Summary
De Vries’s term for the sense, strengthened by the war, that diamond workers in Palestine were part of an empire and a colonial network tying their experience to that of diamond miners in Africa, because the stones polished in the various centers originated in those African mines (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.186-187).
Details
- The close association in Palestine between instability of rough-stone supply and industrial unrest made many aware of a similar association in the African diamond mines between the regulated punctuation of mining (as printed) and the working conditions of the South African and Sierra Leonine (as printed) miners; as global diamond mining and trade never knew a supranational workers’ organization, the awareness never expressed itself in organized international solidarity (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.186).
- The effect of stone supply on the multiplicity of strikes made this connectivity another aspect of an imperial social formation; in the last year of the war, awareness of the relations between postwar international arrangements and the international division of labor in the diamond industry deepened (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.186-187).