Work, Class and Empire: An African Historian's Retrospective on E. P.

Thompson
Author(s): Frederick Cooper
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Social History, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May, 1995), pp. 235-241
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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DISCUSSION
Frederick Cooper

Work,

class

and

historian's
B. P.

empire:

an

African

retrospective on

Thompson

Let me begin by mentioning the titles of some of the majorbooks in African labour history
in the 1970S and I98os: The Development of an African WorkingClass; The Making of an
African WorkingClass: Ghanaian Miners' Struggles 1870-1980; Islam and Urban Labor
in Northern Nigeria: The Making of a Muslim WorkingClass; and A WorkingClass in the
Making: Belgian ColonialLaborPolicy, Pnivate Enterprise, and the African Mineworkers,
I907-I951.

General history texts take up the progressivisttheme: The Making of

ContemporaryAfrica and The Making of Modern South Africa.' African labour historians
are obviously trying to position themselves in relation to Thompson's famous book. At the
very least, one can say that Thompson has inspired and - maybe more importantly legitimated scholars in a part of the world where focusing on workers as a category is a new
endeavour.
The more difficult question is whether the content of Thompson's text has been as
influential as his title. To a certain degree, the answer is no. For some, the operative word
has indeed been 'making'. The point Africanist labour historians wanted to make clear and legitimate by invoking Thompson - is that class formation did indeed take place in
Africa. Africanists wanted to emphasize, as did Thompson, that workers were present at
their own creation: the historian's task is to focus on experience, on how industrial labour
and industrial time discipline defined the conditions under which collective consciousness
and collective action were shaped. For the Africanist of the 1970s, this meant getting out of
a conception of Africans as bound by some kind of traditionalism, as well as the more
' Richard Sandbrookand Robin Cohen (eds),
The Development of an African WorkingClass
Jeff Crisp, The Making of an African
(I975);
Working Class: Ghanaian Miners' Struggles
870-1980 (I984);
Paul Lubeck, Islam and
Urban Labor in Northern Nigeria: The Making
of a Muslim WorkingClass (Cambridge, I986);
John Higginson, A WorkingClass in the Making:
Belgian Colonial Labor Policy, Private Enter-

pnise, and the African Mineworkers, I907-1951

(Madison, I989); Bill Freund, The Making of
Contemporary frrica (Bloomington, I984);
Nigel Worden, The Making of Modern South
Africa (Oxford, 1994).
It should be added, in
view of my criticisms of the 'making' model
which follow, that these are all works of high
quality, and they deserve credit for opening up
the subject of African labour history.

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Social History

236

VOL. 20

: NO.

recent fashion of searching for a kind of African authenticity. It allowed Africanists to

leave the automatic legitimation of being the experts on a small and exotic field, and to join
others in facing questions of general theoretical significance.2
Thompson, of course, was not arguing that a working class was formed merely because
it worked, and he went to some pains to insist that the working class he saw being made was
English. The question one would want to see asked by an Africanist would be what
Africans brought to the workplace: whether the meanings they attached to work, the kinds
of work groups in which they participated, and the notions they had of collectivity affected
their actions in an era of capitalist intrusion. On these scores, the works cited above are
disappointing: they tend to emphasize that Africans too could be workers, that they too
could develop a sense of class solidarity and that they too could organize trade unions and
conduct strikes. Labour historians emphasize what the workplace brought to African
workers rather than the other way around. In such terms, Thompson's followers have
tended to follow on precisely those points where he has been most criticized - the rather
teleological insistence that all the threads he unravels lead by the book's end to a singular
English working class - and not at the point which he himself chose to develop during the
final phase of his historical career- the differing ways in which power was articulatedand
contested in pre-industrial Great Britain.3
The most serious engagement with the issue of what a working class brings to its own
making comes from southern Africanists, not surprisingly given the intensity of capitalist
development in that region.4 One of the most interesting articles is by Keletso Atkins, who
takes on an issue with which Thompson was particularly concerned - time discipline.
Thompson himself had made use of anthropological accounts of time in pre-industrial
economies including Africa, not altogether escaping from the then common assumption
that one could see the past of Europe in the present of Africa. Atkins's argumentcame from
the other end: she showed not only that Zulu had their own concepts of time and sense of
what forms of discipline contributed most to an agropastoraleconomy, but that Zulu
temporal notions infiltrated the work organization of colonial, urban South Africa. The
importance of day labour, for instance, should not be seen as a strategy of capital, but as a
capitalist adaptation to an African work rhythm, and the myth of the lazy African that
became deeply inscribed in European descriptions of Africans was an indication that the

