Scope and Main Argument

This book aims to explain the role that labor and laboring people played in the construction of empires and their transmutation between the mid sixteenth century and the First World War.Footnote ¹ This period saw the emergence of major empires in which labor, and forced labor in particular, shaped political and social hierarchies and determined economic dynamics. Without forgetting African and Asian empires, this book will focus on three empires and their use of labor: French, Anglo-American and Russian. It will be argued that during the period mentioned, the legal and economic tools of coercion, instead of following one another, as in conventional arguments in history, sociology and economics, actually overlapped. In fact, contrary to a view held widely from the nineteenth century up to the present historiography, not only in Russia, but also in Europe, there was no real opposition between pre-modern and capitalist societies, between landowners and slave masters (or serfs), on the one hand, and industrial and merchant capitalists, on the other, but a strong convergence of viewpoints and interests. Aristocratic capitalism determined the absence of rights not only for slaves and serfs, but also for workers. From this point of view, the Western European colonies and the Russian Empire were not the negation of Western values and notions of labor and (un)freedom, but an extreme variation on them. These political and institutional contexts made labor cheap, and explain why, until the Second Industrial Revolution in Western Europe (i.e., after the 1870s), and much later in agriculture and elsewhere in the world, economic growth was labor-intensive and not capital-intensive, contrary to what liberal and Marxist historiographies assert. Coercion was indeed profitable. Colonialism, slavery in the American and Asian colonies and serfdom in the Russian Empire all yielded profits, albeit with different products depending on the period (sugar, cotton, wheat). The abolition of slavery and serfdom was therefore not driven by economic imperatives, but by political ones. Abolitionist movements and the defense of workers in Europe contributed to this. These changes drove up labor costs and encouraged the concentration and mechanization of industrial production in Western Europe. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the alliance between capitalists and agrarians came to an end; stock markets took precedence over agricultural rents, and financial-industrial capitalism over agrarian-commercial capitalism. Against this backdrop, labor standards and practices in Europe and the colonies diverged. While European labor was increasingly protected, in the colonies labor rules remained highly repressive, with legal inequalities between masters and workers, and a capital-poor, labor-intensive economy. Neocolonialism and the scramble for Africa reflected this global transformation. An East–West divide was added: In Russia, the abolition of serfdom gave rise to a society where coercion through labor and the absence of rights for free workers were still in place. The revolution was a reaction against the Second Industrial Revolution and the intensification of capital, but it ultimately gave rise to a regime where large factories coexisted with the persistence of forced labor and empire.

Book Outline

The chapters in Part I cover the main features of labor contracts and institutions in Russia, Great Britain, France and their colonies. In all these cases, it will be shown that legal rules supported coercion and that continental and colonial institutions reinforced each other: the Masters and Servants Acts and other provisions in Britain, indentures and then slavery in its colonies; forms of labor contract in France and, again, indentures and slavery in the colonial world; the multiple forms of colonization, slavery and serfdom in the Russian Empire. Over the decades, the ongoing debate among historians of these regions has focused on the question of whether labor institutions on the continent and in the colonies were linked. Most interpretations of British and French history have argued that increasing freedom on the Continent was opposed to increasing slavery in the colonies.Footnote ² A more recent historiography has focused on the limitations of workers’ rights in Britain itself and its links with colonial labor.Footnote ³

This book will follow this last line of reasoning, demonstrating that the first white migration to the Americas, during the seventeenth century, was based on existing contracts on the continent (master and servant laws for Great Britain, domesticity, rural workers and sailors for France). Coercion was extended and radicalized in the colonies. I will show how the legal and social conditions of indentured migrants and slaves evolved in symbiosis, as one could not be defined without the other.

These relationships prompt us to take a fresh look at Eastern Europe and Russia. As I have already studied the institutions of serfdom elsewhere,Footnote ⁴ here (Part I), I will summarize the main conclusions while developing new concerns, principally the relationship between serfdom and Russian imperial expansion. It will be shown that, on the one hand, Russian serfdom was much further removed from slavery than is generally assumed, while, on the other hand, less harsh conditions were adopted in the Russian colonies than in Central Russia. This solution pitted Russia against the empires of Western Europe, where workers’ working conditions were worse in the colonies than on the continent.

Despite these differences, on both sides of the Urals, in Western Europe and Russia, the institutions set up to control peasant mobility sought to link land ownership to labor-intensive economic growth. The unequal distribution of political and legal rights was crucial to achieving this goal. It was this world that Arno Mayer had in mind when he asserted that the collapse of the ancien régime did not occur until after the Great War.Footnote ⁵ Coercion favored the coexistence of capitalists, landowners and agricultural elites (sometimes competitors, sometimes allies), very often with the support of the state. Landed aristocrats, peasant-workers and rentier-capitalists dominated the social landscape in Western Europe and Russia. This balance withstood the blows of the revolutions of the late eighteenth century and 1848. The alliance between merchants, capitalists, landowners and the state made coercion even more profitable.

However, institutions and legal provisions did not necessarily serve the purpose of optimizing economic efficiency, as some economists claim;Footnote ⁶ on the contrary, historically, political and social power in the hands of landed and urban aristocrat-capitalists and rentiers gave rise to coercive economic institutions that made labor cheap, while reinforcing inequalities. From the mid seventeenth to the mid nineteenth century, in the West, and then in other parts of the world in Eurasia and Africa, production increased to meet the growing demand for consumer goods and income. At the time, it was labor, rather than capital or land, that underpinned this process, not only in Africa, Asia and the imperial peripheries of the European powers but also in Europe itself, including Britain.Footnote ⁷ Why was this so? Part II attempts to answer this question. My point of view is consistent with the so-called revisionist approach to the Industrial Revolution, which since the early 1980s has emphasized the role of labor more than that of capital during the Industrial Revolution.Footnote ⁸ According to this approach, proto-industrial and agricultural growth, and even the First Industrial Revolution, required more work, not less. Full-time proletarians, such as self-sufficient peasants, were rare; pluriactivity dominated everywhere: Peasants were also merchants and workers, craftsmen and sailors.Footnote ⁹ The disappearance of peasant economies was still a long way off; the famous privatization of communal land, the prelude to proletarianization, remained partial until the mid nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰ This was true in Great Britain, even more so in France, and above all in Russia and Eastern Europe. A question therefore arises: According to classical economic theories, if economic growth is based on the intensive use of one factor of production – labor – then without technical progress, productivity will decline, and growth with it. Yet empirical data show that this outcome did not actually occur. Why not?

