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216 journal of social history fall 2000
product of public reactions. Schneider may be understating the extent and pub-
lic tolerance of gang violence prior to World War II. In Chicago, for example,
earlier youth gangs were systematically involved in crime but were not as much
the subjects of public concern as were gangs in post-war New York.
Gangs represent an exciting topic but an extremely difficult one to explain
in an historically satisfying way. Schneider succeeds in offering an insightful
analysis of youth gangs, linking the methods of social history with those of
sociology, anthropology and criminology. This book is well worth the attention
of a wide readership.

Carnegie Mellon University David Wolcott

The Little Slaves of the Harp: Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteerur»
Century Paris. By John E. Zucchi (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 1999. viii plus 208pp.).
During the nineteenth century, Italian child street musicians and others per-
formed in cities across Europe and the Americas. Indentured labourers by virtue
of a contract signed between their parentis) and an adult employer (padrone),
these boys and girls were taken to Paris, London, New York, and elsewhere
to work as violinists, harpists, organists, pipers, and exhibitors of white mice,
monkeys, and dancing dogs and bears. (Others apprenticed as figurine vendors,
mosaic-cutters, chimney sweeps, and glassworkers.) Marked by their peasant cos-
tumes, rural manners, poor skills, and in some cases swarthy looks, the children
caught the attention of urban authorities and journalists.
Once a respectable adult occupation, Italy's migrant music trade developed by
mid-century a notorious reputation as a child slave trade run by cruel padroni who
abused their recruits. Government, philanthropic, and media reports recounted
lurid tales of poor youngsters snatched from rural homes to become virtual beggars
on foreign streets, of child "dens" in city slums where unwashed children crowded
into small and windowless rooms, fed on bread and macaroni, and slept on filthy
floors. The romantic yet pathetic figure of the Italian child performer surfaced
in the writings of Dickens, Dylan Thomas, Dostoyevsky, and others. Caricatures
of Italian entertainers-a barrel-organist and dancing dog, "white mice boys,"
and girls playing violin-graced the pages of the penny press.
This fascinating topic is the subject of John Zucchi's book. First published in
hard cover in 1992, The Little Slaves of the Harp is now available in paperback.
It contains valuable research and critical insights, but problems of organization,
lacklustre writing, and repetition detract from its value.
Zucchi situates his case studies of Paris, London, and New York within the
larger context of nineteenth-century Italian emigration. He shows that the child
trade grew out of an earlier and more honourable adult migrant occupation that,
in turn, had its origins in the impoverished districts that produced northern and
southern Italy's earliest "modern" migrants-i-cash-starved artisans and peasant
and tenant farmers on seasonal sojourns. Zucchi locates the origins of the street
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REVIEWS 217

musicians in certain clusters of hometowns or regional districts of Italy, and doc,

