BONDAGE
Labor and Rights in Eurasia from the Sixteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries
Alessandro Stanziani
268 pages, bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-78238-250-8 $95.00/£60.00 Hb Published (January 2014)
eISBN 978-1-78238-251-5 eBook
“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
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.
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 Bâtisseurs d’Empires. Russie, Chine et Inde à la conquête du monde(Liber-Seuil, 2012).
Series: Volume 24, International Studies in Social History
Contents
Table of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I: BONDAGE IMAGINED
Chapter 1. Second Serfdom and Wage-Earners in European and Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Chapter 2. Poor Laws, Management, and Labor Control in Russia and Britain, or the History of the Bentham Brothers in Russia
PART II: THE ARCHITECTURE OF BONDAGE. SLAVES AND SERFS IN CENTRAL ASIA AND RUSSIA
Chapter 3. Slavery and Bondage in Central Asia and Russia from the Fourteenth to the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 4. The Institutions of Serfdom
Chapter 5. Labor and Dependence on Russian Estates
PART III: OLD BONDAGE, NEW PRACTICES. A COMPARATIVE VIEW. RUSSIA, EUROPE, AND THE INDIAN OCEAN WORLDS
Chapter 6. The Persistent Servant: Labor, Rules, and Social Hierarchies in France and Britain from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 7. Bondage across the Ocean. Indentured Labor in the Indian Ocean
General Conclusion: The Collapse and Resurgence of Bondage
Bibliography
Index