This volume of essays contains case studies of debt bondage covering the impact of an expanding globalized economy, increased commercialization, colonial and post-colonial societies, and emerging economies.

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

In the West, human bondage remains synonymous with the Atlantic slave trade. But large slave systems in Africa and Asia predated, co-existed, and overlapped with the Atlantic system—and have persisted in modified forms well into the twenty-first century, posing major threats to political and economic stability within those regions and worldwide. This handbook examines the deep historical roots of unfree labour in Africa and Asia along with its contemporary manifestations. It takes an innovative longue durée perspective in order to link the local and global, the past and present. Contributors trace shifting forms of forced labour in the region since circa 1800, connecting punctual shocks such as environmental crisis, conflict, market instability, and crop failure to human security threats such as impoverishment, violence, migration, kidnapping, and enslavement. Together, these chapters illuminate the historical and contemporary dimensions of bondage in Africa and Asia, with important implications for the fight against modern-day bondage and human trafficking.

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.

The first history of Lake Tanganyika and of eastern Africa's relationship with the wider Indian Ocean World during the nineteenth century.

Monsoon rains, winds, and currents have shaped patterns of production and exchange in the Indian Ocean world (IOW) for centuries. Consequently, as this volume demonstrates, the environment has also played a central role in determining the region’s systems of bondage and human trafficking. Contributors trace intricate links between environmental forces, human suffering, and political conditions, examining how they have driven people into servile labour and shaped the IOW economy. They illuminate the complexities of IOW bondage with case studies, drawn chiefly from the mid-eighteenth century, on Sudan, Cape Colony, Réunion, China, and beyond, where chattel slavery (as seen in the Atlantic world) represented only one extreme of a wide spectrum of systems of unfree labour. The array of factors examined here, including climate change, environmental disaster, disease, and market forces, are central to IOW history—and to modern-day forms of human bondage.

Between 1500 and 1850, European traders shipped hundreds of thousands of African, Indian, Malagasy, and Southeast Asian slaves to ports throughout the Indian Ocean world. The activities of the British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese traders who operated in the Indian Ocean demonstrate that European slave trading was not confined largely to the Atlantic but must now be viewed as a truly global phenomenon. European slave trading and abolitionism in the Indian Ocean also led to the development of an increasingly integrated movement of slave, convict, and indentured labor during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the consequences of which resonated well into the twentieth century. Richard B. Allen’s magisterial work dramatically expands our understanding of the movement of free and forced labor around the world. Drawing upon extensive archival research and a thorough command of published scholarship, Allen challenges the modern tendency to view the Indian and Atlantic oceans as self-contained units of historical analysis and the attendant failure to understand the ways in which the Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds have interacted with one another. In so doing, he offers tantalizing new insights into the origins and dynamics of global labor migration in the modern world.