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This chapter analyses the historical evolution of the creation and aesthetics of Nigerian artists during the colonial period through local musicians and actors. Moreover, the importance of oral traditions before the interaction with Europeans – such as proverbs, panegyrics, and rituals – incorporated Christianity through schools by the Nigerian elite and Western music and instruments. In the case of music, the chapter mentions how precolonial cultural traditions shaped it, the influence of ex-enslaved people from the Caribbean (such as Brazilians) who returned to the city of Lagos, and European contributions. Methodologically, the chapter follows musicians such as Fela Sowande, Victor Olaiya, and Bobby Benson. They, in different ways, integrated precolonial elements to create a national tradition that would create unity in the colonial period. In the case of theater, the chapter also mentions its historical evolution: from traveling theater to the work of Hubert Ogunde, Kola Ogunmola, and Duro Ladipo, as icons representing creativity and aesthetics, introducing Nigerian cultural elements to theater, such as Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo language, myths, and stories, linking with Western traditions such as Christianity. The chapter concludes that the artists of the colonial period sought, through their musical and theatrical works, to preserve precolonial traditions.
This chapter discusses the various social changes experienced in Nigeria during its colonial phase. It brings together the various events, changes, and processes established in previous chapters, focusing on their impacts, specifically on the social landscape of Nigeria. It takes important topics such as women’s rights and industry and explores what they were like in precolonial times, the changes seen during the colonial period, and the social ramifications of these changes. In colonial Nigeria, colonial officials fostered social change to promote British economic and political interests. Generally, this meant the diffusion of Western ideas, customs, material culture, and institutions, among many others. These were to be promoted (often violently) at the direct expense of their Indigenous counterparts (except for Northern Nigeria, which retained many Islamic and Indigenous institutions). The specific impacts of these efforts and the social changes seen during this period will be explored in detail. Finally, the chapter explores the social development of Nigeria’s Western-educated elite. Through direct exposure to Western customs and their hypocrisy, they would organize in opposition to colonial rule, culminating in Nigeria’s independence.
The ILO was created in a period of globalization in the early nineteenth century to help governments agree on health and safety protections for workers. These labor standards were renewed after World War II and today the ILO is the primary global agency at the interface where governments and labor meet on a global scale. This chapter looks at the authority of the ILO in both theory and practice. The theory is provided by the legal texts of the ILO’s conventions and agreements, and a case study on Myanmar’s long-running violations of the rules provides insight into some of the lived experience of the rules.
The return of remains of Korean forced laborers who died in Japan between 1940 and 1945 has been a major controversy for over half a century for Koreans. These deaths reveal the tragic consequences of Japan’s World War II forced labor system. Japan forcefully mobilized nearly 800,000 Koreans who were taken to at least 1,589 worksites in Japan and 381 worksites in Hokkaido. Over 10 percent of all Koreans forcefully mobilized throughout the empire are estimated to have died or disappeared, but the precise number of Korean forced laborers’ deaths inside Japan remains unknown. Until 1989, remains recovered from graves throughout Japan by local people were immediately cremated by Japanese Buddhist priests, making cause of death and precise identities forensically impossible. This account relates the first and only comprehensive effort to exhume Korean forced labor graves without immediate cremation, coordinated by Korean and Japanese activists and academics based in Hokkaido. This effort helped revive a neglected aspect of Korean forced labor history while focusing on the concerns of bereaved Koreans seeking the remains of their lost family members. Nevertheless, the project had serious limitations due to working in a difficult political environment and neglect of forensic science protocols in mass grave excavations and identification. This complex situation prevented identification of victims’ names and cause of death that could have held the Japanese government and companies involved accountable.
This chapter details the rapid and radical changes experienced by Jews in Nazi Germany, focusing on the ways in which Baeck reacted to the annexation of Austria, the November Pogrom (Kristallnacht), and the German genocidal politics. Besides detailing Baeck’s political activities, this chapter is the first to offer a full analysis of his most contested work, a 1200-page unpublished manuscript he co-authored with Leopold Lucas and Hilde Ottenheimer. Although Baeck claimed it was produced for the conservative resistance, archival documents suggest it was written at the command of Nazi officers. Baeck’s discussions of race and Jewish colonization throughout history as they appear in this text reveal that he is treading very cautiously, citing Nazi scholarship on the one hand, while insisting on the rights of Jews on the other. This ambiguity is best explained by treating this manuscript as forced intellectual labor, an understanding that sheds light on Baeck’s imperial imagination at a time when the organization he headed came under Nazi supervision. Now named the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, needed to make difficult choices, including regarding deportations.