For an excellent overview of writing on

African labour history, see Bill Freund, The
AfnicanWorker (Cambridge, I988). My own
views on theoretical issues are spelled out in
'Urban space, industrial time, and wage labor in
Africa' in Frederick Cooper (ed.), Struggle for
the City: Migrant Labor, Capital, and the State

in UrbanAfrica(BeverlyHills, I983),

7-50.

Calhoun, The Question of Class

Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism during the Industrial Revolution (Chicago, I 982); PatrickJoyce, Visionsof the People:
Industrial England and the Question of Class
184o-1914 (Cambridge, I99'I).
3Craig

I
Work in this field is so rich and varied that it
is hard to say where the readerunfamiliarwith it
should begin. One place is a series of volumes of
collected papers: Shula Marks and Anthony
Atmore (eds), Economy and Society in Preand Shula
Industrial South friica (I980),
Marksand Richard Rathbone (eds), Industrialization and Social Change in South Africa:
African Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness X87o-1930 (I982), as well as publications of the Johannesburg History Workshop,
notably Belinda Bozzoli (ed.), Class, Community and Conflict:South AfricanPerspectives
(Johannesburg, i987).

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May

Work,classandempire

9ggS

237

power of colonialism and capitalism did not quite succeed in imposing clock-discipline on
an African workforce.5
The other South Africanist whose work has strong Thompsonian echoes - and who was
more directly influenced by him than was Atkins - is Charles van Onselen, who shares
both the desire to rescue the memories of extinguished lives from the condescension of
posterity and an aversion to structuralist theory. Van Onselen's best work echoes
Thompson's invocation of the world of artisanson the edge of increased involvement with
commodity production, the looming power of industrializationand the homogenization of
work that was about to extinguish it, and the particularforms of politics that arise in such a
context; his focus, however, is on the urban economy of Johannesburg in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and on the fact that both whites and blacks
inhabited for a time this ambiguous space.6 Here there is room for some quite interesting
debates, notably one Keletso Atkins opened up in another illuminating article. Van
Onselen had written movingly about a group of Zulu washermen, who found a niche in the
urban economy and within it struggled through their guild-like structure to guard a
measure of autonomy in the work process until overwhelmed by steam laundries. Van
Onselen saw the washermen as arisingwithin the urban milieu itself, but Atkins shows that
the urban structure was in fact an adaptationof an earlier Zulu labour form.7
In some ways, Thompson's writing since the 1970S on eighteenth-century England
offers the most interesting insights to the non-European historian, not just in relation to
industrial capitalism and labour but into the issue of power outside the realm of the
modern state. His 'Patriciansociety, plebian culture', for instance, offers insights into the
theatre of rule and the modes of self-representation of rulers and of contestation from
below. His stress on the fluidity of inequality provides a welcome antidote to universalizing models of class or structures of domination, and is a reminder that arguments about
the specificity of histories in Africa or Asia are not just about the exotic East or South but
about Europe itself.8
But here again the best-known migration of a Thompsonian idea overseas is in fact a
misreading. I refer to James Scott's The Moral Economy of the Peasant. Thompson's
moral economy was a relational concept: about a modus vivendi that developed between
rulers and ruled in England, an uncertain and frequently tested set of understandings
I Keletso Atkins, "'Kafirtime": preindustrial
temporal concepts and labour discipline in
nineteenth century colonial Natal', Yournal of
Afnican Histoty, xxix (I988), 2z9-44; E. P.
Thompson, 'Time, work discipline and industrial capitalism', Past and Present, xxxviii
(i 967), 56-97. See also Atkins's book, TheMoon
is Dead! Give Us Our Money!: Cultural Origins
of an African WorkEthic, Natal, South Africa,
i843-I9goo

