Christian G. De Vito
Since October 2023 I have joined the Department of Economic and Social History (WISO) at the University of Vienna (Austria).
My book project deals with punishment and empire building in the Spanish monarchy (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries).
Main areas of interest:
* History of punishment
* Global labour history,
* Microhistory and global history (micro-spatial history)
* Social history
* History of the Spanish Empire
I am vice-president of the International Social History Association (ISHA) , member of the International Scientific Committee of the International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH), and member of the COST Action "Worlds of related coercions in work" (WORCK), the Italian Society of Labour History (SISLav) and the association Storie in Movimento (SIM).
Together with other colleagues, I edit the book series "Social History of Punishment and Labour Coercion" at Amsterdam University Press; "Work in Global and Historical Perspective" at De Gruyter; and "Le impronte" at Franco Angeli.
I graduated in History at the University of Florence (Italy), obtained my PhD in Modern History at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (Italy), and later worked on various post-doc research projects in Italy and the Netherlands. From September 2013 to August 2018 I was Research associate on the ERC Project "The Carceral Archipelago", coordinated by prof. Clare Anderson and based at the University of Leicester. From October 2018 to September 2023 I was researcher and coordinator of the research group "Punishment, Labour, Dependency" at the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) at the University of Bonn, Germany.
Address: http://socialhistory.org/en/staff/christian-de-vito
My book project deals with punishment and empire building in the Spanish monarchy (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries).
Main areas of interest:
* History of punishment
* Global labour history,
* Microhistory and global history (micro-spatial history)
* Social history
* History of the Spanish Empire
I am vice-president of the International Social History Association (ISHA) , member of the International Scientific Committee of the International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH), and member of the COST Action "Worlds of related coercions in work" (WORCK), the Italian Society of Labour History (SISLav) and the association Storie in Movimento (SIM).
Together with other colleagues, I edit the book series "Social History of Punishment and Labour Coercion" at Amsterdam University Press; "Work in Global and Historical Perspective" at De Gruyter; and "Le impronte" at Franco Angeli.
I graduated in History at the University of Florence (Italy), obtained my PhD in Modern History at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (Italy), and later worked on various post-doc research projects in Italy and the Netherlands. From September 2013 to August 2018 I was Research associate on the ERC Project "The Carceral Archipelago", coordinated by prof. Clare Anderson and based at the University of Leicester. From October 2018 to September 2023 I was researcher and coordinator of the research group "Punishment, Labour, Dependency" at the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) at the University of Bonn, Germany.
Address: http://socialhistory.org/en/staff/christian-de-vito
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Monographs and edited volumes by Christian G. De Vito
centuries. Collectively, the articles address three main themes: the relationship between the enslaved, the slaveholders, and the state; the shifts in modalities of governance across space and time; and the entanglement of modes of punishment across geographies. This perspective illustrates the broader implications of punishment for
issues of labor supply and labor control, and helps us understand how slavery was produced and reproduced in different, yet connected, regions of the America
Here, authors from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Spain take a historical and sociological perspective and analyse a series of problems relating to labour relations. The chapters weave together different periods of Latin American colonial and republican history from the vice-royalties of New Spain (now Mexico) and Peru, the Royal Audiencia de Charcas (now Bolivia), Argentina and Uruguay (former vice-royalty of Río de La Plata) and Chile (former Capitanía General).
Articles by Christian G. De Vito
This article is an invitation to study the question of the multiplicity of the mitas within the analytical frame of the long-lasting tension
between the ‘Toledan system’ -based on the triad: reduccion, tribute and mita -and the competing regimes of labour extraction that
emerged primarily from the impact of indigenous migrations on the tributary population. To that end, I first address the competition for
the mitayos and indigenous migrations as two areas where that tension became visible. Then I focus on some practices of coercion
that were embedded in both the preservation and subversion of the Toledan system. The third and concluding section offers some
comparative remarks on selected modalities of labour coercion within the Andean region and beyond
centuries. Collectively, the articles address three main themes: the relationship between the enslaved, the slaveholders, and the state; the shifts in modalities of governance across space and time; and the entanglement of modes of punishment across geographies. This perspective illustrates the broader implications of punishment for
issues of labor supply and labor control, and helps us understand how slavery was produced and reproduced in different, yet connected, regions of the America
Here, authors from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Spain take a historical and sociological perspective and analyse a series of problems relating to labour relations. The chapters weave together different periods of Latin American colonial and republican history from the vice-royalties of New Spain (now Mexico) and Peru, the Royal Audiencia de Charcas (now Bolivia), Argentina and Uruguay (former vice-royalty of Río de La Plata) and Chile (former Capitanía General).
