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Touts : Recruiting Indentured Labor in the Gulf of Guinea / Enrique Martino.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: Work in Global and Historical Perspective ; 14Publisher: München ; Wien : De Gruyter Oldenbourg, [2022]Copyright date: ©2022Description: 1 online resource (XII, 271 p.)Content type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9783110754643
  • 9783110755961
  • 9783110755923
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 331.73
LOC classification:
  • HD4875.E6 M378 2022
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- List of Maps and Illustrations -- Introduction: Smugglers and Strangers -- 1 Indentured Contract Labor -- 2 Take or Give: Recruiting Techniques -- 3 Panya: Contractual Inversions -- 4 Dash: Contractual Doubling -- 5 Lumpen-brokers -- Conclusion: Making Colonial Labor Markets -- Archives -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary: Touts is a historical account of the troubled formation of a colonial labor market in the Gulf of Guinea and a major contribution to the historiography of indentured labor, which has relatively few reference points in Africa. The setting is West Africa’s largest island, Fernando Po or Bioko in today’s Equatorial Guinea, 100 kilometers off the coast of Nigeria. The Spanish ruled this often-ignored island from the mid-nineteenth century until 1968. A booming plantation economy led to the arrival of several hundred thousand West African, principally Nigerian, contract workers on steamships and canoes. In Touts, Enrique Martino traces the confusing transition from slavery to other labor regimes, paying particular attention to the labor brokers and their financial, logistical, and clandestine techniques for bringing workers to the island. Martino combines multi-sited archival research with the concept of touts as "lumpen-brokers" to offer a detailed study of how commercial labor relations could develop, shift and collapse through the recruiters’ own techniques, such as large wage advances and elaborate deceptions. The result is a pathbreaking reconnection of labor mobility, contract law, informal credit structures and exchange practices in African history.

Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- List of Maps and Illustrations -- Introduction: Smugglers and Strangers -- 1 Indentured Contract Labor -- 2 Take or Give: Recruiting Techniques -- 3 Panya: Contractual Inversions -- 4 Dash: Contractual Doubling -- 5 Lumpen-brokers -- Conclusion: Making Colonial Labor Markets -- Archives -- Bibliography -- Index

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Touts is a historical account of the troubled formation of a colonial labor market in the Gulf of Guinea and a major contribution to the historiography of indentured labor, which has relatively few reference points in Africa. The setting is West Africa’s largest island, Fernando Po or Bioko in today’s Equatorial Guinea, 100 kilometers off the coast of Nigeria. The Spanish ruled this often-ignored island from the mid-nineteenth century until 1968. A booming plantation economy led to the arrival of several hundred thousand West African, principally Nigerian, contract workers on steamships and canoes. In Touts, Enrique Martino traces the confusing transition from slavery to other labor regimes, paying particular attention to the labor brokers and their financial, logistical, and clandestine techniques for bringing workers to the island. Martino combines multi-sited archival research with the concept of touts as "lumpen-brokers" to offer a detailed study of how commercial labor relations could develop, shift and collapse through the recruiters’ own techniques, such as large wage advances and elaborate deceptions. The result is a pathbreaking reconnection of labor mobility, contract law, informal credit structures and exchange practices in African history.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 02. Mai 2023)