Bondage: Labor and Rights in Eurasia from the Sixteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries: 24 (International Studies in Social History, 24)

Bondage: Labor and Rights in Eurasia from the Sixteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries: 24 (International Studies in Social History, 24)

by Alessandro Stanziani (Author)

Synopsis

For the first time, this book provides the global history of labor in Central Eurasia, Russia, Europe, and the Indian Ocean between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. It contests common views on free and unfree labor, and compares the latter to many Western countries where wage conditions resembled those of domestic servants. This gave rise to extreme forms of dependency in the colonies, not only under slavery, but also afterwards in form of indentured labor in the Indian Ocean and obligatory labor in Africa. Stanziani shows that unfree labor and forms of economic coercion were perfectly compatible with market development and capitalism, proven by the consistent economic growth that took place all over Eurasia between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. This growth was labor intensive: commercial expansion, transformations in agriculture, and the first industrial revolution required more labor, not less. Finally, Stanziani demonstrates that this world did not collapse after the French Revolution or the British industrial revolution, as is commonly assumed, but instead between 1870 and 1914, with the second industrial revolution and the rise of the welfare state.

$148.63

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 270
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 31 Jan 2014

ISBN 10: 178238250X
ISBN 13: 9781782382508

Media Reviews
This is an iconoclastic work, based on a vast knowledge of the relevant literature and on archival materials in French, English, and Russian. It effectively undermines several certainties that have characterized our thinking about the history of labor relations worldwide. * Marcel van der Linden, International Institute of Social History
Author Bio
Alessandro Stanziani is Professor at the EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) and Senior Researcher at the CNRS (Centre National des recherches Scientifiques), Paris. He is the author of four monographs, ten edited volumes, and more than one hundred articles. His books include Rules of exchange: French capitalism in Comparative Perspective, 18th-20th Centuries( Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Batisseurs d'Empires. Russie, Chine et Inde a la conquete du monde(Liber-Seuil, 2012).