"The Organizational Paradox of Overseas Worker Exploitation in Quaker-Managed Confectionary Firms: 1890 to 1917 "

Our paper engages with the important questions about labour and race that have been raised by the New History of Capitalism. By the late nineteenth century, Britain’s Quaker shad developed an elaborate set of teachings about the responsibilities of employers to their workers that anticipate present-day ideas about Corporate Social Responsibility and stakeholder theory. Historians have explored how Quaker firms in Britain such as Cadbury and Rowntree pioneered new forms of welfare capitalism by spending money on elaborate projects such as worker housing that were celebrated by contemporaries as a heralding the arrival of a new era of socially-enlightened and reformed capitalism.
At precisely this time, however, a number of Quaker industrialists in the United Kingdom were embroiled in public controversy over their treatment of particular classes of non-white workers overseas. Journalists and social activists produced evidence that some of the workers on whom these respected Quaker industrialists relied were, in fact, were treated worse than would have been common in their respective industries at that time. In this paper, we use internal correspondence and other documents in corporate archives seek to understand this paradox by learning how the industrialists themselves attempted to understand and justify this differential treatment. We use the records of Cadbury Ltd, which are now in the University of Birmingham archive to explore how the firm structured its relations with cocoa producers in Portuguese west Africa, territories in which African workers did not even enjoy the minimal protections afforded to such workers in British colonies. In 1909, accusations that the firm was engaged in modern slavery resulted in a high profile lawsuit in London. We also use the records of Joseph Rowntree, which are in an archive in York, to understand how this firm’s managers reconcile their lofty rhetoric about improving working conditions in Britain with their reliance on Hindu indentured labour in the British West Indies.