Colonial labor regimes depend on oscillating absorption and expulsion of migrant workers.

Evidence

Both conundrums centered on effective means of exploitation, drawing black workers into work on white-dominated resources while excluding them from the full return of their effort. The first involved maneuvering among missionaries who considered themselves uniquely qualified to define and defend Native welfare, chiefs who claimed competing jurisdictions within predominantly African areas of settlement, and capitalists who already depended heavily on African labor. The second involved ensuring that each year pastoral and agricultural communities would continue to send several hundred thousand able-bodied workers, mostly male, for labor away from home, yet reabsorb them when employment slackened or they lost the strength necessary for the labor. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 552

Categorization

• SHARE: For anyone on labor/circular migration or southern African history: the colonial system was built on drawing hundreds of thousands of men to the mines each year and reabsorbing them when slack - a real circular-economy logic.
• XREF: connects to: Capitalist labor demand contradicts South Africa’s categorical containment strategy. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 570; Local warlords under apartheid played classic indirect-rule politics — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 592; Colonial indenture formalized the transnational labor market and legal-illegal categories (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial regimes imported then expelled Asian laborers as disposable workforce. #exemplifies (0.95) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2353
• Colonial indenture formalized the transnational labor market and legal-illegal categories #expands (0.85)
• Africans’ mass labor withdrawal triggered the planters’ importation of immigrant labor #exemplifies (0.80)