See P. de Gennes, Mémoire pour le sieur de la Bourdonnais, avec les pièces justificatives (Paris, 1750); The Case of Mde la Bourdonnais, in a Letter to a Friend (London, 1748); Fantin des Odoards, Révolutions de l’Inde (Paris, 1796); Collin de Bar, Histoire de l’Inde ancienne et moderne (Paris, 1814); Barchou de Penhoën, Histoire de la conquête et de la fondation de l’empire anglais dans l’Inde (Paris, 1840); Margry, “Les Isles de France et de Bourbon sous le gouvernement de La Bourdonnais,” in La Revue maritime et coloniale (1862); W. Cartwright, “Dupleix et l’Inde française,” in La Revue britannique (1882); G. B. Malleson, Dupleix (Oxford, 1895); Anandaranga Pillai, Les Français dans l’Inde, Dupleix et Labourdonnais, extraits du journal d’Anandaran-gappoullé 1736–1748, trans. in French by Vinsor in École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes, séries 3, vol. xv. (Paris, 1894).
LABOUR EXCHANGE, a term very frequently applied to registries having for their principal object the better distribution of labour (see Unemployment). Historically the term is applied to the system of equitable labour exchanges established in England between 1832 and 1834 by Robert Owen and his followers. The idea is said to have originated with Josiah Warren, who communicated it to Owen. Warren tried an experiment in 1828 at Cincinnati, opening an exchange under the title of a “time store.” He joined in starting another at Tuscarawas, Ohio, and a third at Mount Vernon, Indiana, but none were quite on the same line as the English exchanges. The fundamental idea of the English exchanges was to establish a currency based upon labour; Owen in The Crisis for June 1832 laid down that all wealth proceeded from labour and knowledge; that labour and knowledge were generally remunerated according to the time employed, and that in the new exchanges it was proposed to make time the standard or measure of wealth. This new currency was represented by “labour notes,” the notes being measured in hours, and the hour reckoned as being worth sixpence, this figure being taken as the mean between the wage of the best and the worst paid labour. Goods were then to be exchanged for the new currency. The exchange was opened in extensive premises in the Gray’s Inn Road, near King’s Cross, London, on the 3rd of September 1832. For some months the establishment met with considerable success, and a considerable number of tradesmen agreed to take labour notes in payment for their goods. At first, an enormous number of deposits was made, amounting in seventeen weeks to 445,501 hours. But difficulties soon arose from the lack of sound practical valuators, and from the inability of the promoters to distinguish between the labour of the highly skilled and that of the unskilled. Tradesmen, too, were quick to see that the exchange might be worked to their advantage; they brought unsaleable stock from their shops, exchanged it for labour notes, and then picked out the best of the saleable articles. Consequently the labour notes began to depreciate; trouble also arose with the proprietors of the premises, and the experiment came to an untimely end early in 1834.
See F. Podmore’s Robert Owen, ii. c. xvii. (1906); B. Jones, Co-operative Production, c. viii. (1894); G. J. Holyoake, History of Co-operation, c. viii. (1906).
LABOUR LEGISLATION. Regulation of labour,[1] in some form or another, whether by custom, royal authority, ecclesiastical rules or by formal legislation in the interests of a community, is no doubt as old as the most ancient forms of civilization. And older than all civilization is the necessity for the greater part of mankind to labour for maintenance, whether freely or in bonds, whether for themselves and their families or for the requirements or superfluities of others. Even while it is clear, however, that manual labour, or the application of the bodily forces—with or without mechanical aid—to personal maintenance and the production of goods, remains the common lot of the majority of citizens of the most developed modern communities, still there is much risk of confusion if modern technical terms such as “labour,” “employer,” “labour legislation” are freely applied to conditions in bygone civilizations with wholly different industrial organization and social relationships. In recent times in England there has been a notable disappearance from current use of correlative terms implying a social relationship which is greatly changed, for example, in the rapid passage from the Master and Servant Act 1867 to the Employer and Workman Act 1875. In the 18th century the term “manufacturer” passed from its application to a working craftsman to its modern connotation of at least some command of capital, the employer being no longer a small working master. An even more significant later change is seen in the steady development of a labour legislation, which arose in a clamant social need for the care of specially helpless “protected” persons in factories and mines, into a wider legislation for the promotion of general industrial health, safety and freedom for the worker from fraud in making or carrying out wage contracts.
If, then, we can discern these signs of important changes within so short a period, great caution is needed in rapidly reviewing long periods of time prior to that industrial revolution which is traced mainly to the application of mechanical power to machinery in aid of manual labour, practically begun and completed within the second half of the 18th century. “In 1740 save for the fly-shuttle the loom was as it had been since weaving had begun . . . and the law of the land was” (under the Act of Apprentices of 1563) “that wages in each district should be assessed by Justices of the Peace.”[2] Turning back to still earlier times, legislation—whatever its source or authority—must clearly be devoted to aims very different from modern aims in regulating labour, when it arose before the labourer, as a man dependent on an “employer” for the means of doing work, had appeared, and when migratory labour was almost unknown through the serfdom of part of the population and the special status secured in towns to the artisan.
In the great civilizations of antiquity there were great aggregations of labour which was not solely, though frequently it was predominantly, slave labour; and some of the features of manufacture and mining on a great scale arose, producing the same sort of evils and industrial maladies known and regulated in our own times. Some of the maladies were described by Pliny and classed as “diseases of slaves.” And he gave descriptions of processes, for example in the metal trades, as belonging entirely to his own day, which modern archaeological discoveries trace back through the earliest known Aryan civilizations to a prehistoric origin in the East, and which have never died out in western Europe, but can be traced in a concentrated manufacture with almost unchanged methods, now in France, now in Germany, now in England.
Little would be gained in such a sketch as this by an endeavour to piece together the scattered and scanty materials for a comparative history of the varying conditions and methods of labour regulation over so enormous a range. While our knowledge continually increases of the remains of ancient craft, skill and massed labour, much has yet to be discovered that may throw light on methods of organization of the labourers. While much, and in some civilizations most, of the labour was compulsory or forced, it is clear that too much has been sometimes assumed, and it is by no means certain that even the pyramids of Egypt, much less the beautiful earliest Egyptian products in metal work, weaving and other skilled craft work, were typical products of slave labour. Even in Rome it was only at times that the proportion of slaves valued as property was greater than that of hired workers, or, apart from capture in war or self-surrender in discharge of a debt, that purchase of slaves by the trader, manufacturer or agriculturist was generally considered the cheapest means of securing labour. As in early England the various stages of village industrial life, medieval town manufacture, and organization in craft gilds, and the beginnings of the mercantile system, were parallel with a greater or less prevalence of serfdom and even with the presence in part of slavery, so in other ages and civilizations the various methods of organization of labour are found to some extent together. The Germans in their primitive settlements were accustomed to the notion of slavery, and in the decline of the
