Labour regime and Labour Mobility from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century”

Alessandro Stanziani (1)

1 EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales

Why coercion? Many economists and economic historians follow Domar's model according to which labour coercion is likely to develop when labour is scarce compared to land. This model was based largely on Russian and medieval European serfdom, but it has been since used to describe several other contexts, not only in Russia, Africa and Asia, but also in Britain and the US as well. Such models are interesting not so much for what they explain but for what they fail to explain. 1 Thus, Domar's model suggests that slavery and serfdom were established when labour was scarce; in contrast, Habakkuk, Postan, North and Thomas stressed that in Western Europe, scarcity of labour accounts not for the strength but for the decline of serfdom and resulting capital intensification. In the first case, labour scarcity led to coercion, in the second it led to increased wages and hence to capital intensification. 2 1 Evsey D.

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société

Alessandro Stanziani. Labour regime and Labour Mobility from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century”. Tirthankar Roy and Giorgio Riello, eds, Global Economic History, (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), pp.175-195, 2019. ⟨hal-02954634⟩