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This chapter will not question the terms of comparison and analogy in abstract methodological models; instead, it will place actors and debates in their appropriate historical context in order to understand why they were interested in comparison and why, in a given context, they practised it in one particular way and not in another. Moreover, each context will be resolutely trans-regional and comparison will be identified as a cross-cultural practice. I will therefore take some distance from current arguments relating comparison only to European colonial expansion. Infra-European tensions and competition were no less important in justifying comparisons than encounters with non-European worlds.
Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.
Liberal utilitarianism is usually presented as a current of thought mostly inspired by Jeremy Bentham and other Western European thinkers, and eventually diffused in other parts of the world. This paper adopts a different approach and shows, on the one hand, how the Bentham brothers’ experiences in Russia and serfdom in particular inspired their invention of the Panopticon. The latter was not related to deviance (Foucault's interpretation), but to labor organization and surveillance. On the other hand, the interplay between utilitarianism and colonial India led Bentham, then James and John Stuart Mill, and ultimately Henry Maine to revise utilitarianism, in particular the relationship between law, labor, and political economy. In both the Britain–Russia interplay and Britain–India interplay, the tension between universalism and particularism of philosophical, social and economic categories was at work.
The history of political-economic thought has been built up over the centuries with a uniform focus on European and North American thinkers. Intellectuals beyond the North Atlantic have been largely understood as the passive recipients of already formed economic categories and arguments. This view has often been accepted not only by scholars and observers in Europe but also in many other places such as Russia, India, China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire. In this regard, the articles included in this collection explicitly differentiate from this diffusionist approach (“born in Western Europe, then flowed everywhere else”).
This article discusses the specificity of Western economies and, within this framework, of inequality as envisaged by Thomas Piketty. To this end, it considers the relevance of national, regional, trans-regional, and above all imperial scales of analysis, particularly in regard to the historical dynamics of development (the “Great Divergence”), the fiscal state, and welfare.
Recent analyses of the economic impact of the abolition of serfdom mark a major return to quantitative approaches in the economic and social history of Russia. Tracy Dennison, Steven Nafziger, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, among others, make wide use of data produced by the zemstvo (provincial elected assembly), the Central Statistics Committee (TsSK), the Ministry of Agriculture, and local governors. These figures are particularly crucial with regard to the debate over the impact of the abolition of serfdom and the economic dynamics of tsarist Russia between 1861 and 1914. Indeed, the authors are too quick to consider the data reliable and only concerned about which statistical method should be used. Markevich and Zhuravskaya claim outright: “Historians agree that the quality of the late imperial statistics and governor reports is rather high.” Nafziger makes a similar statement regarding zemstvo statistics, which he declares are fully reliable sources. Dennison and Nafziger add: “Zemstvo publications offer a unique window into rural economic conditions in the post-1861 period, but western scholars have only begun to explore them. We consider these household surveys, other zemstvo publications, research by central government and provincial statistical authorities (including the 1897 census), and various secondary sources to develop some “stylized facts” about rural living standards in Iaroslavl' and Vladimir provinces in the post-1861 period.”
This chapter talk about the abolition in terms of the circulation of ideas and the economic and social dynamics between various areas, Europe, Russia, Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Americas. It begins with Russian serfdom and its abolition and analyses the transatlantic slave trade and the abolition of slavery in European colonies in connection with economic and social dynamics in Africa, India, Europe and Latin America. The chapter then shows that abolition in the USA impacted different areas such as Brazil, Egypt, Russian Turkestan, India and, of course, Europe. It concludes with the abolition of slavery in Africa and in the Ottoman Empire before World War I and a broader reminder of persistent forms of bondage and coercion through to the present day. Abolitionism started when British public opinion and the British government took interest in the abolition of slavery in the Ottoman Empire.
Cet article discute de la spécificité des économies occidentales et, dans ce cadre, des inégalités telles qu’elles sont analysées par Thomas Piketty dans Le capital au XXIe siècle. À cette fin, la pertinence des échelles nationales, régionales, transrégionales et surtout impériales sera discutée par rapport à l’économie historique du développement (la grande divergence), de la fiscalité et de l’action publique.
