101 refusal of impressed labor
"Demands that certain people perform impressed labor for others have on occasion been met with a refusal to do such work. Refusal has usually been aimed at the abolition of impressed labor, rather than merely at improved conditions. In 1921, for example, in the district of Kotgiri (or Kotgarh) in India, an organized, disciplined campaign of nonviolent refusal was conducted against the very old system of begar, or forced labor. This system had allowed Europeans to demand at will that poor cultivators perform hard labor at extremely low wages, despite the consequent detrimental effect on the agriculture of the hill tribes. The cultivators’ demands were met; a strict limitation was placed on the types of service that Europeans could demand, and reasonable rates of pay were fixed for any work performed.34"...
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Historical cases from the Nonviolent Action Database that used this method
Kumaon villagers campaign against British forest regulations, 1916-1921
From 1916 to 1921, villagers in Kumaon in northern India set hundreds of forest fires to protest the colonial British state’s increasing regulations of the natural environment.\n\nRural residents of Kumaon depended on forests as a source of firewood ...
Guatemalans refuse to serve in civil patrols, 1988-1993
From 1961 to 1996 Guatemalans endured a bloody civil war. During this conflict the military-controlled government fought the leftist guerillas or the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG). These groups fought each other for political control...
Formerly enslaved people end apprenticeship practices in Trinidad, 1832-1838
By 1830 the enslaved people in the “West Indian” colonies of the British Empire understood that slavery, as an institution, was about to fall. White abolitionists in Britain and around the world had been pushing legislation through the Parliament tha...
Pare people in Tanzania defeat new tax system, 1945-46
In the 1940s the British colonial government in Tanzania proposed the implementation of mbiru, which was a graduated local tax system. On 14 July 1944, delegates from nine chiefdoms in Tanzania met and drew up their objections on the mbiru ta system,...
Fort Leavenworth Prison strike for better prison conditions and reduced sentences, 1919
On 6 April 1917 the United States of America entered World War I. The American army was about the sixth the size of Britain’s, and President Woodrow Wilson sought to increase the army’s numbers to one million through volunteer conscription. After onl...
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Historical cases from the Nonviolent Action Database that used this method