The answer lies in the strength of the empire. Raw sugar and raw cotton produced through slave labor provided the necessary inputs for Britain (and Europe); they added profits, which were otherwise limited in Britain by high rent and labor-intensive production.Footnote ¹¹ Sugar and slavery, along with domestic markets, played a major role in financing the First Industrial Revolution.

For many years, this point has been the subject of wide-ranging debate. Some authors have insisted on the primacy of the slave trade, then of sugar and cotton production, and finally of the Industrial Revolution in terms of profits, markets and raw materials.Footnote ¹² Others have taken the opposite view, asserting that the Industrial Revolution rested above all on British capital, markets and technical innovations.Footnote ¹³ I will show that, even if we take the lowest estimate of the net contribution of the slave trade and slavery, they nevertheless played a crucial role in British growth. However, unlike most of the historiography, I do not justify this role by the capitalization of the British economy, as Williams, Beckert and, to some extent, Pomeranz have done, each in their own way.Footnote ¹⁴ Rather, I argue that the revisionist approach to the Industrial Revolution reveals that its relationship with slavery and the slave trade was fundamental not because capital intensified and peasants were transformed into proletarians, but for the opposite reason: Capital was still expensive and labor highly in demand. Between the mid seventeenth and mid nineteenth centuries, British growth was labor-intensive, requiring additional hectares and labor to cope with an eventual decline in the rate of growth. Markets for manufactured goods were also limited due to the persistence of multiple activities and proto-industrialization; hence the importance of colonial resources and profits.

In this general framework, the timescale is important: As Burnard and Riello have shown,Footnote ¹⁵ sugar played an important role in the eighteenth century, while American cotton came much later, after the Napoleonic Wars. It didn’t help finance the First Industrial Revolution but contrasted with the slow pace of growth in the first half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁶

France also experienced labor-intensive growth during the eighteenth century, even more so than Great Britain; and for the same reasons, it also relied on colonial profits,Footnote ¹⁷ which were quite relevant in the eighteenth century and strategically crucial insofar as French domestic markets were less extensive than those of Great Britain.Footnote ¹⁸ Losing Saint-Domingue, then Mauritius, Louisiana and Pondicherry was an economic catastrophe for France and its empire.Footnote ¹⁹

These dynamics interacted with those of Russia, which was not the quasi-periphery of Europe.Footnote ²⁰ According to this interpretation, Russian wheat, produced by serfs, supported British and Western European industrialization. The problem with this interpretation is that we now know that Russian economic growth was stronger than generally claimed. It was achieved by following a similar path to that of Western Europe: intensification of labor, coercion, persistence of the peasantry and landed aristocracy, the role of the empire as a source of land and profits.Footnote ²¹ The Russian domestic market was far more developed than Wallerstein asserted; at the same time, Russia supplied wheat to Western Europe and, from this point of view, Russia and its serfdom complemented American slavery and “ghost acres.”Footnote ²² To this end, Russia invaded the Ukraine and colonized the central Steppes and Siberia. However, the Empire brought Russia far fewer resources and advantages than France and Great Britain: no slaves, no precious metals, no sugar or cotton plantations, but wheat grown by soldier-colonists and by peasants partially or totally emancipated from serfdom. These different trends influenced the historical dynamics of serfdom and slavery. The latter was confronted by the abolitionist movement and the mechanization of production, while the former was gradually transmuted. But how? Resistance from below and reform from above interacted in fairly similar, if different, ways across Eurasia and the Atlantic.

Debates on abolition have essentially focused on two interdependent questions: (1) whether the abolitions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represented a major advance over previous centuries (or even millennia) of human history, during which servitude had been the dominant form of work and the human condition; and (2) whether they were the expression of an action specific to the Western bourgeoisie and liberal civilization. It is true that the number of abolitionist acts and people involved during the extended nineteenth century (1780–1914) has no equivalent in history: thirty million Russian peasants, half a million slaves in Saint-Domingue in 1790, four million slaves in the United States in 1860, another million in the Caribbean (at the time of the abolition of 1832–40), another million in Brazil in 1885 and 250,000 in the Spanish colonies were freed during this period. It is estimated that abolition in Africa at the turn of the century involved around seven million people.Footnote ²³

However, this argument has been criticized by those who have argued that abolitionist legal acts take into account neither the high rate of manumission and freedom purchase in Islamic societies, in regions such as Africa, Southeast Asia and the Ottoman Empire,Footnote ²⁴ nor the high rate of manumission in Russia and Brazil before general abolition, nor the legal and social constraints on freed slaves and serfs.

This book attempts to provide answers that go beyond the classic oppositions between before and after abolition, on the one hand, and between “the West” and “the rest,” on the other. I will focus on the interrelationships in terms of the circulation of ideas and economic and social dynamics between the different spaces: Europe, Russia, Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Americas. From there, I will attempt to identify continuities and changes in the long-term process of emancipation and the interplay between different notions and practices of “freedom.” When and why did the golden age of servitude come to an end? Was abolitionism a response to political and/or economic pressure?

Part III answers this question. It will be argued that in Russia, the abolition of serfdom was a consequence of both internal tensions and the Great Divergence: The decline of China added to Britain’s reorientation towards American corn deprived Russia of most of its foreign markets. Moreover, the diminishing returns of serfdom and proto-industry in the first half of the nineteenth century finally proved the impossibility of reconciling serfdom with long-term economic growth. On the other hand, abolition had a revitalizing effect, although it maintained many of its earlier restrictions, notably on peasant mobility, and pursued the same strategy based on proto-industry and intensive labor that had sustained Western growth almost up to that point. This choice guaranteed a certain degree of social stability and short-term growth, but Russia would soon find itself confronted by the Second Industrial Revolution followed by the First World War, both of which were incompatible with this type of economy. Yet in the French and British empires, profits initially fell after abolition, even as conditions for former slaves and new immigrants improved only slowly. Why was this so?

As with the previous sections, I’ll start with the changes in labor institutions (contracts, legal status); according to one interpretation, post-abolition labor resembled forced labor and slavery, and contracts were seen as the expression of a legal fiction.Footnote ²⁵ This approach deprives the abolition of slavery of any historical significance,Footnote ²⁶ while overlooking all the efforts made by indentured immigrants and former slaves to fight for their own rights.Footnote ²⁷ Several historians have opposed this viewpoint, demonstrating that the actual conditions of emancipated slaves and new immigrants gradually improved over time.Footnote ²⁸ This argument is in line with recent trends in emigration history, which also emphasize the shifting boundary between free and unfree emigration.Footnote ²⁹ I will elaborate on this latter view and add a further dimension: Instead of discussing in a vacuum whether former slaves and indentured migrants were “free people” or “slaves in disguise,” this book argues that we need to examine in detail and in specific places what workers were forced to do as well as what they were allowed to claim.

