Empires of Labor

Alessandro Stanziani is Professor of Global History at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and Senior Researcher at the CNRS. He is the author of Earth Capital: The Long History of Capitalism and Its Aftermath.

• Introduction; Part I. Labor Rules and Colonization: 1. The Russian way: peasants, landowners and the empire; 2. The British empire: coercion in the name of freedom; 3. The French touch: protecting men in urban industry, excluding rural people, women and colonies; Part II. The Economics of Bondage: 4. The Russian empire and the economic dynamics of serfdom; 5. Labor and the British Industrial Revolution; 6. International trade, slavery and the industrial revolution; 7. With or without you. France and the empire of sugar; Part III. Labor Empires Under Attack. From Abolition to the Great Transformation, 1840–1918: 8. Who is the true slave?; 9. The aristocratic abolition of serfdom in Russia; 10. Abolition in the United States and the great transformation; 11 Neo-colonialism in the age of the welfare state; General conclusion and extrapolations.

'In a tour de force of four centuries of labor history across the British, French and Russian empires, Alessandro Stanziani develops a new view of the central role of coercion in the development of global capitalism. A fine-grained analysis deeply rooted in extensive archival research, he shows how serfdom, slavery, indenture and other forms of unfree labor structured the capitalist revolution deep into the nineteenth century. A book that effectively questions many cherished notions about the rise of the world we live in; required reading for anyone trying to come to terms with modern history.' Sven Beckert, author of Capitalism: A Global History