Racialized Labour in the Colonial Food Regime: The Whitening of England's Farmworkers

Abstract

The crystallization of a colonial food regime in the 1870s centred around Britain is key to historical accounts of agrarian political economy. Yet such accounts have neglected the role of the agrarian proletariat in shaping this regime from below and its basis in racialized hierarchy. To better equip food regime analysis to apprehend the possibilities for labour agency and the persistence of racism, this article provides a race-conscious case study of the National Agricultural Labourers' Union: a chief protagonist in Britain's late-19th century ‘revolt of the field’. Its contribution is two-fold. First, it shows how the union helped consolidate the colonial food regime's tenets of free trade, settler colonialism and nationalist state-building in the English countryside. Second, it situates these within the union's racial project to whiten England's farmworkers whereby the creation of a white slave subjectivity, emigration to the settler states and adherence to English nationalism were used to secure material and symbolic gains. Its core argument is that the articulation of class formation with racial formation was authored by organized agricultural labour and mattered for regime stability; a historical argument with contemporary relevance in a world where populist appeals to workers and whiteness are reascendant.