The evolution of labor and its rules in the colonies also had an impact on the continent. The final chapters make the link between the abolition of slavery and serfdom, and changes in the rules and practices of work in continental Western Europe (the emergence of the welfare state, the Second Industrial Revolution). Polanyi called the latter process “the Great Transformation,” while ignoring the transmutation of colonial empires.Footnote ³⁰ I argue that the Great Transformation was a response not only to the rise of social movements and the cost of labor in Europe but also to the abolition of slavery in the colonies and the United States. The abolitions reopened the debate on social and legal labor standards in Europe itself. Social reforms in France and Great Britain accelerated after 1870, in the face of now global competition from Russia, Canada, Australia, the United States, and soon Japan and Germany. The cost of labor rose steadily, and the first forms of welfare state came into being. After 1870, it was no longer possible to pursue the once-dominant strategy of intensive labor in Western Europe and the United States. On the contrary, this strategy found a new lease of life in Russia and the European colonies. Here, workers could not benefit from the growing welfare state, as in Europe. The “national” resident was a new category allowing certain continental workers access to social rights, and excluded women, craftsmen, workers in small units and, above all, colonial workers. This connected history and disconnected social rights between national welfare in the “North” (not for all!) and coercion in the “South” is still with us today.

This book has a long history: About ten years ago, I had already completed a three-volume comparative history of labor, coercion and economic dynamics between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. I was encouraged to condense it into a single volume; so I put aside the first volume on prisoners of war and the relationship between military and labor markets, and concentrated on the other two volumes. Their revision into a smaller volume took me years. Meanwhile, I went on to produce other articles and books and complementary or partial issues, such as the role of labor institutions in Russia, with a small comparison with Britain; then studies on the Indian Ocean world, and finally an evaluation of the role of law and legal labor institutions from a global perspective. The present book therefore offers a different view: First, it is my first systematic attempt to compare the Anglo-American, French and Russian empires, where the role of the colonial worlds is as important for Russia as that of labor on the mainland. Second, for the first time, I fully develop my discussion of the American continent, the Caribbean and North America. Third, I avoid repeating the analysis of labor institutions (except for the Americas) already present in previous studies, and I put the accent on the economic rationale and performances of labor and coercion. From this perspective, I have tried to connect different historiographies, such as the Great Divergence and the Great Transformation, the history of the Industrial Revolutions, labor, slavery and serfdom. How?

Scales Matter: Global Labor History or Global Microhistory?

Since the start of the new millennium, global labor history has produced a deluge of publications, created associations all over the world and made a major contribution to the renewal not only of the history of labor but of history in general.Footnote ³¹ This field had been in decline since the 1980s–1990s; partly as a consequence of the decline of the “social turn” in history,Footnote ³² these difficulties in labor history also reflected those of the activism of many labor historians.Footnote ³³ The crisis of the working class and the political and ideological difficulties of the Left thus resulted in a veritable intellectual impasse for most labor historians, not only in France, but also in most other European countries and the United States. Without necessarily resolving these contradictions, the global history of labor took off at the turn of the 1990s–2000s, in the wake of debates on globalization. Labor became topical again from two main angles: the future of Western workers, faced with the decline of the welfare state and offshoring, and the political and social tensions linked to migratory movements.Footnote ³⁴ Global histories of slavery have been produced along similar lines: The Cambridge history of slavery, the Palgrave handbook of global slavery and a French world history of slavery have abandoned ancient and Atlantic slavery as a paradigm and instead emphasized the multiplicity of slaveries across the world over the long term.Footnote ³⁵ For their part, global histories of migration have constantly shifted their focus and questioned the boundary between free and unfree migration.Footnote ³⁶ This effervescence has led to a major shift in the focus of research, from the history of work in the West to a history linking different continents over the long term (usually from the sixteenth century onwards). Never has the history of labor in China, India, the Ottoman Empire, Africa and Latin America attracted so much interest from historians, sociologists and political scientists as in recent decades.Footnote ³⁷ One of the great successes of this historiography has been to overcome the conventional distinction between historians of wage labor and those of slavery, which in turn reflected that between historians of Europe and the United States and those of area studies.Footnote ³⁸

Authors of global labor histories are often accused of superficiality, lack of rigor, unfamiliarity with the regions studied and reliance on secondary literature.Footnote ³⁹ However, to attack global labor histories as such is to miss the point: These syntheses are welcome as advanced textbooks; there’s no question of depriving ourselves of them, unless we consider that the general public and students are not worthy of attention, or that only national history counts. Nor should these works be criticized for relying essentially on secondary sources (in the case of individual works); why should historical syntheses be acceptable if produced by Hobsbawm (with an emphasis on the English Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution), whereas they should be rejected if produced by Van der Linden or Lucassen?

In fact, the main limitations of these recent syntheses, as well as of the major series published by Anglo-American publishing houses, lie not only in the absence of original sources (which remains a fact), but also in the fact that they pass on almost exclusively from researchers based in American and British centers, and blithely ignore historiographies in languages other than English. It is as if no study in German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and of course Arabic, Chinese or Russian deserved attention. The Eurocentrism of sources is no less dangerous than the Eurocentrism of arguments and categories. Global syntheses are almost inevitably still prisoners of this legacy. Would a change in the scale of investigation solve this problem?

