Download or read book The Invention of Free Labor written by Robert J. Steinfeld and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the emergence of the modern conception of free labor--labor that could not be legally compelled, even though voluntarily agreed upon--Steinfeld explains how English law dominated the early American colonies, making violation of al labor agreements punishable by imprisonment. By the eighteenth century, traditional legal restrictions no longer applied to many kinds of colonial workers, but it was not until the nineteenth century that indentured servitude came to be regarded as similar to slavery.
Download or read book Coercion Contract and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century written by Robert J. Steinfeld and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-02-05 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 enforce wage labor agreements. Professor Steinfeld argues that wage workers were not employees at will but were often bound to their employment by enforceable labor agreements, which employers used whenever available to manage their labor costs and supply. In the northern United States, where employers normally could not use penal sanctions, the common law made other contract remedies available, also placing employers in a position to enforce labor agreements. Modern free wage labor only came into being late in the nineteenth century, as a result of reform legislation that restricted the contract remedies employers could legally use.
Download or read book Free Labor written by Mark A. Lause and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monumental and revelatory, Free Labor explores labor activism throughout the country during a period of incredible diversity and fluidity: the American Civil War. Mark A. Lause describes how the working class radicalized during the war as a response to economic crisis, the political opportunity created by the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the ideology of free labor and abolition. Grappling with a broad array of organizations, tactics, and settings, Lause portrays not only the widely known leaders and theoreticians, but also the unsung workers who struggled on the battlefield and the picket line. His close attention to women and African Americans, meanwhile, dismantles notions of the working class as synonymous with whiteness and maleness. In addition, Lause offers a nuanced consideration of race's role in the politics of national labor organizations, in segregated industries in the border North and South, and in black resistance in the secessionist South, creatively reading self-emancipation as the largest general strike in U.S. history.
Download or read book Free Soil Free Labor Free Men written by Eric Foner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-04-20 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its publication twenty-five years ago, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men has been recognized as a classic, an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the causes of the American Civil War. A key work in establishing political ideology as a major concern of modern American historians, it remains the only full-scale evaluation of the ideas of the early Republican party. Now with a new introduction, Eric Foner puts his argument into the context of contemporary scholarship, reassessing the concept of free labor in the light of the last twenty-five years of writing on such issues as work, gender, economic change, and political thought. A significant reevaluation of the causes of the Civil War, Foner's study looks beyond the North's opposition to slavery and its emphasis upon preserving the Union to determine the broader grounds of its willingness to undertake a war against the South in 1861. Its search is for those social concepts the North accepted as vital to its way of life, finding these concepts most clearly expressed in the ideology of the growing Republican party in the decade before the war's start. Through a careful analysis of the attitudes of leading factions in the party's formation (northern Whigs, former Democrats, and political abolitionists) Foner is able to show what each contributed to Republican ideology. He also shows how northern ideas of human rights--in particular a man's right to work where and how he wanted, and to accumulate property in his own name--and the goals of American society were implicit in that ideology. This was the ideology that permeated the North in the period directly before the Civil War, led to the election of Abraham Lincoln, and led, almost immediately, to the Civil War itself. At the heart of the controversy over the extension of slavery, he argues, is the issue of whether the northern or southern form of society would take root in the West, whose development would determine the nation's destiny. In his new introductory essay, Foner presents a greatly altered view of the subject. Only entrepreneurs and farmers were actually "free men" in the sense used in the ideology of the period. Actually, by the time the Civil War was initiated, half the workers in the North were wage-earners, not independent workers. And this did not account for women and blacks, who had little freedom in choosing what work they did. He goes onto show that even after the Civil War these guarantees for "free soil, free labor, free men" did not really apply for most Americans, and especially not for blacks. Demonstrating the profoundly successful fusion of value and interest within Republican ideology prior to the Civil War, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men remains a classic of modern American historical writing. Eloquent and influential, it shows how this ideology provided the moral consensus which allowed the North, for the first time in history, to mobilize an entire society in modern warfare.
Download or read book Twice the Work of Free Labor written by Alexander C. Lichtenstein and published by Verso. This book was released on 1996-01-17 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twice the Work of Free Labor is both a study of penal labor in the southern United States, and a revisionist analysis of the political economy of the South after the Civil War.
