| dc.description.abstract | Throughout the nineteenth century, thousands of children from the Austrian Alps undertook yearly journeys to Southwestern Germany, where they negotiated labor contracts at “child markets” (Kindermärkte) for work as domestics and shepherds. Over roughly a century, a loose coalition of regional state actors took interventions transforming these so-called “Swabian Children” (Schwabenkinder) into temporary public wards. In so doing, they supplanted parental authority with the unmediated power of the provincial state. This binational coalition accomplished this by, respectively, constructing Schwabenkinder as a legal category of personhood, compelling children to travel using a “Swabian Children Association,” and subjecting children found noncompliant with legal requirements to physical extradition. Contrary to previous scholarship on these migrations, the Swabian Children were hardly impervious to state oversight. By 1900, it could rather be argued that they had been fashioned as a state-based category of welfare.
Scholars of child labor reform have long centered national or imperial legislation as the primary mechanism that expelled most children from numerous industrial labor sectors by 1914. By approaching it in this fashion, these historians have adopted a framing that legal scholars have criticized as “gap analysis” - the notion of law as constituted by a text/enforcement dichotomy, for which non-legislative activities can manifest degrees of mere closure. Absent any corresponding legislation from Vienna or Berlin, regional administrators launched recurrent policy initiatives fundamentally reshaped these migrations. This project shows how the prevailing emphasis on legislation has obscured the power local state actors have wielded as agents of meaningful legal change. | |
