Material landscapes of labour exploitation

Despite international efforts to restrain forced labour practices in the first half of the 20th century, with the 1930 Convention on Forced Labour by the International Labour Organization as prime example, many colonial states continued to rely on forms of forced labour throughout their history. While historians have studied these labour practices in spearhead sectors like mining, agriculture or manufacturing, the construction industry —the key ‘scaffolding of Empire’ that buttressed these essential sectors, as Peter Scriver described— has remained largely overlooked.

According to strands of architectural theory, labour conditions can be read in architectural artefacts. Following these assertions, this thematic session proposes to critically explore materialities in the (post)colonial built environment, as lenses to understand the labour regimes under which they were realized. Imported construction technologies and building materials, for instance, seemingly innocent, could also be read as political tools in the deskilling of the construction site, enabling and maintaining forced labour practices. Following interpretations of concrete as a capitalist ‘weapon’ in the deskilling of the construction site, for instance, one could similarly read the many concrete projects realized under colonial political projects, as testimonies of continued forced labour practices. Likewise, the self-supporting roof elements, widely used in housing schemes throughout colonial Africa, can be understood as a means to mobilise unpaid labour in such ‘self-built’ projects. While such power inequalities are inevitably embedded in colonial built environments, the attention for materiality can also disclose more subversive narratives. Through a strong reliance on forced labour, colonial construction reluctantly yet inadvertently incorporated local building technologies and materials, generating a complex landscape of new and hybridized architectural typologies that bore witness to indigenous agency and building know-how. While the (shifting) forced labour regimes can be seen quite directly in large-scale infrastructural projects, such other narratives are often relegated to more ad-hoc building practices, for instance to smaller typologies (warehouses), to everyday adaptations to buildings (outdoor hospital kitchens) or even to the temporary equipment of large buildings sites (such as workers’ housing). 

In this session, we explicitly aim to further question the 1930 definition of forced labour, in particular the way it excluded ‘disguised’ practices such as military, penal or conscripted labour, community service, self-building or compulsory upkeep work by (psychiatric) patients, pupils, and citizens. While such strategic omissions conveniently served coercive colonial logics of extraction and labour exploitation – the main focus of this session – papers thematizing how these colonial practices are continued in other temporal and geographical settings are warmly welcomed.