Download or read book Reinventing Free Labor written by Gunther Peck and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-05-22 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most infamous villains in North America during the Progressive Era was the padrone, a mafia-like immigrant boss who allegedly enslaved his compatriots and kept them uncivilized, unmanly, and unfree. In this history of the padrone, first published in 2000, Gunther Peck analyzes the figure's deep cultural resonance by examining the lives of three padrones and the workers they imported to North America. He argues that the padrones were not primitive men but rather thoroughly modern entrepreneurs who used corporations, the labour contract, and the right to quit to create far-flung coercive networks. Drawing on Greek, Spanish, and Italian language sources, Peck analyzes how immigrant workers emancipated themselves using the tools of padrone power to their own advantage.
Download or read book Freedom written by and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 968 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Free Labor in an Unfree World written by Michele Gillespie and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2004-09-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Individual case studies explore the artisans' worlds on a more personal level, introducing us to the lives and work of such individuals as William Price Talmage, a journeyman; Reuben King, an artisan who became a planter; and Jett Thomas, one of the first master builders to leave his mark on Georgia's architecture."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Terms of Labor written by Stanley Engerman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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).
Download or read book Freedom s Frontier written by Stacey L. Smith and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2013-08-12 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most histories of the Civil War era portray the struggle over slavery as a conflict that exclusively pitted North against South, free labor against slave labor, and black against white. In Freedom's Frontier, Stacey L. Smith examines the battle over slavery as it unfolded on the multiracial Pacific Coast. Despite its antislavery constitution, California was home to a dizzying array of bound and semibound labor systems: African American slavery, American Indian indenture, Latino and Chinese contract labor, and a brutal sex traffic in bound Indian and Chinese women. Using untapped legislative and court records, Smith reconstructs the lives of California's unfree workers and documents the political and legal struggles over their destiny as the nation moved through the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Smith reveals that the state's anti-Chinese movement, forged in its struggle over unfree labor, reached eastward to transform federal Reconstruction policy and national race relations for decades to come. Throughout, she illuminates the startling ways in which the contest over slavery's fate included a western struggle that encompassed diverse labor systems and workers not easily classified as free or slave, black or white.
Download or read book Free Labor written by John Krinsky and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s proudest accomplishments is his expansion of the Work Experience Program, which uses welfare recipients to do routine work once done by unionized city workers. The fact that WEP workers are denied the legal status of employees and make far less money and enjoy fewer rights than do city workers has sparked fierce opposition. For antipoverty activists, legal advocates, unions, and other critics of the program this double standard begs a troubling question: are workfare participants workers or welfare recipients? At times the fight over workfare unfolded as an argument over who had the authority to define these terms, and in Free Labor, John Krinsky focuses on changes in the language and organization of the political coalitions on either side of the debate. Krinsky’s broadly interdisciplinary analysis draws from interviews, official documents, and media reports to pursue new directions in the study of the cultural and cognitive aspects of political activism. Free Labor will instigate a lively dialogue among students of culture, labor and social movements, welfare policy, and urban political economy.
Download or read book Free Soil Free Labor Free Men written by Eric Foner and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 1995-04-20 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men has been recognized as a classic, an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the causes of the American Civil War. A key work in establishing political ideology as a major concern of modern Americanhistorians, it remains the only full-scale evaluation of the ideas of the early Republican party. modern American historical writing.
Download or read book Terms of Labor written by Stanley L. Engerman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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).
Download or read book Men Is Cheap written by Brian P. Luskey and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-02-13 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a Civil War substitute broker told business associates that "Men is cheep here to Day," he exposed an unsettling contradiction at the heart of the Union's war effort. Despite Northerners' devotion to the principles of free labor, the war produced rampant speculation and coercive labor arrangements that many Americans labeled fraudulent. Debates about this contradiction focused on employment agencies called "intelligence offices," institutions of dubious character that nevertheless served the military and domestic necessities of the Union army and Northern households. Northerners condemned labor agents for pocketing fees above and beyond contracts for wages between employers and employees. Yet the transactions these middlemen brokered with vulnerable Irish immigrants, Union soldiers and veterans, former slaves, and Confederate deserters defined the limits of independence in the wage labor economy and clarified who could prosper in it. Men Is Cheap shows that in the process of winning the war, Northerners were forced to grapple with the frauds of free labor. Labor brokers, by helping to staff the Union military and Yankee households, did indispensable work that helped the Northern state and Northern employers emerge victorious. They also gave rise to an economic and political system that enriched the managerial class at the expense of laborers--a reality that resonates to this day.
