Les métamorphoses du travail contraint. Une histoire globale XVIIIe-XIXe siècles

Alessandro Stanziani’s Les métamorphoses du travail contraint is highly innovative in a number of ways. Chief among them is its ambition to construct a Global Labour History focusing on free and forced labour in hugely varied but nonetheless comparable geographical contexts, concentrating on Russia and specific case studies from the British and French Empires, namely the Mascarene Islands and French Congo. A second original element involves a literary experiment focusing on the biographical trajectory of Joseph Conrad. A third novel aspect is the problem of geographically and linguistically diverse archives and how the scholarly problems inherent in that scenario might be overcome in order to create an effective global history, as distinct from a Euro-centric history emerging from European-language sources in European archives. The last element of innovation is the balance achieved between theoretical reflections on Marxism, liberalism and capitalism on one hand, and a socio-economic historical approach together with archival research on the other, the net effect being to revise some well-established temporal categories for the study of the transformation from slavery to indentured labour in the colonial world and the shift from peasant agricultural labour to paid employed in Europe.