This book offers a comparative analysis of the major systems of servitude present in the world since 1500. Slavery, serfdom, debt bondage, indentured service and convict labour all provided labour and service through the legal subjection of one person to another, but remained very different. By comparison and contrast, this study seeks to establish their distinctive character.



Servitude in Modern Times concentrates on the forms of servitude that figured in the process of early modernization: notably the white bonded labour, convict and indentured, used to settle...

This book offers a comparative analysis of the major systems of servitude present in the world since 1500. Slavery, serfdom, debt bondage, indentured service and convict labour all provided labour and service through the legal subjection of one person to another, but remained very different. By comparison and contrast, this study seeks to establish their distinctive character.



Servitude in Modern Times concentrates on the forms of servitude that figured in the process of early modernization: notably the white bonded labour, convict and indentured, used to settle...

Serfdom and Slavery compares the two forms of legal servitude in cultures in Western civilization, in Europe and the New World from ancient times to the modern period. Within a tightly controlled framework of general contextual chapters followed by specific case studies, a distinguished team of scholars offers 17 specially written essays that illuminate the nature, development, impact and termination of serfdom and slavery in European society. While the case studies range form classical Greece to early modern Brandenburg, and from medieval England to nineteenth-century Russia, the...