Bondage is a critical assessment of the well-known thesis in global economic history that ‘capitalist economic growth’ and ‘free labour’ emerged in an interdependent fashion in western Europe ‘from the eighteenth century to our own time’, whereas coerced labour and obstacles to economic growth persisted in eastern Europe, especially Russia (p. 2). The book attributes this thesis to the ‘liberal and Marxist historiographies’ (ibid.), according to which, ‘Free labor is said to form the basis of capitalist economic growth, whereas forced labor is said to explain the economic backwardness of Russia’ (ibid.). The corollary that serfdom was the epitome of unfree labour is ‘synonymous with either demographic decline or arrested economic or technological development’ (p. 55). Labour bondage, according to this reading of European history, is a pre-industrial system and an obstacle to industrialization.

Stanziani subjects this thesis to a sharp and energetic critique consisting of five key propositions. First, it is necessary for historians to distance themselves ‘from liberal, as well as Marxist and Weberian, definitions of capitalism’ and ‘to show that capitalism cannot be associated with wage labor and “proletarians”’ (p. 7). True proletarians did not emerge until the second Industrial Revolution. Second, until the 1870s and the emergence of nineteenth-century labour movements, workers in western Europe were not as free as we might think. Third, workers in Russia were not as unfree as we might think. Fourth, intellectual and legal traditions in both the East and the West held an ambivalent position on freedom and voluntary contract until the twentieth century. And fifth, bondage did not act as an obstacle to industrialization and capitalism anywhere in Europe. These five propositions are substantiated empirically, which then enables the author to suggest that the rhetoric of freedom serves no higher purpose than to project imperial Russia as the backward ‘other’ of western Europe.

Excluding the introduction and the conclusion, the book contains seven chapters arranged in three parts. Part I, entitled ‘Bondage imagined’, is formed of two chapters. Chapter 1 considers freedom and unfreedom in the light of eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinking, and compares Russian and French attitudes on forced labour to discover whether the former somehow distorted the liberal discourse on forced labour. The chapter finds that Russian and French writers were equally torn between, on the one hand, defence of coercion on economic grounds or resistance to more freedom on political grounds, and, on the other, moral objections to coerced and unfree labour. Chapter 2 is a study of labour surveillance in the eighteenth century. It shows that, whether coerced or free, surveillance of labour was a problem for the employers. An interesting eighteenth-century answer to the problem was the Panopticon, which Michel Foucault made popular through his story of prisons, and which Stanziani links to labour control.

Part II, ‘The architecture of bondage’, consists of three chapters dealing with slavery, bondage, and serfdom in Russia and Central Asia. Terms such as ‘slavery’ and ‘serfdom’ are too generic to be useful for comparative history. It is necessary instead to ‘acknowledge how different societies in different times identified legal status … and assigned … duties, obligations, … and rights’ (p. 65). In other words, conditions of labour are best described as a bundle of legal requirements and social norms. Slavery or serfdom can accommodate more than one bundle. Chapter 3 extends that approach to slavery in Russia and Central Asia, showing the different origins and meanings of slavery in these regions, and the extensive scale on which slave trade existed in Central Asia. Chapter 4 is about serfdom. Stanziani argues that there was no single act which formally initiated serfdom in Russia. It follows that emancipation was not a single act either. The particular attributes for which serfdom was later famous derived from the legal control of estate owners by the state in the wake of colonization. Chapter 5 develops the complementary argument that, at the level of the landed estate, ‘serfdom was a much more flexible world than is usually held’ (p. 140). Obligatory labour service was a legal concept with a corresponding notion of rights attached to it, and such obligations did not, as sometimes claimed, obstruct market exchange or the growth of labour-intensive industry. Part III, on ‘Old bondage, new practices’, and the last two chapters return to comparative history, with studies on labour-intensive industrial production and institutional dynamics in the Indian Ocean region.

Bondage is a bold and persuasive attack on certain long-held assumptions about the global history of capitalism. Stanziani makes impressive use of existing scholarship and archival evidence from a number of regions, in both the East and the West, to build his case. The case is sound enough, but perhaps not settled after this book. The received view is partly based on a conception of the landowning nobility in the East, which the book does not question. Like many fine works in labour history, Bondage is not very informative on the demand side of the labour market, failing to shed much light on why the employers wanted a particular employment system. These minor issues notwithstanding, the book marks a significant advance in comparative labour history and global economic history, and will, one hopes, generate a new debate.