...University North Carolina Press, 1991) compared British American labour law up to the late 19th century. Steinfeld argued that free labour (where employers could not compel performance or imprison workers for leaving their labour contracts) only achieved preeminence in the 1800s. In his new book, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor, Steinfeld returns to the comparative history of the enforcement of wage labour contracts in Britain and the United States of America in the 19th century. Instead of studying the emergence of free labour, Steinfeld turns to the persistence of unfree labour. He concludes that free and unfree labour are but part of a continuum. Free labour is not inherent to the free market; on the contrary, employers and lawmakers have been quite willing,...

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