For the first time, this book provides the global history of labor in Central Eurasia, Russia, Europe, and the Indian Ocean between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. It contests common views on free and unfree labor, and compares the latter to many Western countries where wage conditions resembled those of domestic servants. This gave rise to extreme forms of dependency in the colonies, not only under slavery, but also afterwards in form of indentured labor in the Indian Ocean and obligatory labor in Africa. Stanziani shows that unfree labor and forms of economic coercion were perfectly compatible with market development and capitalism, proven by the consistent economic growth that took place all over Eurasia between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. This growth was labor intensive: commercial expansion, transformations in agriculture, and the first industrial revolution required more labor, not less. Finally, Stanziani demonstrates that this world did not collapse after the French Revolution or the British industrial revolution, as is commonly assumed, but instead between 1870 and 1914, with the second industrial revolution and the rise of the welfare state.

This book is the first product of an investigation of the conflicting social theories of the French Revolution. The writings of these men disclosed several unexplored connections between the old regime and the contemporary world. Their testimony offered an unaccustomed view of the French Revolution and an illustration of the revolution's interaction with the main currents of European thought. Contents: (1) Who will defend the old regime?; (2) The shock of 1789; (3) Deputies of the right; (4) Resistance to the constitutional monarchy; (5) Adversity; (6) Joseph de Maistre; (7) Louis de Bonald; (8) Rene de Chateaubrand; (9) Troubled orthodoxy; (10) Social theories in motion; References. This is a print on demand edition of an important, hard-to-find publication.

A biography of the Polish woman who built a multi-million dollar business as one of the first mass-producers of cosmetics.

Sugar was the single most valuable bulk commodity traded internationally before oil became the world's prime resource. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, cane sugar production was pre-eminent in the Atlantic Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Subsequently, cane sugar industries in the Americas were transformed by a fusion of new and old forces of production, as the international sugar economy incorporated production areas in Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Sugar's global economic importance and its intimate relationship with colonialism offer an important context for probing the nature of colonial societies. This book questions some major assumptions about the nexus between sugar production and colonial societies in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, especially in the second (post-1800) colonial era.