(Portsmouth,

New

Hampshire,

'993).
6 Charles van Onselen, Studies in the Economic and Social History of the Witwatersrand
(I982) and Chibaro: African Mine Labour in
Southern Rhodesia *go1
933 (1976).
7Charles van Onselen, 'AmaWasha:the Zulu

Washermen's Guild of the Witwatersrand,

in his Studies, op. cit., 2, 74-I 10;
I890-19I4'
Keletso Atkins, 'Origins of the AmaWasha: the
Zulu Washermen's Guild in Natal, I890o-9IO',
of African Histo?y, xxvii ( I986), 41-57 .
I found Thompson's articles as useful in

7ournal
8

writing a book that did not directly concern wage

labour, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of
Africa (New Haven, 1977), as his book was in
writing one that did, On the African Watetfront:
Urban Disorderand the Transformationof Work
in Colonial Mombasa (New Haven, 1987). See,
in particular, E. P. Thompson, 'Patrician
society, plebian culture', 7ournal of Social
History, VII (1974), 382-405.

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about the limits of power, focusing on the extent to which merchantswould sell grainwhen
it was in short supply within the region of production, how far the 'crowd' would go in
claiming grain for itself, and how far authorities would go in policing the process. Scott
locates the moral economy not in relations within the pre-colonial polities of South-East
Asia - which were far from communitarian or egalitarian - but in the peasantry itself,
isolated from structures of power. Such a peasantry is the figment of the imagination, an
attempt to read understandings of power, a collective conceptual framework, off a
sociological category rather than an historical relationship. Where Thompson's moral
economy was contestatory and supple, Scott's moral economy is brittle, contrasted starkly
with a colonial power which is also treated as nothing more than an imposition, not in
interaction with its subjects, not itself the object of contestation and the definition of
limits.9
Let me conclude with two more titles, almost identical, and some issues facing labour
history now that Edward Thompson is gone. The first, edited by Lenard Berlanstein, is
called Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis and, although
one would not know it from its cover, is actually about France. The other, written by
Dipesh Chakrabarty,is called Rethinking Working-ClassHistory, and its subtitle actually
does reveal that this is about Bengal i 890o940.10 The former contains several pieces in
which authors congratulate themselves on having made the linguistic turn, finding in
discourse analysis the way beyond the limitations of Thompson's (or Marx's) framework.
The article I want to say a few words about is William Sewell's, entitled 'Toward a
post-materialist rhetoric for labor history'. He asserts that labour history has of late lost
much of its vitality because it is too wedded to the metanarrativeof proletarianization.
This bring together a number of processes and, while acknowledging variation, treats the
overall trend as universal: cultivators and artisans are deprived of access to means of
production; they flock to cities or are forced into insecure wage labourjobs on farms; their
skills are devalued; and ever tighter forms of managerialcontrol are devised; meanwhile,
workers acquire a sense of their collective identity as the sellers of labour power; their
traditions of artisanal autonomy or republican assertiveness are rechannelled into class
identity; they form organizations; they go on strike; and collectively they challenge
capital.
Sewell argues that this metanarrative pays 'insufficient attention to the profoundly
uneven and contradictorycharacterof changes in productive relations, not to mention the
role of discourse and politics in labor history'."1The proletarianizationthesis presumes
that material causes take pride of place over the other ways in which people define
themselves and order their worlds. Current social theory, meanwhile, has moved away
9 E. P. Thompson, 'The moral economy of
the English crowd in the eighteenth century',
Past and Present, L (197I), 76-136; James C.
Scott, The Moral Fconomy of the Peasant:
Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia
(New Haven, 1976). For a critique of Scott, see
Michael Adas, "'Moral Economy" or "Contest
State"?Elite demands and the origins of peasant
protest in Southeast Asia', Journal of Social

History, xiii (1980), 521-46.