Chapter 2 takes a deeper dive into the literatures on pragmatism and agonism to illustrate how, when combined, they provide the intellectual framing and underpinnings of the varieties of remedy approach. While pragmatism highlights the need to analyze the dynamics between local actors, their advocates, and the firms involved in the abuse, agonism opens us to the notion that non-violent contestation and confrontation could have a potentially positive role. With this foundation, I develop the varieties of remedy approach, exploring how contestation (e.g. claim making) shapes governance outcomes (e.g. access to judicial or non-judicial remedy mechanisms). Three pathways are discussed in greater depth in Chapter 2 – Institutional Strength, Corporate Characteristics, and Elevating Voices – and tested empirically in subsequent chapters.
Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.
Recent debates on the economic history of the United States and other regions have revisited the question of the extent to which slavery and other forms of labor coercion contributed to the development of economic and political institutions. This article aims to bring Africa into this global debate, examining the contributions of slavery and coercion to periods of economic growth during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that the coercion of labor in a variety of forms was a key part of African political economy, and thus when presented with opportunities for growth, elites turned first to the expansion of coerced labor. However, while labor coercion could help facilitate short-run growth, it also made the transition to sustained growth more difficult.
This chapter examines the multiple ways in which obtaining food was tied to labor in the ghetto. This includes trading labor for resources to purchase food as well as supplemental food which was provided for certain occupations. It explores different types of work in the ghetto including forced labor, work for the Judenrat, factory work, home-based piece work, as well as employment in the ghetto’s private sector. The chapter looks at ways in which people utilized their social networks to obtain better work as well as how hunger impacted productivity. This chapter also explores the tension between obtaining work that provided enough funds to meet one’s food needs versus positions which protected one against deportation and the strategies employed by individuals and households to meet their needs of adequate food and protection. This chapter also discusses the struggles of the Jewish communal leadership in providing labor to the Germans while feeding working and nonworking ghetto inhabitants. This chapter examines how the Germans took control of food distribution out of the hands of the communal leadership in order to prioritize labor.
The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery reveals the way recent scholarship in the field of slavery studies has taken a more expansive turn, in terms of both the geographical and the temporal. These new studies perform area studies-driven analyses of the representation of slavery from national or regional literary traditions that are not always considered by scholars of slavery and explore the diverse range of unfreedoms depicted therein. Literary scholars of China, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa provide original scholarly arguments about some of the most trenchant themes that arise in the literatures of slavery – authentication and legitimation, ethnic formation and globalization, displacement, exile, and alienation, representation and metaphorization, and resistance and liberation. This Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery is designed to highlight the shifting terrain in literary studies of slavery and collectively challenge the reductive notion of what constitutes slavery and its representation.
While supersanctions may not have improved the terms of Liberia’s loans very much, they did have unanticipated impacts on the structure of domestic political institutions. This chapter examines these effects, and in doing so offers a new interpretation of one of the more infamous phases in Liberia’s economic history: the 1930 League of Nations investigation into forced labor, when an investigative commission established by the League found that Liberian government officials had engaged in the use and export of forced labor. Over the first decades of the twentieth century, foreign financial controls imposed on the Liberian government as a condition of borrowing expanded from control over customs revenue to include nearly all sources of cash revenue by 1927. This chapter documents the Liberian government’s efforts to develop alternative sources of revenue with which to pay an expanded administrative establishment during repeated periods of fiscal crisis, and their ultimate turn toward a decentralized system of in-kind taxation in the form of forced labor and seizures of goods. These practices led to both domestic political upheaval and international isolation, and the threat of a League of Nations mandate over Liberia. This chapter contributes to a growing understanding of the contributions of forced labor to African government budgets in this period, as well as to work on the impacts of supersanctions on domestic institutions.
This chapter analyzes the nationwide coordination and concealment of the government’s “anti-Haitian campaign.” What they called the anti-Haitian campaign was actually the beginning of a genocide that the perpetrators variously misrepresented in terms of deportation, imprisonment, forced labor, and flight. This chapter brings to light leading functionaries, including Emilio Zeller and Reynaldo Valdez who played key strategic roles as architects of the genocide. By exploring records of mass arrests, and the jailers’ own descriptions of conditions of imprisonment over the course of 1937, the chapter casts doubt on the exact fate of detainees. The anti-Haitian campaign also included racialized discourse around disease, vagrancy, and illegality. The chapter argues that not only was the 1937 Genocide planned, but that a critical appraisal of the actions that the officials were willing to write about offers one of the best windows into the killings that they deliberately concealed. It wrestles with the interpretive problem of official concealment and suggests that deportation was also a euphemistic cover for killing. This chapter interrogates the fact that military and migratory documents are completely absent for the northern border regions during the most violent months of 1937 and places the archival record into dialog with eyewitness accounts.