Global microhistory,Footnote ⁴⁰ and its first expressions in labor history,Footnote ⁴¹ aim to restore the role of local contexts and individual lives in global history, accused of producing an exclusive bird’s-eye perspective. This is certainly an important goal; the problem is that in this orientation, the micro aspect, described as micro-spatial, actually includes heterogeneous approaches: Italian micro-history, local monographs, biographies, group trajectories and even chapters on regional studies. The “local” refers to many different objects, and the same applies to “individuals”: A village, a region, even an area can be included in the definition of micro-spatial labor studies. At the same time, the target (i.e., the global), refers only to global syntheses such as those discussed previously and ignores other approaches to global history (connected history and comparative history in particular). This unfortunate mixing of genres is common in historiography, particularly in economic and social history, where regional, urban or company monographs are often confused with micro-history as an analytical approach and epistemological proposition. On the one hand, the original Italian microhistory radically challenged the notion of statistical representativeness, replacing it with the relevance of the case studied to the questions posed. The life of a merchant was not to be “representative” of merchants and trade; this question was irrelevant and openly rejected. On the contrary, an individual life was used to raise broad historiographical questions about, for example, trade and the religious counter-reformation, and to provide new answers. On the other hand, regional monographs and case studies constantly evoke their representativeness.Footnote ⁴² Spatial microhistory, like most Anglo-American microhistory studies, straddles these two approaches. This is why global microhistories of labor still encounter major difficulties in reconciling this micro dimension with the dominant categories (coercion, globalization, capitalism, etc.) needed to link individual cases to structural dynamics. For the moment, micro-studies do not seek to redefine these notions but, on the contrary, to mobilize them to link local studies together. Thus, the broader categories act not as heuristics to raise new questions and provide new answers, but to confirm conventional answers (such as the role of capitalism), while adding “complexity.” But what exactly is “complexity”?

We already know, before we begin the historical survey, that every region, every village, every individual is different from another. But so what? This purely descriptive stance confuses the historian’s methodological challenges with the survival strategies of working populations. The diversity of their experiences reminds us not only of the epistemological difficulties faced by the investigator, but also of the extremely difficult conditions under which the workers had to operate in order to obtain better living and working conditions. Is gender relevant in this case?

The answer must surely be in the affirmative, as the enormous historiographies on gender in global labor history prove.Footnote ⁴³ While studies of women’s work in the West emphasize their role in reproduction, precarity, underpayment and lack of rights, in the history of slavery, the focus has again been on women’s role in production and reproduction (which in this respect differentiates the United States from other slavery systems).Footnote ⁴⁴ Individual micro-histories were highlighted in this context.Footnote ⁴⁵ Overall, a tension was stressed between production and reproduction: The more women worked, the less they were able to reproduce. A trade-off that could be resolved either by importing more slaves (or workers in Europe) or by mechanizing production. The first solution was profitable as long as the cost of importing was low. The ban on the slave trade partially altered this balance, and even more so, abolitionists’ attacks on indentured slavery, seen as a new form of slavery, contributed to the problem. The protection of child and female labor in Europe went hand in hand with this change.Footnote ⁴⁶

This book does not develop gender as such, but systematically brings it to the fore when examining different labor regimes. For example, I will discuss at length the indentured women who crossed the Atlantic in the seventeenth century, particularly in the French colonies. In this case, the lack of migrant families, the violence inflicted on native women and the subsequent importation of marginalized women into France will be interconnected. This solution will be much less easy to apply in post-slavery Mauritius and Réunion, where most of the enlisted people were initially men. These cases and different dynamics will influence the mutual evolution of labor rights in the French and British empires, particularly when, after the 1870s, men’s labor rights improve, excluding those of women and colonial workers. The Russian case, as we shall see, was even different: Serfdom was a village and household affair, where patriarchal values met labor hierarchies. In the Russian colonies, there were two main cases: Either peasant-soldiers and fugitives without families, in which case their reproduction was at stake or families on the move, in Siberia, Ukraine and parts of the Steppe. In this case, gender intersects not only with labor, but also with the Russification of the Empire. Moreover, as in the case of slavery, in the case of serfdom, gender strongly influenced the transmission of serf status (matrilineal transmission of legal status). And yet, to return to Western Europe, in the nineteenth century, women were still subject to a different legal status, whether in labor, trade or any other field. In other words, the relevance of legal status goes beyond slavery and serfdom, and concerns “free” work and gender in Europe too.

In summary, this book takes into account the contribution of gender and (global) microhistory, but seeks to develop it from a different perspective: Individual cases, regional investigations and comparative analyses between empires and their regions aim to identify not only the aforementioned tensions between “the local and the global,” but also to provide their mutual interaction and co-evolution, and, ultimately, to identify the “local” and the “global” in terms of historical context. For example, on a broader scale, I use the Russian case to reassess the British case. In this broad context, I will not focus on entire empires, but on Russian borderlands and contrast them with the Anglo-American frontier. Regional studies and differences come into play here. Within this box, the individual cases of serfs, indentured servants and slaves will highlight the multiplicity of voices and living courts and their impact on broader trends. These multiple scales interact within a dynamic political and economic configuration that is absolutely central to the period under study: the Empire.

Empires

Of course, this book is not about empires as such.Footnote ⁴⁷ The most impressive tour de force on this subject is undoubtedly Empires: A World History by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper,Footnote ⁴⁸ which examines a wide range of empires, from antiquity to the present day. Its main focus is on strategies of domination, and therefore on politics and society, rather than economics. Most of the book’s arguments are in line with those of Burbank and Cooper, starting with the assertion that the rise of the state in Western Europe is a consequence, not the origin, of Empire. The nation-state was a late and temporary by-product of Empire. A second point on which we agree is that empires cannot be reduced to the opposition between colonizers and colonized, that the latter were never purely passive subjects and that multiple forms of interaction and institutional accommodation were put in place. These solutions have differentiated Empires. More recent works of synthesis have also offered valuable comparisons between several empires, including the Russian Empire.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, unlike Burbank and Cooper, and these other titles too, I do not intend to write a world history of empires from their origins to the present day, focused primarily on political history, but rather a connected and comparative socio-economic history of the relationship between labor and certain empire-building between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ⁵⁰ The aim here is not to identify imperial repertoires, but rather to grasp the comparative interrelation between labor and empire-building in specific contexts. In this endeavor, one main question arises: Why did so many different forms of empire – in space and time – rely on the coercion of labor? Was this inherent in imperial forms of state and power, or was it a consequence of the market dynamics of which state empires were themselves a by-product?

The answer depends on the empire studied. I will concentrate primarily on three empires: Russian, British and French. This decision does not exclude references to Central and South Asia, China, the Ottoman Empire, Africa and the Americas, for which extensive and valuable historiographies exist.Footnote ⁵¹ This will not be an attempt to re-establish a Eurocentric approach to labor and imperial history, but, on the contrary, to reorient Europe itself in a global perspective.Footnote ⁵² The way out of Eurocentrism is not necessarily to study non-European regions (which, incidentally, are themselves subject to Eurocentric or other “centric” approaches), but to study Europe itself without presuming that it is the nucleus of progress and modernity. How does this happen?