uments the timing of their differing migration waves from these Italian locales to
cities across the globe. Having discovered these patterns, however, Zucchi draws
few conclusions, except to say that these musicians were among the precursors
of the mass migration of later decades. He also repeats his findings-in the form
of long lists of Italian place names-in every subsequent chapter.
A major contribution is the analysis of host society responses. While middle,
class authorities in each city shared much in common, Zucchi highlights key
differences. For Paris, the child entertainers were treated largely as a law and
order problem. London authorities sought to regulate street noise in middle,class
residential suburbs, while reformers tried to stamp out what they saw as a begging
problem. New York child reformers hoped to channel the children into useful
occupations. Meantime, in the newly united Italy, relevant political debates
revealed more a concern with liberalism and nationalism than with the children
themselves. In documenting these patterns, Zucchi recounts many fascinating
anecdotes. Unfortunately, the decision to devote a chapter to each city does
make for some repetition, and the problem is exacerbated by the author's listing
of virtually every city by-law, ordinance, court decision, parliamentary debate,
proposed bill, and public official that he came across.
A central question is how best to evaluate the child music trade. Zucchi's an,
swer falls on the agency side of the "victims vs agents" paradigm. What outsiders
depicted as a virtual slave trade, he argues, was in fact a form of apprenticeship
"like any other" except that the child did not become skilled in a trade. The
padrone was an ethnic intermediary and labour agent with the resources nee-
essary to conduct the trade. The parents were struggling farmers who used the
indentured system as a family strategy of survival. The children, though vulner-
able to mistreatment, often managed to send home wages, and some later shifted
into more respectable trades.
I support Zucchi's approach and readily endorse his warnings against rely,
ing too heavily on "biased" middle-class sources. Indeed, his work lends further
credence to the argument made in numerous studies of Victorian society-
including, for example, Judith Walkowitz' work on Jack the Ripper, North Amer-
ican studies of the "girl problem," and work on social reform movements more
generally-that moral panics gripped the age. While some of these works ap-
peared after 1992, others, particularly Linda Gordon's study of violence against
the women and children of Boston's largely immigrant population, might have
been used to strengthen the comparative aspect of the study. Also, given current
debates regarding the status of historical evidence and social history practice,
a new preface or revised introduction that addressed these issues would have
widened the book's appeal.
These suggestions notwithstanding, one is still struck by how little evidence
is available in support ofZucchi's relatively benign view of the child music trade.
Even he at times describes the children in ways that echo his sources. In grappling
with these issues, Zucchi might have drawn more widely on comparable studies
of child labour, especially Joy Parr's work on the British child "orphans" sent to
Canada on labour contracts which bound them as "apprentices" to families who
"adopted" them.
The research cries out for a gendered approach. Boys greatly outnumbered
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218 journal of social history fall 2000
girls in the trade, but the scattered evidence on girls hint at key gender dif-
ferences. Whether girls were more vulnerable to sexual assault is an obvious
question. (Here, Zucchi's discussion of a rape is unsatisfactory.) Were boys sex-
ually assaulted? What about homosexual acts? Did authorities worry about the
moral capacity of the girls for respectable marriage and motherhood? Given the
enormous moral anxieties of the Victorian era, such questions should have been
posed.
As social history, this book tells us more about the social and legal experts
than about the subject of their gaze. Fair enough. As Zucchi observes, the child
street performers were cast as exotic "other," as part of what Victorian reformers
dubbed the "underbelly" of respectable society that threatened the political,
social, moral, and gender order. In demonstrating the validity of this thesis,
Zucchi has produced a valuable study of a wonderful topic. It is a pity that his
publisher did not demand a more polished final text, both in 1992 and in 1998.

University of Toronto Franca Iacovetta

Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues. Edited by Tom Brass and
Marcel van der Linden (New York: Peter Lang AG, 1997. 602pp.
$78.95).
This volume is a collection of papers delivered at a conference on free and
unfree labor organized by the International Insti tute of Social History in 1995. In
addition to introductory and concluding essays authored by the editors, twenty-
two essays are presented. They include both theoretical discussions of free and
unfree labor and case studies of unfree labor across the globe.
While the majority of the essaysfocus on the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies, some reach back as far as the sixteenth century. The articles focus for
the most part on "unfree" rather than "free" labor; within the former category,
the authors dedicate considerably less attention to chattel slavery than to other
coercive systems. Nonetheless, the case studies investigate a wide array of co-
ercive regimes, ranging from convict labor in Australia to concentration camp
and prison camp labor in Germany and the Soviet Union; from bonded labor
in India to undocumented labor in California's agricultural sector; from legally
sanctioned indigenous debt peonage in Guatemala to illegal forms of peonage
practiced in the Amazonian regions of contemporary Brazil.Taken as a group, the
contributions to this volume refute visions of unfree labor as a peripheral, colo-
nial or marginal phenomenon. They substantiate the existence of widespread
systems of coerced labor up to the present, and demonstrate the coexistence and
even compatibility of systems of free and unfree labor in diverse periods and
places.
While recognizing the longevity of "unfree" forms of labor, several authors
(Lucassen, McCreery, van der Linden) nonetheless seem to make the case for
an historical movement from unfree labor to progressively "freer" forms of labor,
often in connection with the introduction and development of industrial or