Colonial-era hiring rationalized underpaying Yemenite workers through claims about their modest needs.

Evidence

But they had other valuable qualities; for example, “they were all scribes” Schatz claimed, “and this previous skill helps them in their new work which requires precision.” In addition, they were “famous for their extra patience and love of work.” No less significant was that they could be paid modestly because, as Schatz put it, “the Yemenite and his wife need little for their livelihood.” — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 598

Categorization

• SEED: The wage-suppression logic — ‘they need little’ — as a genealogy of modern justifications for paying marginalized workers less.
• XREF: Echoes the ‘cheap labor’ rationalization in colonial economies described across the book’s earlier chapters; parallels later anthropological critiques of fair-trade wage discourse.