Slavery casts a long shadow over human history. Though, historically, the chief mechanism of slavery was seen as violent abduction, this view is being adjusted to recognize the importance of financial indebtedness in creating and sustaining human bondage. Filling a significant gap in the historiography, the essays in this volume show that debt slavery has played a crucial role in the economic history of numerous societies which continues even today.
This volume examines the relationship between debt and human bondage in the Indian Ocean world (IOW). The IOW refers to a vast macro region, running from Africa to the Far East, where agricultural production, in which the vast bulk of the population were engaged, and long-distance commercial exchange, notably but not exclusively maritime trade, were largely shaped by the monsoon system. The ‘wet’ (rice) and ‘dry’ (wheat) cultivation regions of Asia were largely dictated by the reach of the monsoon rains, while the monsoon winds (from the south-west during the northern hemisphere summer and from the north-east during its winter), dictated trans-oceanic exchange to the north and to approximately twelve degrees south of the equator. Moreover, terrestrial long-distance trade in regions affected by the monsoons and/or a cyclone season was also largely seasonal, restricted chiefly to the drier winter season.
Human trafficking in the IOW has taken place since at least 2000 bc and experienced three major periods of demand-led acceleration corresponding to sustained bursts of economic growth: from about 200 bc to ad 200, from the ninth to thirteenth centuries, and again from the nineteenth century. In the intervening periods, which were generally characterized by economic stagnation or decline, the slave trade was dominated by supply factors. Systems of bond-age existed throughout the IOW but varied greatly according to time and place. Slavery was limited amongst hunter-gatherer and pastoral peoples, but relatively widespread in sedentary agricultural societies.
This chapter argues that from the late eighteenth to early twentieth century, there existed a strong relationship between the institutions and practices of debt and labour in Britain and those in the colonial world. Thus, one cannot fully understand the origin and evolution of indentured labour in the Indian Ocean without taking into consideration the notions about labour, and labour practices, in Europe.
Conventionally, historians have interpreted the phenomenon of indentured labour in two main ways. The first interpretation, advanced by colonial elites in the nineteenth century and later renewed in ‘subaltern studies’, is that the indentured contract was a ‘legal fiction’, and that those indentured experienced conditions of forced labour or even slavery. This approach essentially negates the historical significance of the abolition of slavery and underestimates the efforts of indentured immigrants to fight for their own rights. Also, legal scholars have demonstrated that indentureship was initially viewed as an expression of free will in contract, and can only be considered as an involuntary contract that reflected forced labour in the second half of the nineteenth century. This in turn reflects recent debates in the history of emigration that also stress the shifting boundary between free and unfree emigration.
Bondage in ancient Rome and Northern America has often been presented as forms of chattel or ‘real’ slavery as opposed to the ‘mild’ or hybrid forms of slavery, servitude and coercion found in so many different contexts in Africa, Asia and medieval Europe. Such a distinction is problematic. Anthropologists, sociologists and historians differ considerably in their assessments of what precisely constitutes slavery, highlighting variously issues of social status (membership of or exclusion from the clan, family and local community), religion, legal status (forms of dependence, freedom of movement, hereditary nature of constraints), economic conditions and political, legal and procedural rights. Researchers have pinpointed several variables in their attempts to find a definition of bondage, but without reaching a consensus.
The debate has sharpened even more over the last two decades as cultural and subaltern studies scholars have highlighted the relativity of notions of freedom and coercion. As a result, the critical question currently asked is whether the different forms of servitude found in various societies in Africa, Asia, the Indian Ocean world or the Americas can all be considered to constitute ‘slavery’. If the answer is yes, then by implication slavery existed before and independently of colonialism. Conversely, if the answer is no, it means that these were forms of ‘imperialist’ dependence and bondage specific to a particular place.