

#Upper volta colonial impact free
However, the areas that suffered the most were those given to concessionary companies in central Africa: the colonized were forced to take part in an exhausting natural rubber harvest, which was imposed at the price of the worst maltreatment, and which was denounced by Edmund Morel ( Red Rubber., 1907) for the Congo Free State, and by André Gide ( Voyage au Congo, 1927) for French Equatorial Africa (AEF). In Java, the governor Van den Bosch implemented in 1830 a system of compulsory cultivation obliging peasants to devote 1/5 th of their land and work to export crops for the benefit of the state. For example, “Malaysia alone recorded 7 million entries of Chinese migrants between 18”-and “nearly 15 million Chinese coolies left their country to work across the globe”-numbers that can be compared to the 1-2 million Indians used solely in the British Empire. Although the use of African manpower recruited under contract ended in 1859 in French colonies, the British (in Maurice and South Africa), and to a lesser extent the French (from Pondicherry toward Reunion), resorted to the manpower of Indian coolies and the Chinese. Indentured labor can also be mentioned in this context, for the conditions of recruitment (in general for three to five years), along with the harshness of the conditions of workers, warrant connecting it with forced labor, in fact if not in law.ĭuring the nineteenth century, abolition came at a time when colonial plantations of the older type had a growing need for manpower, and as new European colonization required more and more workers.

As soon as they arrived in Cape Town in the seventeenth century, the Boers used the forced service of portions of local populations in addition to that of imported slaves. Under the authority of the Indian leader, the cacique, who was recognized by the Spanish authorities, a percentage of the population was forced to work in rotation, for a number of weeks or even a year, on farms ( estancias, haciendas), sugar mills ( trapiches), or weaving workshops ( obrajes). It was in continuity with the personal corvées demanded by the Mexicas (Aztecs) and Incas of their tributaries. Forced labor during the early modern periodįorced labor was implemented in Spanish America, notably in mines such as Potosí in 1545.


Five forms of it were described in the International Labour Organization's General Conference in 1930: requisition, prestation, conscript labor, penal labor, compulsory cultivation. One can classify as such various forms of imposed labor that, unlike slavery, were temporary and compensated, but that had conditions inferior to those on the market.