This article is an invitation to study the question of the multiplicity of the mitas within the analytical frame of the long-lasting tension
between the ‘Toledan system’ -based on the triad: reduccion, tribute and mita -and the competing regimes of labour extraction that
emerged primarily from the impact of indigenous migrations on the tributary population. To that end, I first address the competition for
the mitayos and indigenous migrations as two areas where that tension became visible. Then I focus on some practices of coercion
that were embedded in both the preservation and subversion of the Toledan system. The third and concluding section offers some
comparative remarks on selected modalities of labour coercion within the Andean region and beyond
da escravidão: ilegalidade e costume no Brasil oitocentista [The Force of Slavery: Illegality and Custom in Nineteenth-Century Brazil] (2012). Among countless academic engagements, Chalhoub was a founder of the Centro de Pesquisa em História Social da Cultura [Center of Research on the Social History of Culture] at the University of Campinas.
In March 2021, Chalhoub attended the online workshop “Punishing the
Enslaved,” organized by Christian De Vito and Viola Müller, where he shared his expertise as a social and labor historian. This interview, to which he kindly agreed, reflects his personal experiences as one of the leading historians of Brazilian slavery, his perspective on the field of Atlantic slavery, and the connection to the topic of this special issue.
The first section addresses the interactions between the State and the slaveholders through the lens of “protection.” The second section turns to paternalism as a repertoire of both legitimation and contestation of punishment. The final section assesses the continuities and discontinuities in the impact of paternalism on the punishments of slaves across time, both during and beyond the colonial period.
The history of convict transportation in the Spanish empire, however, is much longer and includes a broader range of punitive regimes. The first two sections of this chapter take this expanded chronological and thematic frame in order to offer an overview, and to provide, respectively, a general description and periodisation of the various forms of convict transportation and a preliminary evaluation of the quantitative scale of the phenomenon as a whole. In the subsequent sections I use the presidio perspective to explore aspects of convict transportation that can be equally investigated in relation to other mobility-oriented punishments. First, I seek to provide a comprehensive description of convict flows to the presidios and relate them to the structure of the Spanish empire. I then foreground the distinctiveness of each route and the variety of groups of prisoners transported along different routes and standing in each destination, and point to the entanglements and disentanglements between the convict voyages and the journeys of other migrants. Finally, I address the relationship between the process of sentencing, the destinations of transportation and agency, and the role that punishment-related spatial mobility played in the lives of the convicts. All in all, the chapter foregrounds the way convict transportation was shaped by, and in turn impacted on, the structures, spatiality, conceptualisations and goals of the empire – a point that I especially highlight in the concluding section.
The relational nature of these definitions represents one of this essay’s contributions to the debate on labour flexibility and labour precariousness in both historical studies and contemporary debates. Whereas many contradictory definitions of these phenomena exist in scholarship, those provided here have arguably the advantage of connecting labour flexibility/precariousness to the issue of control over labour: they indicate how labour flexibility relates to external (employers’ and/or policy-makers’) control over the workforce, whereas labour precariousness relates to workers’ control over their own labour force. By foregrounding the question of control, and ultimately of power, these definitions additionally allow for a focus on the “constraint agency” of historical and contemporary actors at the crossroads of materiality and perceptions, external categorisation and self-representation.
My argument especially builds on the findings of two distinct streams in recent scholarly literature: the re-conceptualisation of the role of multiple labour relations in the process of labour commodification, which has been proposed within the context of Global Labour History; and the studies that have addressed contemporary labour precariousness from a historical and global perspective. Starting from these new approaches, the paper explores five directions. The first section sketches the outlines of a conceptualisation of labour flexibility and precariousness vis-à-vis the process of labour commodification. The second section, largely referring to my own empirical research and selected examples from secondary literature on late-colonial and post-colonial Spanish America, poses space, time, and State- and private control of the workforce as key components of labour flexibility. Based on the same empirical findings, the third section addresses the limits of the employers’ control over the workforce. The fourth section raises the question of the workers’ perception of the precariousness of their labour, and its interrelation with workers’ agency. The concluding section points to distinct fields where the global, long-term, and relational approach to the study of labour flexibility and precariousness directly contributes to contemporary debates and scholarship in the field.