From this point of view, the case of Russia offers a particularly clear illustration of the Eurocentrism that continues to guide historical analysis. Over the past few centuries, and still today, Russian, European and Western observers have debated Russia as a “European,” “Asian-Mongolian” or ultimately “Eurasian” entity.Footnote ⁵³ Even the new approaches to world history, which challenge Chinese “backwardness” and European ethnocentrism, nevertheless regard Russia as the paradigm of unfree labor and the absence of markets. As such, it is either presented in head-on opposition to the Lower Yangtze and Great Britain in the case of Pomeranz, or regarded as an exception in Europe for having put an end to famines and introduced private property and democratic rule in the books of Osterhammel or Darwin.Footnote ⁵⁴ In all these approaches, the “case of Russia” systematically expresses the demarcation line, even the negation, of Western growth and civilization. Russia is on the periphery of global dynamics, both in terms of economic performance and – crucial to any approach to global history – in terms of the decentralization of Europe (or the West). When it comes to Russia, decentralizing perspectives collapse.

Dominic Lieven has given us valuable insights into this comparative perspective of the Russian empire. He accepted the basic arguments used to explain the growth of Western economies (capital, the First Industrial Revolution, the proletarianization of the peasantry, etc.) and channeled them to explain Russian reactions to these same phenomena. Darwin adopted a similar approach: He emphasized the Eurasian dimension of modern Western history and the role Russia played in it.Footnote ⁵⁵ He placed Russia within Europe and then sought to give a less Eurocentric picture of the modernization process. In addition, Darwin, like many others, contrasted Western empires with so-called Asian empires: The former excluded and subjugated conquered populations, while the latter were much more inclusive.Footnote ⁵⁶ On the other hand, several other authors contest this allegedly “mild” Russian colonialism.Footnote ⁵⁷ The problem with both approaches is that they are based on more or less idealized images of one of the terms of comparison: Specialists in Russian history portray the West and its empires based on conventional ideas about crucial notions such as the Industrial Revolution, colonization or democracy, while experts on the West start from equally stereotyped images of Russia as a land of serfdom and despotism.Footnote ⁵⁸ Conventional approaches use anhistorical categories of “serfs,” “serfdom” and “despotism.” This book reorients the identification of serfdom in its relation to the construction of the Russian empire.Footnote ⁵⁹ It will show that serfdom and the Russian empire were not the negation of, but an extreme variation on, the European model of labor and empire.

If so, we are ready to reassess the role of labor in Western empires too. The idea that capitalism, and in particular the English Industrial Revolution, was made possible by institutions that facilitated free contracts and (according to some) a proletarianized peasantry is supported by a long tradition. It goes back at least to the nineteenth century and the classical economists (Smith, Marx), then to Tawney and Polanyi, and most of the historical sociology and economic history of the twentieth century. The world-system approach, while emphasizing the existence of mixed forms of labor and exploitation on the periphery and quasi-periphery, assumed that free wage labor characterized the “core.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Acemoglu and other economists before him stressed the relationship between empire and the rise of democracy and private property in Britain: Atlantic trade would have encouraged the Glorious Revolution and the alliance between merchants, capitalists and Parliament at the expense of the Crown and aristocrats.Footnote ⁶¹ This book follows an important trend in Atlantic and world historyFootnote ⁶² and argues that there was indeed a link between England, Europe and the Atlantic, but that it went in the opposite direction of increased freedom: Through slavery and the appropriation of profits, the colonial world helped keep coercive institutions alive in Britain, and the same was true in France. Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, Western Europe experienced a major innovation: not democracy, nor the agrarian and Industrial Revolution, but a new link between labor, coercion and production, both in the European colonies and on the continent. From this perspective, the case of France is equally interesting: France is usually presented not as the land of liberty and revolution, but of absolutism and state intervention. Conventional labor historiography therefore contrasted France with Britain: France was said to have kept alive the peasantry and small units, the putting-out system, small-scale manufacturing and labor-intensive growth paths. Britain was the opposite: capital-intensive, mechanized, proletarianized and industrialized society and economy.Footnote ⁶³ The opposition between regulation, free markets and liberalism was also commonplace in historiography.Footnote ⁶⁴ This view has been sharply contrasted: Britain made extensive use of regulation, while conversely, France was more “liberal” and free-market oriented than is generally assumed.Footnote ⁶⁵ In the past, historians have been fond of contrasting the persistence of guilds and the corporatist spirit of French labor law with the Anglo-Saxon free labor market.Footnote ⁶⁶ This is no longer the case, and labor regulation in France is no longer seen as an obstacle to market growth.Footnote ⁶⁷ Moreover, some recent studies have highlighted the fact that the French case encourages a reorientation of the very notion of empire, too often associated with the formal occupation of territories. On the contrary, as the current experience of the United States and the history of post-decolonization confirm, informal empires, which make use of soft power, economic and diplomatic pressure, are just as relevant. Thus, according to this interpretation, nineteenth-century France was a major informal empire with exports of luxury goods such as wine and silk.Footnote ⁶⁸ Despite its virtues, this interpretation nevertheless runs up against several questions, starting with the broad definition of empire (already very broad in Burbank and Cooper’s approach): If everything is empire, how can we distinguish this form of governance from others? And why, if informal empire was ultimately less costly than formal empire, have the great imperial powers struggled so hard to maintain or reconstitute their empires (France and England after 1945, Russia after 1917 and today, the Ottomans at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries)?

Moreover, the informal control of the European powers over the countries of the “South” is quite different from France’s exports of wine and silk to European countries and the United States. It is hard to imagine France taking economic control of Great Britain and the United States through its exports of luxury goods to these countries. This approach makes some sense today, but it seems inappropriate to extend it to other historical periods.Footnote ⁶⁹ And yet, we still have to justify the use of the main categories we rely on (labor, coercion, capitalism): How do we reconcile the so-called emic (belonging to the actors and their context) and etic (belonging to today’s observer) categories?

Categories in Space and Time: Capitalism and Coercion

It’s no coincidence that global labor history is constantly confronted with the same question: What categories are we supposed to use when we move from one era to another, from one space to another? Are labor or slavery adequate categories across the ages and the world? If we refer to the so-called emic categories (used by historical actors), we are confronted with their possible incommensurability between different regions: Can we really translate Chinese, Bengali, Russian, etc. terms as “slave”?

