The Transformation of the World (150 page)

In Rhodesia, where the peak years were from 1892 to 1910, the railroad labor force consisted of men from all over the world, including not a few Italians and Greeks. The highly skilled white workers were recruited in Britain, less-skilled ones in South Africa. In many places, Rhodesia and India among them, railroad companies went on to become the largest private employer outside agriculture. The Indian railroads were the largest construction project in Asia in the nineteenth century, as well as the greatest single capital investment in the British Empire. By 1901 the country's 25,000-mile network, fifth in the world behind the United States, the Tsarist Empire, Germany, and France, was longer than those of Britain (22,000 miles) and the Danubian Monarchy (23,000 miles) and not much shorter than the French (24,000 miles).
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The construction work, which began in 1853, engaged more than ten million workers over the next five decades (the peak figure was 460,000 Indians in 1898). This unique labor density, roughly three times higher than on British sites,
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was attributable in part to the large percentage of women and children; it was thought preferable to employ whole families, which could be had at rock bottom wages and often came from a landless underclass with no village ties. Many of these were, so to speak, unskilled “professionals,” moving from site to site as and when they were needed. There are no precise statistics on the matter, but the number of human lives sacrificed in India's railroad construction must have been exceptionally high. It was more dangerous than the unhealthiest factory labor.
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On all continents, new labor markets with a translocal and often global reach took shape around the railroad construction sector. Many large sites tapped the vast pool of unskilled labor in Asiatic agrarian societies. But there was also a need for qualified train drivers, conductors, signalmen, and repair-shop technicians. This opened up new opportunities for local people below the color bar that, though always shifting, was never absent in the colonies. Such a move up the social hierarchy might be associated with demands of a nationalist inspiration. In Mexico, for example, before the revolution that began in 1910, local workers fought to gain access to highly skilled positions on the US-financed railroads. A new railwayman's habitus developed all over the world, most striking where the railroads were state owned and their officials came to represent public authority.

The Ocean Workplace

Ships were another typical workplace of the nineteenth century.
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It is hard to imagine today, in the age of giant tankers and tiny crews, but sailing ships required a large, mostly unskilled, workforce. Long before industrialization, free wage labor was the norm on Europe' s oceangoing merchant ships.
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The early days of the steamship changed little in terms of crew size. Since passenger and freight volumes were increasing at the same time, including on rivers such as the Rhine, Yangtze, and Mississippi (Mark Twain closely described work routines from personal experience in his
Life on the Mississippi
, 1883), the ship reached its zenith as a workplace in the nineteenth century.
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But it remained what it had been in the early modern period: a cosmopolitan space, with men recruited from all around the world. It was also, along with the army and the plantation, the workplace most heavily charged with violence: flogging was not banned on US ships until 1850; use of the cat-o'-nine-tails—an especially brutal form of chastisement—was permitted in the Royal Navy until the mid-1870s; and officers directly inflicted violence on sailors in the merchant navy too. Finally, the ship was an extremely hierarchical and segmented social space, with the quarterdeck an unmarked area reserved for the captain and the forecastle an inferno for the crew.

For all the
Moby-Dick
romanticism, whaling ships—together with premodern mines (still notoriously dangerous around 1900 even in an otherwise highly modern United States) and the Peruvian islands from which guano excrement was collected—were among the most unsavory workplaces imaginable, especially if, as in the Australian case, their main hunting grounds were far from home. In 1840 it was not unusual for a whaling expedition to last four years, with ports of call few and far between. The record was held by the
Nile
, which in April 1869 put into its home port in Connecticut after eleven years at sea. The food was usually appalling, the sleeping quarters cramped, and the medical care utterly minimal, while those who braved the dangers of the trip were subject to the discipline of an all-powerful captain. The dead whales, as much as ten tons in weight, were used for many purposes. No place was safe from the blubber-fueled fires that burned continually under the giant oil boilers; comparisons with hell came naturally to those who experienced the scenes on board. One of the reasons for the decline of whaling was that less-insalubrious job opportunities were available in other sectors.
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Office and Home

The office as such is not a nineteenth-century invention. As soon as there is a bureaucracy, its staff must have somewhere to sit—and so the office has existed in every civilization with a system of writing. In the Imperial Palace in Beijing, one can still see the austere workrooms used by high officials, and it is easy to imagine that they looked no different many centuries ago. The great East India
companies ran administrative headquarters in London and Amsterdam, which required secretaries and administrative staff to handle the huge quantities of paper communication.
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What was new in the nineteenth century, especially after around 1870, was the bureaucratization of enterprises above a certain threshold in size; the male and female employee ensconced in their office workplace became an ever more important social category. However, “employee” is only a very broad and formal term covering the “white-collar” work situation of all those who did not have to get their hands dirty—from managers to humble bookkeepers to the female secretaries who proliferated from the mid-seventies on with the spread of the typewriter. The lower one's position on the ladder, the smaller was the scope for individual initiative and the greater the share of predefined executive tasks. Employees were also to be found in large industrial enterprises, especially the accounts and engineering departments, and they were predominant in sectors such as wholesale and overseas trade, banking, and insurance, where there were hardly any manual workers. The spread of white-collar activities created new functional and gender hierarchies. The market for female labor grew in this “tertiary” sphere—which included the retail trade, from small shops to department stores—more rapidly than it did in the “secondary” sector of commerce and industrial production. This cannot really be described as a “feminization” of given types of work, since women often found employment in
newly
created
occupations. They had few opportunities to move into higher jobs. Women worked where the male management wished to put them.
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Outside Europe and North America, the first employees were in branches of foreign companies. As all these agencies operated in an unfamiliar business environment, they were almost always forced to employ some local people in managerial positions, naturally paying them a lower salary. So arose the figure of the “comprador,” especially striking in China, but also important elsewhere—originally an indigenous merchant, in good repute and with some capital of his own, who was employed on a temporary basis by a European, North American, or even Japanese company. He took care of local business contacts, vouched for the trustworthiness of suppliers and customers, and had responsibility for a local workforce that he recruited and paid himself.
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In the 1920s, some large Chinese enterprises, mainly banks at first, sowed the seeds of a local employee class by adopting a combination of indigenous and Western business principles. In Japan this process took place a few decades earlier, as the country took the lead in economic modernization and bureaucratization.

