I had been waiting impatiently for the publication of this monograph by Rutgers University historian Andrew Urban, and it does not disappoint. Urban published a widely-cited article in 2009 on Irish domestic servants in the United States, but my interest in his work, as a historian of colonial domestic service, had been sparked by a fascinating paper on Chinese domestic labor in white settler societies that he delivered at an International Conference of Labour and Social History in Austria in 2013, which was subsequently published as a book chapter.Footnote ¹ With virtually no histories to speak of on Chinese domestic workers in the United States—barely a mention, even, in the general histories of North American domestic service—Urban's promised book-length study was well overdue.Footnote ²

Brokering Servitude does indeed offer the first sustained history of Chinese domestic servants and employers in the United States, and in that regard is groundbreaking in itself. But the book is actually a much broader history of domestic labor in the United States, encompassing not only Chinese servants but also Irish and European women servants, as well as black American domestic workers, mainly women (the latter considerably adding to the coverage in Urban's dissertation, upon which the book is based).Footnote ³ Unlike the Chinese servants, of course these other workers have been the subjects of major studies before, with the racialization of domestic labor often the central question. In bringing these diverse groups together now, Urban crafts a new and distinctive approach, where the migration of domestic labor, international and internal, is the key organizing theme for the analysis.

Urban states the fundamental premise in the book's introduction: “the study of the political economy of reproductive labor, usually confined to the static space of the home, cannot be properly understood without attention to labor migrations, and especially migrations of workers that were assisted, compelled, or contracted” (7). His intention is not really to recuperate hidden histories of migrant workers in the United States, nor even to explicate the nature of their relationships with their employers, although there is much to say on that subject, tangentially, throughout the book. Urban's focus is on the role played by the state—at both federal and local levels—in “brokering” the supply of such mobile domestic workers for the nation, and he contends that the interventionist state, in effectively obstructing the rights of these workers to freely contract their labor, for varied and sometimes contradictory reasons and ends, created the conditions of vulnerability and dependence that would make their servility appear natural.

To articulate this argument, Urban works through a series of thematic chapters dealing with specific ethnic groups, each of which stand as valuable case studies on their own, up until the penultimate chapter that brings them together again. The organization is roughly chronological. The book opens with a chapter exploring the assisted immigration schemes of the early nineteenth century that brought Irish women to the United States in the 1850s and early 1860s, in the wake of the Irish Famine. The next looks at the situation of freedmen and women under the Freedman's Bureau, noting how the paternalistic domestic placement policies for these “refugees” often resembled the treatment of the Irish women. Chapter Three explores Chinese servants from the 1860s to the 1880s, and the pressures to exclude them, specifically, from anti-Chinese immigration restrictions, in order to meet local demands for domestic labor. Gender and race then come strongly to the fore in Chapter Four, on the coercion of European women coming into the country from 1850 through to 1917 into the dependent labor relations of servitude, as a form of moral protection. Chapter Five picks up the story of Chinese domestic servants coming into the United States from the 1880s through the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, and the development of a system of bonds as a way of admitting and controlling (and creating), a temporary domestic labor force. The sixth, concluding chapter compares the attitudes of progressivist reformers of household labor to the various ethnic groups of workers—Chinese, black Americans, and European migrants—between the 1890s and 1924. Using a variety of cultural, literary, and print media sources, Urban carefully delineates how calls to professionalize or mechanize the occupation as a “solution” to the problem of scarce household labor failed to recognize that past practice and law, in fact, generated racial hierarchies and damaging stereotypes of supposedly naturally servile and “anti-modern” workers. An epilogue scrolling through multiple twentieth-century examples of state-managed domestic labor migration schemes brings the discussion up to the present day. Urban suggests that a long history of failing to protect the labor rights of migrant workers, and indeed of actively obstructing their capacity to freely contract their labor to employers, have helped to produce the structural inequities that plague domestic labor today.

Urban makes a powerful case for the importance of immigration policies, and the management of mobility more generally, in the shaping of domestic labor. This book will interest scholars of domestic labor and immigration alike. In a field often dominated by tables and figures, quantitative researchers will not be satisfied with this particular study; but more theoretically-attuned historians will appreciate Urban's deeply layered approach and skilled exposition of a complicated thicket of laws and provisions around immigration in relation to domestic service. Drawing upon an impressive array of sources, Urban's nuanced argument about the motivations, effects, and impact of brokering domestic service has application as a theory beyond the question of migrant labor. For instance, official regulation of Native American labor in California in the 1860s, which saw Indian children and women indentured to domestic servitude, ostensibly for their own protection but resulting in a virtual slave trade, did not come under the purview of his analysis; but many of his insights might be usefully extended to this shameful historical episode.Footnote ⁴

Urban is attentive to gender, race, class, and intersectionality. Framing his study within a broader scholarship on “white settlerism” (16–17), Urban's observations about the way that officials, politicians, and others set up oppositional and value-laden concepts of domestic service—so-called “personal service,” despised as imperial decadence and parasitism, versus the wholly valid “domestic service” of child carers—are tantalizing (249–54). His observations about the nineteenth-century U.S. capitalist economy's need for mobile but unfree labor, and all the contradictions that it created, have, of course, particularly strong resonances for understanding the vexed politics of domestic labor and immigration in the United States today.