If, on the other hand, we use so-called etic categories, as developed in current social sciences (slaves, wage-earners, etc.), we can circulate in space and time, but we lose specificities. This latter approach, which prioritizes analytical insights over descriptive historicities, is widespread in most global histories informed by sociology, political science and, ultimately, economics. Certainly, there are many ways of breaking this impasse between local and global categories, present and past, without necessarily mastering every language. Let’s look first at a few syntheses produced by Dutch authors, as well as an important taxonomy of forms of work developed at the International Institute of Social History (IISG) in Amsterdam. Twenty main labor relations are identified (among them: wage-earners, slaves, servants, serfs), each with sub-types (time-earners, wage-tenants, piece-work wage-earners, domestic, agricultural, sexual slaves, etc.). Each category is associated with a “type of work”: reciprocal, market, non-market, tributary-obligatory, etc. The innumerable historical cases are described. Finally, the innumerable historical cases are each placed in one of the boxes of this matrix.Footnote ⁷⁰ Like all taxonomies, it is static and based on categories derived from Marxist thought, opposing the market and the non-market, wage labor and forced labor. These are ideal-types, sometimes useful for asking questions, much less for answering them. For example, in the course of a lifetime, a hired laborer, a slave or even a wage-earner often changes category, even though the market/non-market opposition has been criticized for decades by historians and anthropologists. What is more, this nomenclature doesn’t allow us to grasp relationships from one region to another, from one period to another, apart from conflicts of ideal-types and abrupt ruptures. Nomenclatures are useful when they are produced by historical actors; they express benchmarks for understanding their way of thinking and acting. They seem far less useful when used as historians’ tools for understanding the worlds of the past.

Another solution is to avoid identifying global history with world history, as Pomeranz argued several years ago.Footnote ⁷¹ In this case, the question becomes one of selecting specific areas and then comparing them. The relevance of areas never exists in itself, but is dictated by the questions we raise. In Pomeranz’s case, the underlying question was why China didn’t produce an industrial revolution like Britain did. In many global histories of slavery and abolitionism, the underlying question is why abolitionism only developed in the West. In both cases, these are normative judgments (Why did China behave, or not behave, like Europe? Why was Africa “backward”?) based on comparative approaches. Over the years, several historians have criticized comparative history as inventing artificial comparisons, drawn from economic or social models but not confirmed by original sources. To this approach, they have opposed connected history as the expression of relationships correctly expressed in the sources themselves.Footnote ⁷² However, the same remark about arbitrary choices can be made about archives, both in their original production and in the way historians select and synthesize them.Footnote ⁷³ In reality, there is no point in opposing comparative history and connected history, each of which deserves different objectives and leads to different, complementary questions.Footnote ⁷⁴ For example, it is perfectly legitimate to compare the abolition of serfdom in Russia and France, to understand why it took place at such different times. But it is equally legitimate to ask whether French perceptions of Russian serfdom weren’t dictated, after all, by the persistent constraints that existed in the French labor market even in the nineteenth century. The Weberian approach, from its founding father through to Tilly, Barrington Moore and Pomeranz, not forgetting a number of Dutch labor historians, takes as its starting point a scheme and categories derived from the social sciences (power, coercion, the state, property, competition, etc.) and then tests their relevance in different historical contexts. A totally different approach, linked to the French historian Marc Bloch, but currently used in more conventional historiographies, predetermines not the questions, but the fields of comparison according to their similarities. For example, Bloch allows a comparison between France and Germany as an expression of European culture, but excludes any comparison between these two countries and Russia as a non-fully European civilization. Bloch gave priority to linguistic skills over social sciences and their patterns, but this did not prevent him from selecting areas on the basis of preconceived assumptions.Footnote ⁷⁵ This means that whatever we do, whether we link or compare, and whether we compare according to one approach or the other, the tensions between the emic and etic categories persist. Drawing on my previous methodological (using both comparison and connection)Footnote ⁷⁶ and empirical research,Footnote ⁷⁷ this book will put forward some suggestions for overcoming this impasse.

Firstly, conceptual categories will be used not as tools for preconceived explanations, but as heuristics for raising questions.Footnote ⁷⁸ Secondly, it is possible to adopt emic approaches without losing the comparative and connected story. To explain these points, let me take the two main etic categories guiding this book: coercion and capitalism. As I have already addressed these two categories in previous works, I will simply summarize my main points here. Like Braudel, Sombart and many others,Footnote ⁷⁹ I associate capitalism with finance, monopoly and private property, rather than with the proletarianization of the peasantry and small traders, as argued by Marx, Weber and their many followers.Footnote ⁸⁰ Yet when I began my research into labor many years ago, this point was far from clear to me. I knew the conventional histories of wage labor, slavery and serfdom, and imagined that my regional studies – Russia, Europe, some of the colonies – fitted these patterns perfectly. Over the years, I was disconcerted by the fact that the European colonies and the American South seemed perfectly integrated into the capitalist mechanism; similarly, today, the forced labor practiced by multinationals in the global South with the help of local intermediaries hardly seems to be considered a “deviation” due solely to (bad) local institutions. This means that capitalism is perfectly compatible with forced labor and slavery. From this point of view, this book is close to the New History of Capitalism, which departs from conventional Marxist, Weberian and liberal interpretations associating capitalism with wage labor alone, and which consider slavery, and slave labor in general, to be part of it.Footnote ⁸¹ However, this book proposes two main variations on this approach, mainly linked to the periodization of capitalism: It will not focus on the conquest of the Americas or the First Industrial Revolution, but on the long-lasting aristocratic capitalism that stretches from the mid seventeenth century to the First World War. The question is not to explain the political, social and economic revolutions of the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but rather why, despite these turning points, labor and coercion persisted throughout the world.Footnote ⁸²

What is coercion? Anthropologists, sociologists and historians, depending on their disciplines, have highlighted different aspects of labor relations in an attempt to draw the line between “free” and “forced” labor; in particular, slavery. Social status (membership or exclusion from the clan, family, local community), religion, legal status (form of dependence, freedom of movement, hereditary nature of constraints), socio-economic conditions (dependence, non-economic benefits, coercion, etc.), political rights and legal (and procedural) rights were addressed.Footnote ⁸³ Researchers identified a number of variables, but were unable to reach a consensus. These issues have been debated with all the more fervor over the last twenty years, as cultural and subaltern studies have highlighted the relativity of notions of freedom and coercion. As a result, the question is now whether or not a given form of dependence, servitude, etc. observed in a particular society in Africa, Asia, the Indian Ocean or the Americas can be considered “slavery.” If the answer is yes, it means that slavery existed before and independently of colonialism; if the answer is no, it means that these forms of dependence and servitude were specific to a particular place and that the “imperialist” and revisionist culture would prefer to call them “slavery” in order to minimize the West’s “debt” to the Third World. So, contrary to Marx and Marxist approaches, I don’t see the legal and economic aspects of coercion as succeeding one another over time; the former under pre-capitalist modes of production, the latter under capitalism. On the contrary, both coexist under capitalism.Footnote ⁸⁴ By coercion, therefore, I mean forms of unequal labor relations and contracts, in which workers – not only slaves, but also serfs, indentured migrants and servants – have a different legal status from their masters, and therefore different rights and obligations.Footnote ⁸⁵ I will not use coercion in its broadest interpretation, as in some sociological interpretations, according to which all forms of dependent labor are an obligation and therefore coercion.Footnote ⁸⁶