Whereas the white-collar job became a typical form in the West only with the expansion of the service sector and the bureaucratizatio nof large-scale industry, domestic employment was one of the oldest economic activities in the world. Servants have existed always and everywhere in the homes of the rich and powerful, their number being an important indicator of status. In all civilizations, court life rested upon the service labor of thousands. Little changed in this respect so long
as courts and “stately homes” remained in place, as they did worldwide throughout the nineteenth century. But in many countries there was also a fast-growing demand among the urban bourgeoisie for regular cooks, nannies, coachmen, and the like. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, many intellectuals from modest backgrounds were still able to—or had to—struggle along as private tutors; such was the case with the great German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who never had any other position—in contrast to his friend Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who went on to become a professor of philosophy.
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By the end of the century, however, the spread of higher-quality public education meant that such individualized tutorships were more or less a thing of the past. At least outside the Tsarist Empire, where quite a few performers in distinguished string quartets or orchestras still had serf status in 1850, musicians also ceased to be in the service of the nobility, as Joseph Haydn had been for three decades with the Princes Esterházy—although it is true that King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Richard Wagner's patron, still allowed himself the luxury of an in-house quartet.
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Meanwhile, other forms of employment acquired a new salience. In Europe, the middle and upper bourgeoisie differentiated itself from the petite bourgeoisie in nothing as clearly as the employment of domestic servants, or at least of a maid. This was a token of luxury, however modest, and one of the most striking status symbols in the societies of the West.
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Justified as complaints of exploitation often were, the position of maid offered young women from the country a chance to gain a foothold in the urban labor market under relative secure conditions. A life of cooking and washing was not necessarily an unacceptable alternative to factory work or prostitution. In large Russian cities toward the end of the century, for example, most women newly arrived from the villages went into domestic employment rather than industry. In Moscow in 1882, more than 39 percent of households had one or more servants; the comparable figure in Berlin was around 20 percent.
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The phenomenon continued to grow in importance, so that by 1911 it was the most extensive occupation recorded in the British census: 2.5 million domestics outside agriculture, as against 1.2 million employed in mines and quarries.
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In the United States, even in the economically most developed Northeast, domestic service was by some way the largest female occupation in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. For black women, a small minority, there were scarcely any other options.
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Since the maid was often the only actual employee in less-affluent households, she differed in both function and gender from the hierarchical staff of a “stately home.” There seems to have been a general trend to the feminization of domestic labor in the nineteenth century, but it was not everywhere as pronounced as it was in a few European countries. Female employment in private urban homes was especially attractive where agricultural work was on the decline and new opportunities were not yet sufficiently available in industry or the rest of the service sector.
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Outside Europe and North America, households with a large staff of mostly male domestics remained somewhat longer. If market supply and
demand was not the only regulator, it could sometimes become a burden for householders to maintain a large number of lackeys and dependents. In some societies—China, for instance, where concubines were a feature and adoption was common and easy to arrange—the boundary between family member and staff was more fluid than in Europe. In the colonies, the lowliest white representative of the state or a private company had a host of “boys” and other servants at his disposal; the availability of such cheap labor in Asia and Africa was one of the most prized benefits that came with the colonial way of life.

Domestic service was an important source of employment in areas where there was no shortage of willing and suitable people. The maid or butler had to be capable of communicating smoothly and correctly with Sir and Madam and their guests; some of the upper-class glitter had to rub off onto the staff. The solitary African servant was a rare exception in a European bourgeois household. The globalization of domestic service—Polish cleaners in Berlin, Filipino maids in the Gulf States of Arabia—came only in the late twentieth century. But migration in the opposite direction took place on a lesser scale in the nineteenth: European countries, especially Britain, exported governesses all around the world, and these became important agents of cultural transfer. The housekeeper or nanny-cum-teacher of young children was highly regarded not only among European expatriates but also in wealthy Oriental homes, where offspring were expected to speak English and/or French, to play the piano, and to master Western table manners. Sometimes, as in Istanbul, some uneasiness was felt in orthodox quarters about the corrupting influence of Christian staff in a Muslim household.
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A governess in Europe and beyond occupied a high position in the service hierarchy, one of the most prestigious open to “honorable” women from the middle layers of society, so long as they had few opportunities to become a schoolmistress or college teacher.
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3 Toward Emancipation: Slaves, Serfs, and Peasants