'? Published, respectively, by University of
Illinois Press (I993) and Princeton University
Press (I989).

William Sewell, 'Toward a post-materialist

rhetoric for labor history' in Lenard Berlanstein
(ed.), Rethinking Labor History: Essays on
Discourse and Class Analysis (Champaign,
1993), I8.

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May IggS

Work, class and empire

239

from dividing the economic from the political or the social and is now characterized by
rival claims to theoretical hegemony: all social relations are cultural or discursive; all
spheres of life are governed by choices under scarcity; all life is political. Resolution,
Sewell argues, lies in the recognition that all dimensions of social structure are mutually
constituted, by meaning, scarcity and power simultaneously. In effect, such a procedure
could rescue the history of labour from labour history.
It is ironic - Sewell's plea for mutual understanding notwithstanding - that scholars'
response to the theoretical uncertainties of the current epoch is the assertion of imperial
authority. Modesty might be a more appropriatestance. Sewell's critique of the inhibiting
effect of the proletarianizationthesis is none the less persuasive; this is precisely what is
wrong with all the 'making'arguments in African labour history. But if the development of
capitalism turns out to be more uneven and complex, and less all-determining than the
generalization of the 'making' across the globe, the problem of how so many Africans,
Asians and Latin Americans came to depend on wages for their livelihood is not about to go
away. Capitalism may not define a metanarrative,but it faces us with a megaquestion. As
Sewell would emphasize, capitalism's spread has a discursive and political as well as a
market element to it: colonizers had to define and enforce categories like private property
and alter notions of time and discipline. Africans, meanwhile, were trying to give such
categories their own meanings and to seek alternatives to wage labour in responding to
their growing interest in purchased commodities. That wage labour in the early colonial
period mostly came from young men and mostly took the form of movement back and
forth between workplace and village reflected not just the needs of capital, but struggles
over gender and age within African communities. The classic questions of Marx or
Thompson remain highly relevant. What are the effects of particular patterns by which
people's access to the means of production are altered, constrained or destroyed? Can a
category of people be made to enter production with nothing to offer but their labour
power? What kinds of mechanisms translate the purchase of workers' time into the
production of commodities and surplus value? What possibilities exist in different
structures of production and reproduction that workers can seize to make themselves into
something more than anonymous sellers of labour power?
These questions, however, have answers that do not fit a linear model of 'proletarianization': power, on the shopfloor or in a complex system linking urban and rural areas, was
rooted in particular cultural structures - from the racially based system of colonial
authority to Africans' efforts to use personal relations to shape work patterns to their own
needs. Labour movements were more than automatic responses to becoming a proletarian; they were rooted in specific patterns of affiliation and strategies of mobilization and
alliance-building. Government interventions were of great importance precisely because
the nature of work and of conflict were indeterminant. The labour question was a
question.
12 Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and
African Society: The Labor Question in French
and British Africa (forthcoming). Other authors
who offer a less linear and more complex version
of how Africans became involved in wage labour
than the proletarianization thesis implies include Elias Mandala, Work and Control in a

Peasant Economy:A History of the Lower Tchiri

Valley in Malawi, X859-I 960 (Madison, 9ggo),
and Patrick Harries, Work,Culture, and Identity: Migrant Laborersin Mozambiqueand South
Africa, c. 1860o-191 (Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1994).

