ABSTRACT
As the world capitalist system developed during the nineteenth century
non-slave labour became a com m odity that circulated around the globe
and contributed to capital accumulation in metropolitan centres. The best
examples are the emigration o f millions o f Asian indentured servants and
European labourers to areas o f European colonisation. Asians replaced
emancipated African slaves on plantations in the Caribbean and South
America, supplemented a declining slave population in Cuba, built
railways in California, worked in mines in South Africa, laboured on
sugarcane plantations in Mauritius and Fiji, and served on plantations in
southeast Asia. Italian immigrants also replaced African slaves on coffee
estates in Brazil, worked with Spaniards in the seasonal wheat harvest in
Argentina, and, along with other Europeans, entered the grow ing labour
market in the United States. From the perspective o f capital, these
workers were a cheap alternative to local wage labour and, as foreigners
without the rights o f citizens, they could be subjected to harsher methods
o f social control . 1
1 Among the many studies on this subject are : Shula Marks and Peter Richardson (eds.), International Labour Migration : Historical Perspectives (London, 1984); Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery : The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920 (London, 1974); Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Frank Moya Pons and Stanley L. Engerman (eds.), Between Slavery and Free Labor : The Spanish-Speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, 1985); Peter Richardson, Chinese Mine Labour in the Transvaal (London, 1982) ; Watt Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru (Durham, 1951) ; Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, / 881-190} (Baltimore, 1981); Lucy M. Cohen, Chinese in the Post-Civil War South (Baton Rouge, 1984); Thomas H. Holloway, Immigrants on the Land: Coffee and Society in Sao Paulo, 1886-1934 (Chapel Hill, 1980); and James Scobie, devolution on the Pampa (Austin, 1964).