Convict labor – defined as “the work performed by individuals under penal and/or administrative control” – has hitherto remained marginal within both theoretical debates on “free” and “unfree” labor, and the literature on the relationship between the abolition process of chattel slavery and the persistence of other forms of coerced labor. In this respect, this chapter aims to bring it back into these debates, by making convict presence visible and by interpreting the role of convict labor at the crossroad of multiple regimes of punishment and labor relations. In particular, the essay addresses three broad questions: What historical conditions favoured the exploitation of convict labor as part of the larger process of commodification of labor? In which economic sectors did convicts work, and how did their tasks differ from those of other laborers? How did convict transportation interact with other labor migrations?
In previous publications, Alex Lichtenstein and I have produced broad surveys of the secondary literature on this topic, spanning centuries and virtually covering the globe. In order to offer more nuanced descriptions and interpretations of these phenomena, I now sharpen my focus. Besides concentrating exclusively on male convict labor, this chapter deals specifically with the borderlands of Latin America (Patagonia, Araucanía, Magallanes and Tierra del Fuego), with the double aim of providing a synthesized view of some characteristics of convict labor in this vast and variegated region, and broadening the scope of literature on convict labor in the Americas.
I take the “long nineteenth century” – from the height of the Bourbon reform in Spanish America (1760s) to the early twentieth century – as the temporal frame of this contribution, covering both the late-colonial and the early post-colonial period. This relatively long-term perspective offers an appropriate timeframe to address the role of convict labor on the eve of the abolition of the slave trade and slavery, as well as to deal with the impact of the “great proletarian migration” from Europe on the composition of the workforce and regimes of punishment.
Throughout this contribution, a triple comparative approach is taken. First, the function of convict labor is explored comparatively within the investigated region. Next, the second half of the eighteenth century and the second half of the nineteenth century are respectively addressed, in order to highlight continuities and changes during the late colonial and the post-colonial periods. Then, in the concluding section, I draw comparisons with experiences in Latin America and beyond to make a broader point on the relevance of the study of convict labor at the crossroads of labor history and the history of punishment.
By focusing on the borderlands, the specific deployment of convicts to colonize those regions is thematized vis-à-vis their exploitation in extant colonies in other Spanish American territories. In urban centres like Havana, Santiago, Mexico City and Lima, by the second half of the nineteenth century colonization was a fait accompli and convict labor complemented or substituted the existing free and coerced workforce. The situation was different in the borderlands of Spanish America, including the Southern Cone, the Gran Chaco and Tucumán, the Floridas, Northern New Spain and Upper California. Whereas military and non-military public work and involuntary military service were the convicts’ main occupations, the overall context diverged as these vast regions remained consistently beyond comprehensive control of the colonial and post-colonial authorities for the majority of the long nineteenth century. From the perspective of the Spanish Crown, as Luíz put it, this was a “double frontier” (doble frontera): on the one hand, various Indigenous groups controlled these territories; on the other hand, foreign powers, be they competing European powers or concurrent post-colonial states, fought to hold sway. Defending the whole frontier was by no means possible, as policy-makers were fully aware. As the Viceroy of Peru, Manuel de Amat y Junient, wrote to the Secretary of State Julian de Arriaga in February 1767: “The troops and the money of the whole World are not enough to guard and fortify such vast dominions”. Colonial officials, then, had to make strategic and critical choices about where and how to colonize. They based these decisions on factors including the existence of natural and financial resources, the accessibility of settlements by land and sea, the size and type of the available workforce, and the ability to transport that workforce from other parts of the empire (and eventually beyond its borders). As I will show in this chapter, convict labor in the borderlands was part of this specific configuration of colonization and labor while simultaneously intertwining with other free and coerced labor relations in each site within the region...
The conference resulted in the foundation of the RELATT - Red Latinoamericana de Trabajo y Trabajador@s, or Latin American Labour History Network.
The sessions of the working group were well attended and – during the group meetings – it was concluded that the discussions were lively and the content relevant and coherent.
The discussions in the round tables and group meetings indicated that there is both an urgency and opportunity to move forward...
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