After Japan’s colonization of Korea in 1910, many Korean peasants lost their land owing to the changes imposed in agriculture, and several Japanese coalmining companies started to recruit them as a colonial surplus population. Despite the low wages they offered, not all of the companies relied on Korean miners – the distribution of this workforce was strikingly uneven. Focusing on the mines of Chikuhō and Miike in the Fukuoka prefecture during the 1910s and 1920s, this article argues that the distribution of Koreans was a consequence of uneven capital accumulation among different mining companies. This unevenness reflected the differing wages and recruitment policies of these companies. Correlating earlier groups of cheap labourers, such as convict workers, to this history, we suggest some explanations as to why some mining companies brought Korean workers into the coal-production process as an immediately available, cheap, and disposable workforce, while others did not.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, scholars had transformed our understanding of class, race, and ethnicity in the rise and demise of the US coal industry. Under the twin impact of the modern Black Freedom Movement and the rise of the New Labor History, studies of American labor and race relations fragmented during the late twentieth century. Following the lead of pioneering labor historian Herbert Gutman, one influential body of scholarship resuscitated the early history of the United Mine Workers of America and accented the emergence of remarkable forms of labor solidarity across the color line during the industrial era. Before this scholarship could gain a firm footing in the historiography of labor and working-class history, however, social activist and labor scholar Herbert Hill forcefully argued that emerging emphases on interracial working-class cooperation downplayed the persistence of racial divisions even during the most promising episodes of labor unity. In significant ways, the Hill−Gutman debate fueled the florescence of whiteness studies and the myriad ways that both capital and labor benefitted from a racially stratified workforce. Based upon this rapidly expanding historiography of coalminers in America, this essay explores how the overlapping experiences of black and white miners established the foundation for modes of cooperation as well as conflict, but the persistence of white supremacist ideology and social practices repeatedly undermined sometimes heroic movements to bridge the chasm between black and white workers.

Coalmining in Brazil began in the mid-nineteenth century in the municipality of São Jerônimo, Rio Grande do Sul, the country’s southernmost state. European workers were brought in and joined Brazilian workers, mostly local peasants with no experience in mining. This article discusses the role played by the immigrants in the making of a working class in the coalfields of southern Brazil. The research on which this article is based draws on numerous sources, including lawsuits and the application forms used to request professional licences. It focuses on ethnic and racial ambiguity, and on political strategies. The identity of the miners in the region is commonly represented as an amalgam of all ethnic groups, but this article shows that this self-propagated solidarity and cohesion among workers had its limits.

The Kuzbass coalmining region in western Siberia (Kuznetsk Basin) was explored, populated, and exploited under Stalin’s rule. Struggling to offset a high labour turnover, the local state-run coal company enrolled deportees from other regions of Russia and Siberia, who were controlled by the secret police (OGPU). These workers shared a common experience in having been forcibly separated from their place of origin. At the same time, foreigners were recruited from abroad as experts and offered a privileged position. In the years of the Great Terror (1936−1938) both groups were persecuted, as they were regarded by the state as disloyal and suspicious. After the war, foreigners were recruited in large numbers as prisoners of war. Thus, migrants, foreigners, and deportees from other regions and countries constituted a significant part of the workforce in the Kuzbass, while their status constantly shifted due to economic needs and repressive politics.

This article examines labour relations and labour conditions in the Zonguldak coalfield on the Black Sea coast in Turkey. From 1867, peasants from surrounding villages were obliged to work in the mines on a rotational basis. Peasants continued to work part-time in the mines after the end of this forced-labour regime in 1921, and after its reintroduction between 1940 and 1947. The article explores the significance of the recruitment of local villagers for the division of labour in the mines. Underground work was performed by low-skilled rotational peasant-miners, while migrants became skilled, full-time surface workers. Different ethnic origins added to the division of labour between these two groups. Attention is then turned to trade unionism in Zonguldak. The miners’ trade union was controlled by permanent workers, mostly migrants of Laz origin, to the detriment of underground peasant-workers. Ethnographic fieldwork reveals that these divisions have persisted over many years.