Worker Protection or Commercial Facilitation: The British Empire, Labor Governance and the Gradual Invisibilization of Labor Coercion During the Age of High Imperialism

Authors

Christopher Roberts, The Chinese University of Hong KongFollow
Michelle OngFollow

Abstract

This article considers labor governance and coercive labor practices in the British Empire between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, it focuses its attention on several major commissions of inquiry undertaken around the British Empire in the period, as well as reforms that took place alongside those inquiries. In part, the article concludes these reforms were motivated by protective purposes, demonstrating some degree of genuine concern with workers’ well-being. More significantly, however, it finds these reforms were motivated by British imperial desire to ensure stable labor supplies, enhance the legitimacy of the British Empire, and establish more secure conditions of colonial governance, in the face of rising resistance from workers. While in the process the British Empire checked the tendency of certain private actors towards particularly egregious abuses, it typically only did so in support of the longer-term and bigger-picture interests of commercial actors. In addition, at the same time the British Empire took steps to restrict more extreme forms of abuse, it also gradually invisibilized its ongoing role in labor coercion, helping to render the assistance it continued to provide to employers more effective.

Recommended Citation

Christopher Roberts & Michelle Ong, Worker Protection or Commercial Facilitation: The British Empire, Labor Governance and the Gradual Invisibilization of Labor Coercion During the Age of High Imperialism, 24 Seattle J. Soc. Just. 157 (2025).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/sjsj/vol24/iss1/9