This book presents a fundamental reassessment of the nature of wage labor in the nineteenth century, focusing on the common use of penal sanctions in England to

Winner of the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. The essays collected here straddle four decades of work in both historiography and Marxist theory,

The various manifestations of coerced labour between the opening up of the Atlantic world and the formal creation of Haiti.

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 twenti

Examining the emergence of the modern conception of free labor--labor that could not be legally compelled, even though voluntarily agreed upon--Steinfeld explai