Using a comparative historical approach, this paper examines the problem of labour supply and utilisation in several ‘lands of recent European settlement’ (LRES) in the southern hemisphere, namely Argentina, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand in the 17th–19th centuries.  In these southern hemisphere LRES, labour was sought from both indigenous and imported sources. Much of the labour supply was coerced: slaves, indentured servants, convicts, serfs. The course begins by examining the foundations of unfree labour in the New World, and considers how this might have been extended into the lands invaded and settled by Europeans in the southern hemisphere. ‘Free’ immigrant labour was also sought from Europe, with varying degrees of success. Labour supply policies and practices were developed within a political context of imperial expansion, independence and anti-slavery, and within an economic context of the rise of  First Global Economy. In land-extensive, resource-rich, export-oriented economies such as these economic development could only be achieved if the labour supply problem was overcome. How successfully, at what cost and with what consequences?

Introductory bibliography

General

• E. D. Domar, ‘The causes of slavery or serfdom: a hypothesis’, Journal of Economic History, 30, 1970, 18–32
• Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8 (4), 2006, 387–409
• Donald Denoon, Settler capitalism: the dynamics of dependent development in the southern hemisphere (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983)
• David Northrup, Indentured labour in the age of imperialism 1834–1922 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995)
• Christopher L. Brown, ‘The politics of slavery’ in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic World 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
• Shula Marks and Peter Richardson (eds), International labour migration: historical perspectives (M. Temple-Smith, Hounslow, 1984)
• Robert Johnson,  British imperialism (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), chaps. 5 & 6

New World foundations

• Eric Williams, Capitalism and slavery (Andre Deutsch, London,1944), esp. chaps 1–4
• Robin Blackburn, The making of New World slavery: from the Baroque to the Modern (New York, 1997)
• Nuala Zahedieh, ‘ in Nicholas Canny (ed), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998)
• Jacob M. Price, in P.J. Marshall (ed), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998)
• David Galenson, White servitude in Colonial America: an economic analysis (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981)
• Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and slaves (Chapel Hill and London, 1986)
• A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: the transportation of British convicts to the colonies 1718–1775 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987)
• Paul E. Lovejoy and Nicholas Rogers (eds), Unfree labour in the development of the Atlantic world (Frank Cass, London, 1994) esp. Part I
• Richard Drayton, ‘The collaboration of labour: slaves, empire and globalizations in the Atlantic world, c. 1600–1850’, in A.G. Hopkins (ed), Globalization in world history (London, Random House, 2002)

Australia

• Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders and Kathryn Cronin, Exclusion, exploitation and extermination: race relations in colonial Queensland (ANZ Books, Sydney, 1975)
• Kay Saunders (ed), Indentured labour in the British Empire 1834–1920 (Croom Helm,
• London, 1984)
• Adrian Graves and P. Richardson, ‘Plantations in the political economy of colonial sugar production: Natal and Queensland 1860–1914’, Journal of South African Studies, vi, 1980, 214–29
• Kay Saunders, Workers in bondage: the origins and bases of unfree labour in Queensland 1824–1916 (University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1982)
• Ann McGrath and Kay Saunders (eds), Aboriginal Workers (Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Sydney, special issue of Labour History, No. 69, Nov. 1995)
• Stephen Nicholas (ed), Convict workers (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
• Deborah Oxley, Convict maids: the forced migration of women to Australia (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
• Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the global colour line: white men’s countries and the international challenge of racial equality (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008)

New Zealand and South Pacific

• Donald Denoon and Philippa Mein Smith, A history of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (Blackwell, Oxford, 2000)
• Clive Moore, Jacqueline Leckie and Doug Munro (eds), Labour in the South Pacific (Townsville, 1990)
• Jane Samson, Imperial benevolence: making British authority in the Pacific Islands (University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1998)
• K.R. Howe, Race relations, Australia and New Zealand: a comparative survey (Wellington, 1977)

Latin America/Argentina

• Guido Di Tella and D.C.M. Platt (eds),  The political economy of Argentina 1880–1946 (St Anthonys’/Macmillan, Oxford, 1986)
• Carl C. Taylor, Rural life in Argentina (State University of Louisiana Press, Baton Rouge, 1948)
• David Rock, Argentina 1516–1987: from Spanish colonization to Alfonsin (University of California, Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1987)
• Mark A. Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson, Colonial Latin America (6th edn, Oxford, Oxford University Press), 2008, esp. chaps. 4–6
• David McCreery, The sweat of their brow: a history of work in Latin America (Armonk, N.Y., M.E. Sharpe, 2000)
• John R. Fisher, The economic aspects of Spanish imperialism in America, 1492–1810 (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1997)

South Africa

• R.H. Elphick and H. Giliomee (eds), The shaping of South African society 1652–1840 (2nd edn., Cape Town, Maskew Miller Longman, 1989)
• Robert Shell, Children of bondage: a social history of the slave society at the Cape of Good Hope 1652–1838 (Hanover and London, Wesleyan University Press, 1994)
• Timothy  Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the origins of the racial order (Cape Town, 1996)
• Nigel Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1985)
• Nigel Worden and Clifton C. Crais (eds), Breaking the chains: slavery and its legacy in the 19th century Cape Colony  (Cape Towen, 1994)
• Leonard Thompson, A history of South Africa (3rd edn., Yale Nota Bene, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2001) esp. chaps. 1–4
• Robert Ross, Cape of Torments: slavery and resistance in South Africa (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982)
• Clifton C. Crais, White supremacy and black resistance in pre-industrial South Africa: the making of the colonial order in the Eastern Cape, 1770–1865 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992)
• Timothy Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the origins of the racial question (Cape Town and Johannesburg, David Philip, 1996)