Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long Nineteenth Century, By Andrew Urban (2018) New York: New York University Press, 376 pages. ISBN: 978-0-8147-8584-3

Urban begins by analyzing Vere Foster and assisted Irish immigration in the period 1850-1865. Assisted immigration accounted for less than four percent of departures from Ireland. However, that amounted to more than a quarter of a million people, who “deserve attention as cases that demonstrate how the redistribution of unemployed surplus labor was governed and imagined as a resource for white, Anglophone settlements” (p. 29). Foster himself financed the passage of over 1,200 Irish women to the United States. Through his loans to them, he attempted to assert a coercive power and dictate where the women should settle in the United States. Interestingly, despite this coercive power, the women had significant leeway in choosing, or not, to abide by his advice. Many disregarded Foster’s wishes and made their own choices about where to live. A significant number of households in the United States relied on the help of Irish servants. That said, middle-class homeowners and newly arrived immigrants did not always, to put it mildly, see eye to eye. Servants clashed with employers about their duties, wages, dress, and use of leisure time, among other points. In addition, many people in the United States had a very profoundly negative view of Irish immigrants. Students of nineteenth century political cartoons will recall Thomas Nast’s depictions of Irish men as drunken, illiterate, ape-like brutes. Irish women, often caricatured as “Biddy” became “colonial threats to the sovereign domestic rule of their Anglo-American mistresses” (p. 53). Numerous cartoonists depicted muscular ape-like Irish women bullying cowering employers. Because employers quickly began to dislike Irish servants, they turned to other groups of people, such as African American women, in an effort to find better servants. However, as Urban notes: “the assisted migration of recently freed black women and children during and after the Civil War raised many of the same issues that Foster’s work encountered” (p. 63). Many northern households desired African American labour. Government-run camps for freedpeople frequently became sites of labour recruitment. However, employers quickly realized that African Americans, just like the Irish, were not idealized docile and meek servants. Many of the same fights about wages, work, dress, and leisure time, erupted between employers and employees. In addition, some employers resorted to deception and exploitation to keep their workers in their employ. However, some black domestic workers “did not feel obligated to remain in contracts” (p. 89) and sought out better opportunities. Scholars of Reconstruction know that disputes over contracts occurred frequently in the postbellum South. Some African Americans, after signing a contract, left to work for another employer who offered better wages. White employers constantly accused their competitors of luring away workers. Urban might have offered more sustained analysis of the similarities between women seeking new contracts in the North and men doing so in the South to chart the wide array of responses to this tendency. After becoming disillusioned with Irish and black domestic workers, employers turned to Chinese men and believed they represented the answer to the servant question. However, the turn to Chinese labour came during an era in which Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act, in which nativist sentiment ran strong, and in which riots against Chinese and other Asian immigrants proved common. Some white employers, therefore, supported proposals to restrict the entrance of Chinese laborers. However, the same people “passionately defended their freedom to hire and contract with whomever they chose, regardless of race” (p. 100). People looking for domestic labour behaved, in other words, like other businessmen and employers who protested exclusionary legislation because it hurt their bottom line. Chinese servants did not prove meek …