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This is where Chakrabarty'swork on the jute mills of Calcuttacomes in. He explains the
specifically colonial elements of boss's authority in the jute mills, as well as the way in
which specifically Bengali notions of authority and personal relations shaped the
relationship of managersand workers. The sardar - recruiterand supervisor, patron and
foreman - was a Bengali figure as well as a component of a capitalist workplace. He argues
as well that these patterns of authority engendered particular patterns of defiance and
struggle. This is not a rejection of Marxist theory itself, but rather a working out of the
tension within Marxismof the distinction between 'abstract'labourpower and 'real'labour
power.13 Thompson asked how challenges to capitalism in the early nineteenth century
reflected the earlier notion of the 'freeborn Englishman'. Chakrabartyis asking questions
similar in form but different in content, avoiding the implication that Indian workers
exhibited a 'lower' form of class consciousness. English and Bengali histories represent
different experiences, in real time and in actual space, deriving from the creation of
abstract labour power. Indian history, Chakrabartyinsists, requires an engagement with
the history of capitalism without a subordination to a single narrativeof it.
Such a perspective opens up the possibility of doing more with the labour question
within empires than incorporatingthe particularitiesof colonial situations into a narrative
of class struggle against the global power of capitalism or by subsuming the conditions of
colonial workersinto a narrativeof nationalstruggle. It is more useful to preservea tension
between different sorts of social movements, to see how nationalist politics and labour
struggles sometimes reinforced and sometimes contradicted one another. It is equally
important to examine the circumstances under which colonial states and transnational
corporations found in the organized working class an opponent whom they thought they
could understand and whose protests could be channelled into known limits, as well as
those situations in which thinking of workers as intrinsically different - be it within an
'ethnic' or 'national' culture - appeared as a useful alternative to confronting them as
workers. Just as there are more ways than one to analyse the relationship of 'English' with
'working class' - Thompson's 'the's' need to be read sceptically - the processes by which
social categories were imagined in colonial situations and through which political
movements, alliances and coalitions were forged need to be analysed in a dynamic,
interactive manner.14
Thompson's analysis of capitalism depended in effect on the tension between abstract
and real labour power, and he has been criticized both for being too abstract- lining up his
history along the road to the crystallizationof a working class - and for being too real - a
voluntarist insistence that the English working class made itself. His effort remains both
illuminating and open to more inclusive and complex emendation because of the tension

13 In addition to his book, see Dipesh

Chakrabarty, 'Marx after Marxism: history,
subalternity and difference', Meanjin, LII

parative Studies in Society and History, xxxii

(1990),

383-408, and RosalindO'Hanlonand

David Washbrook, 'After orientalism: culture,

For an illuminatingrelated criticism and politics in the Third World', with a
42I-34.
(I993),
14i-84.
(1992),
debate, see Gyan Prakash, 'Writing post- reply by Prakash,ibid., XXXIV
14 This is what I am attempting to do in
orientalist histories of the Third World: perspectives from Indian historiography', Com- Decolonization and African Society.

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May 1995

Work, class and empire

241

between the poles.'5 The tension within Thompson's approach allows for the writing of
African or Asian histories without falling into the trap of assuming that imperialism or
capitalism subordinated difference and particularityto its own universal logic or into the
equally stultifying trap of endlessly cataloguing or celebrating differences and particularities. Our best tribute to Thompson is not to keep quoting his title, but to engage the basic
tensions of his work.
University of Michigan
IS
Thompson has been rightly criticized for
writing Making as a narrative of men without
specifying that this was the case and, as Carolyn
Steedman points out, this writes the male
gender out of the picture as well as the female
one. 'The price of experience: women and the
making of the English working class', Radical

History,LIX

(I994),

i08-i9.

Some of the best

work on gender and labour in Africa goes

beyond the formula of 'the making of the African
female working class', for example Mandala,
Work and Control, and Luise White, The
Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial

Nairobi(Chicago,I990).

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