A contemporary anti-slavery movement has emerged in response to the diverse array of forms of forced labour that proliferate in the twenty-first-century global economy. The movement has encouraged survivors to speak out about their experiences of enslavement and to work as activists in a new abolitionist cause. As a result, the genre of the slave narrative, so popular among nineteenth-century abolitionists, has reemerged as a form of protest literature. This article suggests that by documenting the very fact of enslavement in the 21st century, the new slave narrators collectively reveal the widespread failure of the promises of globalisation, even as they celebrate their emergence into it. Through these narratives, we are able to discern the true contours of globalisation, the radical inequalities that remain and are fed by the transnational flow of commodities, including but not exclusively labour, and the slavery that is endemic and even encouraged in these global transactions.
This chapter provides an overview of some of the more common human rights violations with corporate involvement. The non-exhaustive overview aims to provide some initial insights into how corporate conduct can affect and impact human rights and to show the breadth of issues that fall under a BHR lens. Hence, the focus is on problems rather than solutions. The issues and violations dealt with are selected with a view on multinational corporations in particular. Furthermore, the selected issues are cross-cutting – that is, not specific to one particular industry. The chapter covers human rights problems relating to employment relations, corporate supply chains, affected communities, the environment, and particularly vulnerable groups such as Indigenous peoples or human rights defenders. Violations include discrimination, child labor, forced labor and modern slavery, and land grabbing, among others.
Recent colonial compensation lawsuits reflect the metamorphosis of historical grievances in collective public memory into tort claims in private law. This article provides a synthetic view of the nexus of colonial law and history in South Korea–Japan relations, focusing on cross-border litigation brought by former forced laborers and victims of sexual servitude known as “comfort women” during World War II. The concept of public policy (ordre public) in Korea, which has colonial origins, has long served law courts as the standard for deciding the validity of a juristic act. But of late heavy reliance on the general clauses of law in legal proceedings has risked turning history and law into handmaids of national spirit, muddling historical accountability and legal liability. Improvement of South Korea–Japan ties should start from a more accurate understanding of colonial laws and a rounded appreciation of their shared legal history.
Stalinist repressions, epitomized by the Gulag, and grand industrialization projects warrant exploration of their implications for the social fabric of a place. I find social reproduction not only despite of but in some ways because of the communist industrial strategy. Whether inside or outside of the Gulag, Soviet industry appropriated both the hardware – the infrastructures of modernity – and the software – the human resources in pedagogy, medicine, research, public enlightenment, and engineering. In turn, social mechanisms of relationships of status and closure converged with the state’s developmentalist and survivalist imperatives. Unpacking these channels of resilience even when set against the most coercive aspect of Soviet planning provides additional credence to the argument that Russia had not been the purported melting pot that annihilated the society of estates. I first perform cross-regional statistical analysis to demonstrate that Soviet industries built on the tsarist industrial heritage. Next, I provide illustrative vignettes of appropriations in Samara’s consumer services, strategic armaments, and petrochemicals. I also discuss an aspect of development that has invited the naïve observer to assume a de novo approach to the Soviet project, namely the establishment of “brand-new” cities like Tolyatti. I then explore how even large-scale population movements followed the logic of social closure.
This Chapter was initially drafted during the Obama Administration. The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) had been negotiated and, although it had not yet been ratified in the United States, the Administration and majority of policy makers were in favor of its implementation. Since that time, as previous Chapters have made clear, the United States Administration changed and the United States withdrew from participation in the TPP. While unfortunate, the Administration’s political decision to withdraw from the TPP does not come as a surprise; an examination of the negotiating history of those provisions illuminates a stark political divide within the United States, even prior to the change in Administrations. Fortunately, the other eleven parties to the TPP persevered, resulting in the Comprehensive and Progressive TPP.
On June 17, 2021, the United States Supreme Court reversed and remanded a suit filed against Nestlé USA and Cargill under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) for lack of jurisdiction. This case has already garnered attention over the nature of the dispute (child slaves in Africa), the Supreme Court's treatment of jurisdiction under the ATS, and the finding shared by five of the nine Supreme Court justices that domestic corporations can potentially be sued under the ATS. This analysis focuses on the child slavery and global supply chain aspects of the decision.
Chapter 4 examines the legal, economic, and political life of the Free Womb law in the Colombian Pacific and the making of new racialized labor structures. For the first time, enslaved women were granted limited legal rights of maternity and motherhood over their children—at least those born after the promulgation of the 1821 law, which was at times malleably interpreted by lowland masters to defend their claims over Free Womb children. By carefully examining notes of sale, mining inventories, dowries, and wills, this chapter charts the formation in the northern Pacific lowlands of a parallel market for Free Womb children, which instantiated a new and at-times confusing regime of property rights. Reversals of the 1821 law are the subject of the chapter’s last section, which looks at extension of Free Womb bondage, partly inspired by the British Caribbean apprenticeship model established under the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, in the aftermath of Colombia’s first civil war (1839–1842).