What If the Tax Was Your Labour? Days Owed Instead of Money

A government wanting a road built has two options, namely to collect money and hire workers, or to require the workers directly. The first needs a monetary economy, a tax collection apparatus and a labour market, all of which were absent or thin across most of history. The second needs only the authority to compel and a record of who owes what, which any state that can tax at all already possesses. Demanding labour directly therefore made sense wherever money was scarce, and it had the further advantage of being collectable from people who had no money at all, which was most of the population in most agrarian societies.

The obligation built the infrastructure that states needed and markets would not supply:

• •Roads and bridges, the most common use and the longest surviving
• •Irrigation canals and their annual clearing, which no individual could do alone
• •City walls, fortifications and military earthworks
• •Monumental construction, including temples, tombs and palaces
• •Transport of goods and materials over long distances
• •Clearing, dyking and drainage of land

The arrangements were more regulated than the bare obligation suggests, because an unlimited demand would have destroyed the agricultural base it depended on. Obligations were typically stated as a fixed number of days per year, commonly a few weeks, and were timed to avoid planting and harvest, which is why so much monumental construction was done in agricultural off-seasons. Records list who owed what, and a substantial administrative apparatus existed to keep them. Substitution was frequently permitted, so a person could send somebody else or pay a sum in place of the days, and that commutation gradually became the main form as money economies developed. Food was often supplied to workers, since people cannot labour on nothing.

An obligation this unpopular generated a whole repertoire of evasion, and the records of enforcement are among the better sources on how ordinary people dealt with authority. Sending the least capable member of a household was standard, since the obligation specified a person rather than an amount of work done. Arriving late and leaving early reduced the effective burden, which is why so many regulations specify hours as well as days. Working slowly was universal enough that supervisors were employed specifically to prevent it. Claiming exemption on grounds of status, age, illness or occupation generated constant litigation, since exemptions were valuable and were bought, inherited and forged. Outright refusal was rare and punished, and collective refusal by a whole community occurred and occasionally succeeded.

The institution proved remarkably durable and its ending was uneven. France abolished it in 1789 among the feudal obligations swept away in the revolution, where road labour had been particularly resented. Russia retained obligations of this kind until the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and in altered forms afterwards. Colonial administrations across Africa and Asia reintroduced compulsory labour on a large scale into the twentieth century, describing it as a tax or a civic duty, and the abuses were severe enough to prompt an international convention against forced labour in 1930 that specifically addressed it. Several countries retained a legal obligation to contribute days of communal work into recent decades, and community work requirements descended from it still exist in places.

Requiring labour directly needs only authority and records, while hiring workers needs money, tax collection and a labour market, which is why states short of coin taxed in days instead. The obligation built roads, canals, walls and monuments, was fixed in length and timed around the agricultural year, and could frequently be commuted to a payment. France abolished it in 1789 and colonial administrations revived it well into the twentieth century.