I will use these definitions of capitalism and coercion only to raise questions, not to find answers according to either theory. The way I conceive the global history of labor does not start from a general definition of “free” and “unfree” labor, nor from preconceived taxonomies of labor relations. Rather, my starting point is the way in which historical actors themselves have shifted the boundaries between “free” and “unfree” work. For example, I seek to understand why, at the end of the seventeenth century, in the French and English colonies, slaves were initially called “indentured” and why, a few decades later, a new category (slave) was imposed, wanted by whom and with what consequences. Nevertheless, my intention is not to argue that wage earners were slaves in disguise, but I will try to explain by whom and why this parallel was advanced in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who opposed it, and with what social and political consequences. This re-examination of historical forms of labor and their definition is not intended to relativize these categories by asserting that “forced labor does not exist” or that it is an “intellectual invention.” On the contrary, by placing these elements in appropriate historical contexts, I aim to provide an original explanation of the dynamics of forms of labor. Instead of looking for the emergence of “free labor” and “civilization” or, conversely, stigmatizing the persistence of the “corporate tradition,” or even latent forms of slavery, I wish to understand the dynamics of certain historical forms of work by relating them to the tension, also historically situated, between freedom and constraint. To do this, I need to fully unpack the complement of constraint (i.e., resistance).

Resistance versus Agency?

In recent decades, a large number of publications have taken up the letters, songs and testimonies of slaves, workers, migrants and sailors.Footnote ⁸⁷ These documents are a powerful testimony to the expression and action of the “subalterns.” But what exactly does this posture mean?

One widespread response is to use individual cases to move beyond conventional social histories of labor and slavery that focus on structural dynamics or mass statistics. Flesh-and-blood individuals are reinjected into the historical narrative. This is a valuable yet purely illustrative attempt: It aims at describing how workers and slaves lived. The words “resistance” and “agency” have been mobilized so often that they ultimately seem to include many different forms of action while losing their explanatory power.Footnote ⁸⁸ In E.P. Thompson’s original approach, working-class agency sought to emphasize the role of class consciousness and representations as well as structural dynamics in the formation of the working class in Britain.Footnote ⁸⁹ The first generation of subaltern studies reframed this approach in Indian and colonial contexts. These approaches have often been accused of adopting an essentialist stance (anhistorical identification of the subaltern, the poor, etc.), of idealizing the poor.Footnote ⁹⁰ A completely different approach to agency emerged in the 1990s in the work of certain Africanists, and Richard Roberts in particular. The theoretical reference was no longer Gramsci and Marxism, but, significantly, Anthony Giddens. At a time when the existence of a working class in the West was being questioned and the classical welfare state was under attack, Giddens’ aim was to restore the role of individual agency in the face of structural social and historical determinism as expressed by Marx and Bourdieu.Footnote ⁹¹ Roberts took Giddens as a point of reference and then translated his approach into a particular form of agency; namely, the use of law by slaves, former slaves, concubines and wives in colonial West Africa.Footnote ⁹² Two further concepts accompanied Roberts’ investigation: On the one hand, power could not be conceived as a monolithic entity; on the contrary, landscapes of power were formed and evolved over time, among other things, in response to the encounter between colonial and local actors and institutions – namely, the law. On the other hand, this complex social and institutional framework, and the fluid interactions between agency and structure, were eager to produce unintended yet powerful consequences in terms of individual and social trajectories. It was a brilliant solution to the problem of historical determinism and the relationship between agency and structure. Unfortunately, over the years, this original inspiration from the political and social sciences and the use of law has gradually been lost or relegated to the background in the vast majority of research that refers to agency as an indefinite form of social action for subaltern social groups. The problem is that, because agency is not an emic concept (internal to the sources) but etic (external to them), it seems difficult to escape a dialogue with the social and political sciences. Which social and political sciences? In this work, as in my previous work, I will not address agency in general, but will refer to a specific form of it, the same as Roberts, namely the use of the law in at least two main ways: Firstly, runaway slaves, serfs, workers, indentured migrants express the main form of resistance as an outlet for people who had only limited access to other forms of expression. Meanwhile, masters and authorities used the law to repress runaways. Secondly, we need to carefully assess the institutional contexts in which workers had some access to the law.

Indeed, the history of slavery is not only that of violence and coercion, but also that of maroons and fugitives. At the heart of the worried accounts of the authorities and planters, then of the rather favorable, but not necessarily enthusiastic, accounts of the abolitionists, maroons are still the subject of studies and novels today.Footnote ⁹³ In Jamaica, communities of maroon slaves haunted the authorities and owners, and were behind the revolts of 1831–1832 that convinced the majority of British parliamentarians to vote for the abolition of slavery. Maroon communities were also numerous, as were their revolts, in Louisiana, Santo Domingo, Cuba, Brazil and the southern states of the United States.Footnote ⁹⁴ The stories of fugitive serfs in Russia are just as significant,Footnote ⁹⁵ confirming the close link between coercion, oppression, escape and the collective imagination. According to folk tales and traditions, the mountains of the North Caucasus were a refuge for bands of runaway peasants. The village of Petrovskoe, on the Kalaus River, is said to have been founded by the fugitive serf Petr Burlak, who took refuge there in 1750 before joining forces with communities in neighboring villages and practicing what the Russian authorities described as banditry. Several thousand fugitive serfs continued to settle in the Caucasus until serfdom was abolished in 1861.Footnote ⁹⁶

However, it would be a mistake to believe that fugitive stories only concern slave and servile societies; on the contrary, these cases retain their importance in post-slavery societies. In the British colonies – from the 1840s onwards – in France, after 1848,Footnote ⁹⁷ but also in Russia after the abolition of serfdom in 1861,Footnote ⁹⁸ and in Africa after the abolition of slavery between 1880 and 1914, immigrants, former slaves and workers described as fugitives remain at the heart of the concerns of authorities, landowners and industrialists.Footnote ⁹⁹

