Spanish Amazonia, 1532–1825

Stretching from modern-day southern Venezuela to northern Bolivia, Spanish-controlled Amazonia represented the ultimate frontier to colonial officials. Home to hundreds of native cultures, Crown authorities consistently struggled to extend hegemony to most of the region. Barriers to entry were both physical and motivational. In the shadow of the Andes, the thick vegetation, constant rains, and lack of navigable rivers from Spanish-controlled regions meant that only the most motivated could reach its most valuable natural resources. As a result, only the most intrepid, and perhaps delusional, adventurers tried. For the most part, it was religious devotion that brought Spanish subjects to the region. Therefore, Spanish colonization in Amazonia was represented largely by the mission church than any other organ of the empire. These religious enterprises fluoresced in some places, but in most others they floundered. While the difficulties of colonization meant fewer colonizers than in other parts of the Americas, the native population suffered under colonial impositions that forced changes in their traditional lifestyle, imposed coercive labor regimes, and brought disease. The native population did not accept this passively, resulting in some of the most successful uprisings in the colonial period, including the Juan Santos Atahualpa rebellion.

Corvée Capitalism: The Dutch East India Company, Colonial Expansion, and Labor Regimes in Early Modern Asia

This article revisits our understanding of corvée labor regimes and their role and impact in the early expansion of colonialism and capitalism. Rather than remnants of feudal pasts, or in-kind taxation or revenue instruments of weak colonial powers, corvée regimes should be viewed as refined methods of colonial exploitation that provided colonial actors with more direct access to and control over the production of commercially interesting global commodities. This article explores and compares the corvée labor regimes employed and shaped by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the Moluccas, Sri Lanka, and Java. The article first addresses how to understand corvée and tributary relations as labor, production, and (political-)social regimes. Second, it explores and compares the organization and development of corvée labor relations in the context of the VOC in South and Southeast Asia. These corvée labor regimes reappear as crucial instruments in the expansion of (early) modern colonialism and capitalism, which could explain their widespread recurrence across the globe in the last few centuries.

Full Transition to a Five-Day Working Week with Two Consecutive Days Off

Labor legislation of Russia provides for both a five-day and six-day working weeks with the same 40 working hours limit per week for two labor regimes that makes it meaningless to work six days a week. The paper summarizes the history of days off in Russia and basic international legislation regulating the days off. The author examines two structural groups of arguments, justifying the necessity of enshrining a provision on a mandatory five-day working week with two consecutive days off in labor legislation. The paper substantiates the discrepancy between the provision of labor legislation containing the rule on one day off and part 5 of Article 37 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation on days off (in plural). The author argues in detail the statement in support of the introduction of a five-day working week for teachers. The author questions the economic feasibility of maintaining the six-day labor regime. It is emphasized that, if a mandatory five-day working week is consolidated in law, the employer’s rights will not be infringed regardless of the form of ownership, because the employer is endowed with legal rules allowing him or her to engage workers to work with their voluntary consent in other schemes of the labor regime (to work overtime, in shifts, etc.). Organizations and enterprises under the current and proposed labour regime may attract workers to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Migration has Stripped Us of Our Manhood: Contradictions of Failed Masculinity Among South Asian Male Migrants in Greece

This article explores the contradictions of the failed masculine stature of South Asian male migrants in Greece. Transnational migration provides low-class rural Indian and Pakistani men an opportunity to socially re-inscribe their adult breadwinner stature. It discusses relational hierarchies of masculinities that shape these men’s encounters with Greek employers, compatriots in Greece, and transnationally located families. Discriminatory state migration and labor regimes intersect with discourses of racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia to reinforce these racialized men’s sense of failed masculinity. Relative powerlessness to a range of local and co-ethnic men further emasculates them. Consequently, they adopt a series of compensatory strategies that include self-valorizing their masculinity relationally vis-à-vis co-ethnic males and Greek male workers. Strategically repositioning self as indispensable to the Greek nation and accentuating personal sacrifice for families notionally transforms them into mythic heroes. Notwithstanding, precarious migrant status in Greece renders hegemonic masculine stature elusive to them.

Places without Police

This reflection explores two loose social formations in contemporary Brazil that offer potentially inspiring political models. One consists of queer, Afro-descended activists invoking quilombos to curate welcoming spaces for community engagement and support. The other is the Primeiro Comando da Capital, or PCC, a prisoner organization that at times has evaded state violence as effectively as some quilombos did in their day. This uneven set illuminates possibilities for social organization that might escape the vicious disciplinary and labor regimes of racial capitalism operative across the Atlantic since the sixteenth century. All have historical relationships to slavery, although very dissimilar ones, and share little else, so the patterns they reveal involve not likeness but iterations of the fact that people beset by state violence seek to evade it, occasionally by struggling to forge what it might help to think of as places without police.

PECULIARITIES OF URGENT ADAPTATION OF MARINE SPECIALISTS OF CONSTRUCTION AND ACTIVE SHIPS AT MARINE OUTPUTS

At present, the number of ships under construction, repairing and upgrading, has increased and, accordingly, their marine outputs, which occur when there is an increased number of participants on board, which significantly impairs the habitability of the ship. In such cases, the dynamics of adaptation reactions of sailors to the conditions of navigation may differ from that on active ships and to a greater extent depend on the initial adaptation potential of the organism. This provision was the main hypothesis of the study performed. The purpose of the work is a comparative assessment of urgent adaptation of marine specialists of construction and active ships at marine outputs. Materials and methods. The control groups of 2 crews under construction ships (19 people) and 4 crews of active ships (36 people) were examined using a specially developed complex of clinical, physiological and psycho-physiological methods. The groups of seamen were divided into subgroups depending on the initial adaptation potential of the organism. Studies were conducted — in the pre-shipping period (1st stage); twice during the period of sailing — after 7 days from the moment of going to sea (2nd stage) and 3 days before the end of the voyage (3rd stage); and 4–6 days after returning to the base (4th stage). The results of research have shown the process of urgent adaptation among sailors of ships under construction, when going out to sea, is much more stressful and difficult than a similar process in the crews of operating ships. In addition, difficulties in adapting to the conditions of navigation are largely determined by the level of the initial adaptation potential of the organism, which can serve as a prognostic criterion for unacceptable deterioration in the working capacity of marine specialists. In this regard, it is extremely important not only to revise the existing labor regimes of the crews of ships under construction, repair and upgrade, but also to improve the measures of their medical (including physiological and psychophysiological) support.