Volume 57 part 3 (December 2012)

Summaries

Jacob Eyferth. Women’s Work and the Politics of Homespun in Socialist China, 1949-1980
For decades after the socialist revolution, people in rural China continued to wear homespun cloth, and millions of rural women continued to spend a large part of their waking hours producing cloth and clothing. This is puzzling because the state opposed manual cloth production as wasteful of labor and raw materials, and because state monopolies should have ensured that all cotton ended up in the hands of the state and that all rural people were supplied with rationed machine-made cloth. This article looks at the reasons for the long survival of handloom cloth. These include the ways in which manual cloth production was integrated with rural gender norms and with a gift economy that prescribed the exchange of cloth at major life cycle events, and the existence of interlocking scarcities (of grain, cash, cotton, and cloth) that forced rural people to sell their cloth rations and make their own cloth from whatever cotton they could scrape together.

Jeremy Krikler. A Chain of Murder in the Slave Trade: A Wider Context of the Zong Massacre
This article seeks to explore from a new angle the massacre associated with the slave ship Zong – that is, the murder of around 130 slaves at sea in 1781. Hitherto, the massacre has been looked at largely in terms of the law, particularly insurance law, and the commercial logic of the British slave trade. This article gives due weight to the overriding concerns of commerce in the Zong atrocity, but it also explains it in terms of the culture and context of the selection of captives for the slave trade, a process in which ship’s surgeons were prominent. It argues that this process habituated surgeons and captains – the Master of the Zong was both – to the possibility of death (at the hands of African controllers) of the captives they deemed unfit for the Atlantic slave trade. The article proposes that in the slave trade, medical expertise became yoked to the fateful decision of whether or not to accord commodity value to the captive. Where the surgeons decided to deny commodity value to a captive in the trade, he or she suffered 'commercial death’, which was all too often followed by death itself.

Juuso Marttila. Monopolizing the Property of Skill: A Prosopographic Analysis of a Finnish Ironworks Community
This article examines the survival of artisan labour structures and their property of skill in a case where neither a guild nor a union was present. Both of these institutions have traditionally been given as explanations for the survival of artisan labour structures and their property of skill. By using a prosopographic analysis of a Finnish ironworks community, this article follows a locally monopolized property of skill from 1880 to 1950. This monopoly was based on an informal apprenticeship system and the control of human capital, and was tied tightly to a closed network of smiths and their families. It was able to function in full force without the backing of any formal institutions as long as favourable local circumstances and the means and motivation to maintain it existed. Family relationships and social networks of smiths, together with the acceptance of patronage, functioned as an alternative to trade unions and guilds as primary strategic resources resorted to by smith households.

Vera Parham. "These Indians Are Apparently Well to Do": The Myth of Capitalism and Native American Labor.
In many histories of Native Americans it seems the original inhabitants of the Americas become obscured in the national mythology of colonization. People who do not fit into the liberal capitalist notion of individualism and economic development simply vanish from the annals of history. Even histories focused specifically on Native Americans cover relatively little of Indian responses to capitalist development. Yet, in the Pacific Northwest the story is not written so simply; Native Americans responded creatively and eagerly to new economic systems through participation in wage labor and the development of business ventures. This response allowed indigenous people in the region to prosper while protecting culture and tradition.