Annual Conference: Households as Coercive Labour Regimes

The conference will focus in the larger household organizations, including the private households of the military, political and economic elites, but also, for example, plantations, private companies, haciendas and estates. All can be considered as households where the head wields extensive if not absolute power over its members. All these households represented labour regimes which were based on an asymmetrically dependent work force consisting of servants, peasants, enslaved and other coerced labourers. We will address the following issues: How do we define the household? How do people enter and exit the household? Who belongs to the household? What is the division of labour? How does it function as a unit of production and/or economic unit? What are the mechanisms of control within the household? All in all, we would like to test the idea that “household” can be developed into an analytical tool to analyze strong asymmetrical dependencies in societies.