Download or read book Unfree Labor written by Peter KOLCHIN and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two massive systems of unfree labor arose, a world apart from each other, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The American enslavement of blacks and the Russian subjection of serfs flourished in different ways and varying degrees until they were legally abolished in the mid-nineteenth century. Historian Peter Kolchin compares and contrasts the two systems over time in this magisterial book, which clarifies the organization, structure, and dynamics of both social entities, highlighting their basic similarities while pointing out important differences discernible only in comparative perspective. These differences involved both the masters and the bondsmen. The independence and resident mentality of American slaveholders facilitated the emergence of a vigorous crusade to defend slavery from outside attack, whereas an absentee orientation and dependence on the central government rendered serfholders unable successfully to defend serfdom. Russian serfs, who generally lived on larger holdings than American slaves and faced less immediate interference in their everyday lives, found it easier to assert their communal autonomy but showed relatively little solidarity with peasants outside their own villages; American slaves, by contrast, were both more individualistic and more able to identify with all other blacks, both slave and free. Kolchin has discovered apparently universal features in master-bondsman relations, a central focus of his study, but he also shows their basic differences as he compares slave and serf life and chronicles patterns of resistance. If the masters had the upper hand, the slaves and serfs played major roles in shaping, and setting limits to, their own bondage. This truly unprecedented comparative work will fascinate historians, sociologists, and all social scientists, particularly those with an interest in comparative history and studies in slavery.
Download or read book The Mighty Experiment written by Seymour Drescher and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-10-14 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the mid-eighteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade was considered to be a necessary and stabilizing factor in the capitalist economies of Europe and the expanding Americas. Britain was the most influential power in this system which seemed to have the potential for unbounded growth. In 1833, the British empire became the first to liberate its slaves and then to become a driving force toward global emancipation. There has been endless debate over the reasons behind this decision. This has been portrayed on the one hand as a rational disinvestment in a foundering overseas system, and on the other as the most expensive per capita expenditure for colonial reform in modern history. In this work, Seymour Drescher argues that the plan to end British slavery, rather than being a timely escape from a failing system, was, on the contrary, the crucial element in the greatest humanitarian achievement of all time. The Mighty Experiment explores how politicians, colonial bureaucrats, pamphleteers, and scholars taking anti-slavery positions validated their claims through rational scientific arguments going beyond moral and polemical rhetoric, and how the infiltration of the social sciences into this political debate was designed to minimize agitation on both sides and provide common ground. Those at the inception of the social sciences, such as Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, helped to develop these tools to create an argument that touched on issues of demography, racism, and political economy. By the time British emancipation became legislation, it was being treated as a massive social experiment, whose designs, many thought, had the potential to change the world. This study outlines the relationship of economic growth to moral issues in regard to slavery, and will appeal to scholars of British history, nineteenth century imperial history, the history of slavery, and those interested in the history of human rights. The Mighty Experiment was the winner of First Prize, Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
Download or read book The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Business Labor and Economic History written by Melvyn Dubofsky and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013 with total page 1139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the global economic crisis that developed in the year 2008 makes clear, it is essential for educated individuals to understand the history that underlies contemporary economic developments. This encyclopedia will offer students and scholars access to information about the concepts, institutions/organizations, events, and individuals that have shaped the history of economics, business, and labor from the origins of what later became the United States in an earlier age of globalization and the expansion of capitalism to the present. It will include entries that explore the changing character of capitalism from the seventeenth century to the present; that cover the evolution of business practices and organizations over the same time period; that describe changes in the labor force as legally free workers replaced a labor force dominated by slaves and indentures; that treat the means by which workers sought to better their lives; and that deal with government policies and practices that affected economic activities, business developments, and the lives of working people. Readers will be able to find readily at hand information about key economic concepts and theories, major economists, diverse sectors of the economy, the history of economic and financial crises, major business organizations and their founders, labor organizations and their leaders, and specific government policies and judicial rulings that have shaped US economic and labor history. Readers will also be guided to the best and most recent scholarly works related to the subject covered by the entry. Because of the broad chronological span covered by the encyclopedia and the breadth of its subjects, it should prove useful to history students, economics majors, school of business entrants as well as to those studying public policy and administration.
