The magnitude of returns to colonial-era investments in Africa has been addressed in an extensive literature, as have the nature and legacies of extractive colonial institutions. However, the link between these institutions and the profitability of firms remains unclear. We reconstruct the...

Die Annahme, es gäbe heutzutage keine Sklaverei mehr, geht an der Realität vorbei. Tatsächlich sind heute - in absoluten Zahlen - mehr Menschen versklavt als jemals zuvor in der Geschichte. Die Internationale Arbeitsorganisation der Vereinten Nationen spricht von "moderner Sklaverei" und...

"Slavery and Bonded Labor in Asia, 1250-1900 is the first collection of studies to focus on slavery and related forms of labor throughout Asia. The 15 chapters by an international group of scholars assess the current state of Asian slavery studies, discuss new research on slave systems in Asia,...

Section 1: Incarceration—Convicts, unfree labour and colonial capitalism -- Chapter 1: Unfree labour, Dissent, Convict-transportation and the building of colonial capital -- Chapter 2: Approaches, Sources and Methods -- Chapter 3: Convict Eastern Australia: Labour Bureaucracy or Police State?...

"This is a rigorous academic inquiry into how labor power has been dehumanized and commodified around the world through the ages for creation of wealth, capital accumulation, and industrialization. Major forms of unfree and involuntary labor markets around the world-from slavery to serfdom, from...

"This is a rigorous academic inquiry into how labor power has been dehumanized and commodified around the world through the ages for creation of wealth, capital accumulation, and industrialization. Major forms of unfree and involuntary labor markets around the world-from slavery to serfdom, from...

Penology in the Jim Crow South centered on the chain gang. Gangs ostensibly served three purposes: their severity served as a deterrent; their putting convicts to work on roads and other public improvements reduced the taxpayers' costs of infrastructure; and their discriminatory implementation...

Thailand has extensively examined the forced labour under the pressure from the international community for the compliance with labour conventions. This has occurred particularly in the fishing industry. The 2015 official report of the Thai government, however, noted one case of forced labour...

This paper examines the long-run economic consequences of Russian serfdom. Employing data on the intensity of labor coercion at the district level in just prior to emancipation in 1861, we document that a greater legacy of serfdom is associated with lower economic well-being today. Our estimates...

For the first time, this book provides the global history of labor in Central Eurasia, Russia, Europe, and the Indian Ocean between the 16th and 20th centuries. It contests common views on free and unfree labor, comparing the latter to many Western countries where wage conditions resembled those...

We explore the impact of encomienda, a forced-labor institution imposed by the Spanish throughout Latin America during three centuries, on long-term development outcomes in Colombia. Despite being a classically extractive institution, municipalities that had encomiendas in 1560 have higher...

This article considers the social desirability of prison work programs in a model in which the function of imprisonment is to deter crime. Two types of prison work programs are studied—voluntary ones and mandatory ones. A voluntary work program generates net social benefits: if prisoners are...

This paper advances a novel hypothesis regarding the historical roots of labor emancipation. It argues that the decline of coercive labor institutions in the industrial phase of development has been an inevitable by-product of the intensification of capital-skill complementarity in the...

This paper advances a novel hypothesis regarding the historical roots of labor emancipation. It argues that the decline of coercive labor institutions in the industrial phase of development has been an inevitable by-product of the intensification of capital-skill complementarity in the...

Do factor endowments explain serfdom? Domar (1970) conjectured that high land-labor ratios caused serfdom by increasing incentives to coerce labor. But historical evidence is mixed and quantitative analyses are lacking. Using the Acemoglu-Wolitzky (2011) framework and controlling for political...

This paper advances a novel hypothesis regarding the historical roots of labor emancipation. It argues that the decline of coercive labor institutions in the industrial phase of development has been an inevitable by-product of the intensification of capital-skill complementarity in the...