Preface.
Part I: The Forms of Legal Bondage:.
1. Servitude Comparatively Considered.
2. Modern Slavery.
3. Modern Serfdom.
4. Indentured Service.
5. Debt Bondage.
6. Penal Servitude.
Part II: Emergence and Development:.
7. White Servitude in the Americas.
8. New World Slavery.
9. European Serfdom.
10. Islamic Slavery.
Part III: Emancipation and After:.
11. Abolition in Europe and the Americas.
12. The Survival of Servitude.
Conclusion: The Significance of Modern Servitude.
A Bibliography Essay.
Notes.
Index.
M. L. Bush is Research Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University
'Servitude in Modern Times explores and explains the great variety
of unfree labour systems that have flourished in one or another
part of the world under the influence of the rise of capitalism.
The book's scope is exemplary, covering serfdom and debt bondage as
well as chattel slavery, and ranging from Europe and the Americas
to Africa and the Islamic world. The world of unfree labour and the
movements of emancipation usually constitute two separate realms of
study; here they are most fruitfully brought together. While
condemning the essential cruelty of servitude, M. L. Bush conveys a
historical understanding of systems of oppression that were
regarded as perfectly civilized until very recently, and new forms
of which survive into the present.' Robin Blackburn, University of
Essex
'The author takes as his subject practically every form of labour,
apart from freewage labour, that has existed between the sixteenth
century and the present. His concern, however, is less with the
persistence of archaic institutions than with the emergence of new
commercially driven forms of bondage, among them the slave empires
of the new World and the so-called new serfdom of Eastern Europe.
Far from being a relic left over from earlier times, servitude is
shown as playing a key role in the shaping of the modern world. The
evidence for this is so overwhelming that one wonders why it has so
frequently been overlooked...As a historian hitherto principally
concerned with European social stratification, Bush has no time for
handwringing over the injustices of the past, preferring to
emphasize the positive contributions made to the shaping of the
modern world by those who laboured under duress.' Howard Temperley,
Times Literary Supplement
'A well researched and skillfully written book ... This work makes
a significant contribution to the study of servitude. The depth to
which Bush plumbs his subject exceeds most works. It can serve as
an introductory work to the subject for interested readers, but it
can also be profitably mined by professional historians,
sociologists, psychologists and college students.' History
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