“L’économie de débrouillardise”: The “Informal Sector” and Histories of Work in the Early Modern World

The history of work, dominated by, as Sabyasachi Bhattacharya and Jan Lucassen have contended, “the assumption of the transition to a capitalist economy,” retains a focus on organized wage earners and their institutions, and in the pre-industrial era, on the guild and the workshop.  Yet the uneven nature of that transition, and, in the context of globalization, the flourishing character of what has been described variously as the “informal sector,” “the unofficial economy,” or more colorfully, “the fend-for-yourself economy,” has opened to question narratives of a straightforward transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist forms of labor organization in the past.  Without dismissing the cautionary observations of Alejandro Portes and others, the concept of the informal sector, thirty years after Keith Hart introduced the term, still offers an analytical tool with which to carry out the globalization of labor history. This paper then begins with the historiography of the informal economy approaches to the analysis of casual work. More importantly, this paper engages the possibilities for the comparative study, for example, of Jamaican “higgler women” and early modern European market women, or between the informal arrangements of African “moto-taxis” and those employed by early modern litter carriers. Such a comparative approach yields insights into a) the exclusionary processes whereby regulation, whether statist or corporate, contribute to the construction of “informal economies”; b) tactics utilized by workers within the casual economy to secure niches within the interstices of the authorized economy; and c) the very fluid nature of the boundaries which divide formal and informal economies, regardless of the regulation and language of labor.