This volume deals with the general issues of the causes and consequences of the rise of so-called free labor from slavery and serfdom in Europe, the United States, and the Caribbean over the past four to five centuries, and points to the many complications and paradoxical aspects of this change.
Throughout recorded history, labor to produce goods and services has been a central concern of society, and questions surrounding the terms of labor—the arrangements under which labor is made to produce and to divide its product with others—are of great significance for understanding the past and the emergence of the modern world.
For long periods, much of the world’s labor could be considered under the coercive control of systems of slavery or of serfdom, with relatively few workers laboring under terms of freedom, however defined. Slavery and serfdom were systems that controlled not only the terms of labor, but also the more general issues of political freedom. The nine chapters in this volume deal with the general issues of the causes and consequences of the rise of so-called free labor in Europe, the United States, and the Caribbean over the past four to five centuries, and point to the many complications and paradoxical aspects of this change.
The topics covered are European beliefs that rejected the enslavement of other Europeans but permitted the slavery of Africans (David Eltis), British abolitionism and the impact of emancipation in the British West Indies (Seymour Drescher), the consequences of the end of Russian serfdom (Peter Kolchin), the definition and nature of free labor as seen by nineteenth-century American workers (Leon Fink), the effects of changing legal and economic concepts of free labor (Robert J. Steinfeld), the antebellum American use of the metaphor of slavery (David Roediger), female dependent labor in the aftermath of American emancipation (Amy Dru Stanley), the contrast between individual and group actions in attempting to benefit individual laborers (David Brody), and the link between arguments concerning free labor and the actual outcomes for laborers in nineteenth-century America (Clayne Pope).
Contributors ix Introduction 1(24) STANLEY L. ENGERMAN
1. Slavery and Freedom in the Early Modern World 25(25) DAVID ELTIS
2. Free Labor vs. Slave Labor: The British and Caribbean Cases 50(37) SEYMOUR DRESCHER
3. After Serfdom: Russian Emancipation in Comparative Perspective 87(29) PETER KOLCHIN
4. From Autonomy to Abundance: Changing Beliefs About the Free Labor System in Nineteenth-Century America 116(21) LEON FINK
5. Changing Legal Conceptions of Free Labor 137(31) ROBERT J. STEINFELD
6. Race, Labor, and Gender in the Languages of Antebellum Social Protest 168(20) DAVID ROEDIGER
7. We Did Not Separate Man and Wife, But All Had to Work: Freedom and Dependence in the Aftermath of Slave Emancipation 188(25) AMY DRU STANLEY
8. Free Labor, Law, and American Trade Unionism 213(32) DAVID BRODY
9. Social Mobility, Free Labor, and the American Dream 245(30) CLAYNE POPE Notes 275(64) Index 339
Stanley L. Engerman is John H. Munro Professor of Economics and Professor of History at the University of Rochester. He is perhaps best known for the influential Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, which he wrote with Robert W. Fogel.
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