Varieties of Force State-Organized Production, Industrialization, and Coerced Labour in Nineteenth-Century Naval Shipyards

Naval expenditure has been linked to the history of state formation primarily through the role of naval shipyards in pioneering new production techniques, labour relations, and systems of state management. Labour historians working on the subject of naval shipyards during the transition from sail to steam have focused on the slow abolition of guild restrictions (and privileges), apprenticeship relations, impressment, and criminal or corporal punishment among skilled shipwrights, as well as their gradual replacement by a “modern” waged workforce. However, even in the technologically most advanced naval shipyards in Western Europe, coerced labourers continued to do much of the heavy work. When put into a global perspective, it becomes clear that industrialization in these crucial state facilities relied on, and itself propelled, experiments in the use of a large variety of forms of coerced labour - from skilled labour by enslaved Africans in Cuba and the US South, to labour conscription in the Ottoman Empire under the Tanzimat reforms, and convict labour in England and France. This chapter presents a survey of nineteenth-century experiments in forced labour, and focuses primarily on non-colonial settings. It shows that coerced labour was not peripheral to state managers’ programmes of administrative reform and industrial transformation but was instead intimately connected to their “modernizing” ambitions.