Trenton W. Wilson, Princeton University
What are the historical conditions for the idea of abstract labor? This paper will look at the Qin and Han (roughly 221 BCE-220 CE) statutes and institutions that created, used, and maintained the idea of “person-day” as a unit of labor. The unit of “person-day” was useful in shaping early imperial ideas of population, convict and corvee labor, and official service. As a term in widespread use, “person-day” could presume to organize the entire imperial realm. In the eyes of many writers, the generalizability of the term, however, threatened the existence of less quantifiable forms of “usefulness.” The paper will try to show how the “person-day” unit stood at the basis of imperial bureaucratic practice, theoretical fantasies of economic control, and elite anxieties about the difference between the labor of imperial officials and the labor of mere commoners and criminals. The legal articulation of labor in the Roman context—as described in the work of Yan Thomas—and the management of labor in the Roman empire, in both estates and the empire writ large, provide a fruitful comparative angle to examine the problems “labor” posed in ancient empires.