Even more troubling, from the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, in Western Europe, people and workers who were in principle free – domestic servants, agricultural day laborers, apprentices – were described as deserters and fugitives, and condemned as such.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This convergence is all the more surprising given that the administrative and legal vocabulary of the time equated these cases with those of soldiers and sailors: Fugitives thus became deserters.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Recent studies have highlighted this global dimension of runaways worldwide.Footnote ¹⁰² The present study is sympathetic to this synthesis,Footnote ¹⁰³ but I shall depart from it in certain respects, starting with the general association between runaways and capitalism. As I’ve already mentioned, my own definition of capitalism differs from Marxist-Weberian approaches. It’s no coincidence that this mentioned global study on runaways, unlike my approach, doesn’t include wage earners, but only slaves, post-slave migrants, serfs, convicts and sailors. In other words, it overlooks the fact that before labor was unionized in the West, it was also subject to harsh conditions and, as I will show, servants were also labeled runaways and deserters. From my point of view, the bifurcation between labor at the core and labor in the peripheries of empires came very late, only with the welfare state in the twentieth century. In order to express this process, in my revised approach to agency and resistance, I will use an interpretation adapted from Hirschman’s trilogy of voice, exit and loyalty. In recent books on the “global fugitive,” some authors and editors – Van der Linden, Rossum, Lucassen – mention this scheme, and I have done so myself.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ However, this approach needs to be reassessed. Exit, according to Hirschman, can only be expressed in the market through a negative act of protest (refusing to work, refusing to buy a given product), whereas voice places us squarely in the realm of politics. The contrast between exit and voice is the same as that between economics and politics; it has enabled a fundamental critique of the perfect competition model, which is why Hirschman’s scheme has been so successful in economics, sociology and political science. The problem, as many scholars have observed the problem, lies with loyalty, a residual category that Hirschman barely developed.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ According to Hirschman, loyalty makes it possible to delay the exit so that the voice and its tensions have more impact: Those who remain can use the exit as Leverage in negotiation. This model works well for consumers and possibly unions, two cases studied by Hirschman and many other authors. Is it also relevant in the case of slavery? Fugitives, maroons, vagabonds and others on the run did not simply express “resistance,” as Scott, Petterson and their followers have claimed.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ If we adopt Hirschman’s model (voice, exit and loyalty), fugitives undoubtedly opted for a form of exit where their voice was weak or non-existent, and their loyalty was therefore equally weak.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ But has exit always been the opposite of voice? Have there been contexts in which they have played complementary roles?

I argue that running away as a form of exit cannot be understood without taking into account the fact that between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, workers – slaves or serfs, day laborers or domestic servants, conscripts or convicts – had no voice or only a very limited voice: no political rights, very few civil rights, unequal legal rights, no social rights. They were fugitives because they had no voice and therefore no choice.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Work as a service meant that anyone who escaped it was considered a fugitive or a vagabond. Limitations on mobility and people’s property titles converged and, in extreme cases, coincided; for example, in the case of slaves, serfs and certain forms of indentured immigrants. The notion of labor as a service led to a normative relationship between the control of time and the control of people.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Law: A Form of Coercion or Resistance?

This explains why the social order is so closely linked to the political order in runaway issues, and in labor issues in general, during the period under study. One of the main aims of the rules governing runaways was to ensure market stability in a well-ordered, hierarchical society. Most rules concerning runaways and fugitives stressed the importance of returning them to their rightful master and/or owner. That is why I’m reframing Hirschman and talking about voice, exit and law.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This last variable needs further explanation.

The law offers neither infinite solutions (the position of those who insist on the importance of informal rules) nor a single, predetermined outcome (the Marxist and Foucauldian thesis), but rather a limited set of possibilities. These possibilities derive from a number of factors: the formulation of the rules and, hence, the pressure groups behind them; the country’s legal traditions; the intellectual and social framework within which the rules are used and interpreted.Footnote ¹¹¹ There is now a substantial body of literature focusing on the way in which actors appropriate the law, particularly in their labor relations in France, England, Germany, the United States,Footnote ¹¹² and Russia.Footnote ¹¹³ Following this historiography, this study challenges the classical oppositions assumed to exist between ancient regime societies (including Russia and pre-modern France) and modern societies, as different population groups, including peasants, made extensive use of the law not only in Britain, but also in pre-revolutionary France and Russia. In these contexts, law could perpetuate social inequalities, but not necessarily and not in the same way.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Studies of colonial law and its use by “colonized” populations have also attracted a great deal of interest over the past twenty years.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The general principle applicable to all these contexts is that law could be a mediating tool, that it could produce inequalities but also reduce them and that the end result never was a foregone conclusion. Nevertheless, the scope of this flexibility should not be overestimated: A legal norm can only be used within precise limits, which depend on its wording, the way it is applied and the relationships between the parties involved. Consequently, it is necessary to determine empirically, in each context, whether and how the concerned actors – serfs, workers, indentured immigrants or former slaves – were able to defend themselves, to what extent and with what success. Lauren Benton and many others have shown that local actors were able to appropriate colonial law by taking advantage of legal pluralism. Legal pluralism in the colonial context reveals that the colonial order was far more complex and institutionally unstable than we usually assume.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The coexistence of multiple legal orders enabled different actors to call on different sets of rules.Footnote ¹¹⁷ From the point of view of economic and social players, the multiplicity of rules and jurisdictions represented not only a cost but also an opportunity. The possibility of appealing to different rules and jurisdictions was important: Not only did it enable actors to “cheat,” it also guaranteed them a certain amount of leeway.

This optimistic vision needs to be reframed, however. If recourse to the law was not an unattainable dream, it was much more accessible to landowners and colonial elites than to workers. The former constantly took the latter to court and won, while the latter constantly faced enormous obstacles. However, despite these difficulties, they continued to use the law, contrary to most interpretations made by observers and researchers on this point. The relevant question, then, is not to set equality before the law against inequality in the practices of social life. Rather, I would stress that there was considerable inequality both in the text and in the implementation of the law, even in a liberal context. But it is precisely for this reason that the procedures, the burden of proof and the same deserve close scrutiny, which the social actors themselves did at the time. These varieties of “law in action” occurred before, during and after the abolitionist process.