions. For instance, 20.000 Madeirans and Azoreans settled in Hawaii to work in sugar plantations, supported by a massive labour contract system where they knew harsh working and living conditions. Hawaii then saw a race-based social structure that results in low social mobility.

In Hawai’i protestant missionaries who had arrived in the 1810s soon became the land-owning class by acting also as people of business. The enterprise handled by elite class led the white descent of missionaries to rule the Hawaiian society. Mid-19^th century, they entered the sugar economy and promoted labour immigration to overcome the decline in the native Hawaiian population.

The concept of plantation does not refer to any agricultural crop: plantation is an empire monocrop overlapping capitalism which appeals to massive labour immigration. It is in this particular context, but also in that of the Portuguese arrival to New England from the 1890s in cotton manufactures, that large labour immigration produces racialized identification. A branch of the project lead by Cristiana Bastos also covers contemporary issues (in Portugal, in Italy), but is not covered by her presentation of 21 October.

Bastos’ presentation was a great success and generated a lot of enthusiasm among the partners. Among the questions from the audience was what contribution legal historians could make to this project. Bastos emphasised that she would like to gain a better understanding of the legal forms and terms of employment of the contracts of plantation workers.                                                                                                       E.B.

© Cristiana Bastos