Alessandro Stanziani's Les métamorphoses du travail contraint is highly innovative in a number of ways. Chief among them is its ambition to construct a Global Labour History focusing on free and forced labour in hugely varied but nonetheless comparable geographical contexts, concentrating on Russia and specific case studies from the British and French empires, namely, the Mascarene Islands and French Congo. A second original element involves a literary experiment focusing on the biographical trajectory of Joseph Conrad. A third is the problem of geographically and linguistically diverse archives and how the scholarly problems inherent in that scenario might be overcome in order to create an effective global history, as distinct from a Euro-centric history emerging from European-language sources in European archives. The last innovative element is the balance achieved between theoretical reflections on Marxism, liberalism, and capitalism, on one hand, and a socioeconomic historical approach together with archival research on the other, the net effect being to revise some well-established temporal categories for the study of the transformation from slavery to indentured labour in the colonial world and the shift from peasant agricultural labour to paid employed in Europe.

This transformation was not automatic, and pluriactivity and legal pluralism persisted both in the colonial world and in Europe after the legal abolitions of slavery in the colonies and the industrial revolution in Europe, with the concomitant birth of the welfare state. A key thesis of the book is that the emergence of the welfare state in Europe (in France and Great Britain) was the economic consequence of the exploitation of new imperial “colonies”. Empires used a new workforce, often consisting of former slaves and indentured workers, whose working and living conditions were frequently the same as those of slaves, especially in respect to punishment and reduced capacity of movement involving the imposition of immobility. Conditions for former slaves and indentured labourers were even worse than those endured by slaves in the last phase of slavery before abolition. The main objective of the book is to develop our understanding of freedom and unfreedom in work over a long chronological period before and after the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, and the legal abolitions of slavery in the British and French empires. For Stanziani there is a long ancien régime that really ends with World War I, because, at the end of the nineteenth century, the new welfare state excluded the inhabitants of the colonial world and some categories of European workers such as sailors – a central group in his analysis.

This book is rich in bibliographical references and will itself be an essential reference for further research in this field. Structurally, this dense work is divided into seven main chapters, plus an introduction, conclusion, and afterword. The chapters are not always in dialogue with each other, but each one makes an important contribution to Stanziani's conception of non-freedom in working conditions and to understanding the real condition of workers beyond their legal rights and in different geographical spaces. The first chapter, “Le miroir russe”, focuses on Russian serfdom, and the author affirms in the conclusion “l'abolition du servage en Russie est à envisager moins comme le passage du féodalisme au capitalisme ou du servage au travail libre que comme l'une des étapes d'un processus long et complexe au cours duquel paysans et propriétaires participent aux activités marchandes tout en étant globalement hostiles aux ‘capitalistes’ urbains” (p. 305).Footnote ³ Chapter 2, entitled “Une globalisation précoce: les marins” considers the pluriactivity of sailors and their living conditions. Their living conditions were very similar to those of indentured labourers and slaves. Sailors were recruited in a coercive fashion, and they lived in a coactive condition. Often, slaves were employed as sailors (p. 65). Chapter 3, “Qu'est-ce que le ‘travail libre’ aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles?”, analyses the meaning of free labour in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing on the control and disciplining of the poor in the workhouses of Great Britain and on penal sanctions imposed on workers in France through the instrument of the workers’ book (livret ouvrier). The main point is that the free market did not exist, but there was a system that combined productivity and coercion based on the work of children, apprentices, and workers, who were subordinated to terrible contractual conditions, restricted freedom of movement, and unlimited working hours. Chapter 4, “Le mouvement abolitionniste au Royaume-Uni et en France”, compares and contrasts the abolitionist movements in the two countries. In both cases, the reflection on the abolition of slavery in the colonial world relates to the labour issue nationally. Stanziani argues that internally, in Europe, the difference between the two countries is that in Great Britain coercion was manifested through laws affecting the poor and in France through the fight against vagrancy and the livret ouvrier. Thus, the legal abolition of slavery in the colonial world was not consequent on improvements in working conditions in Europe.

Chapter 5, “L'abolition en pratique (années 1830–1860): le cas des Mascareignes”, demonstrates clearly how deeply embedded the indentured labour system and local forms of servitude were in the Mascareignes, particularly for domestic workers. Recruitment practices including kidnapping, coercion, and the exploitation of debt, working conditions similar to those under a military regime, and obligations to masters created fugitive workers just as before there had been fugitive slaves. Chapter 6, “Des abolitions en Russie et aux Amériques à la grande transformation”, concentrates on the abolition of serfdom in Russia (1861) and of slavery in the United States (1865) and on the global consequences of these changes in the context of the domination of American cotton and Russian grain on the international markets of capitalism. These abolitions also impacted the second industrial revolution, which required a stable workforce, and assisted the parallel growth of the welfare state in Europe and the replacement of poor laws, such as the Masters and Servants Acts in Britain in 1875. The last chapter, “Le Coeur des ténèbres: violences impériales et État social”, scrutinizes the brutal practices of forced labour in French Congo after the abolition of slavery in light of the contradiction that, until 1914, the occupation of Congo by France was not economically cost-effective but geopolitically strategic.

To conclude, this book is pioneering in how it connects varied aspects of coerced labour in Russia, France, and Britain and in the colonial world. It argues that capitalism is not the product of wage labour but the consequence of the coexistence of practices of unfree work and free work according to the local context. Coercion and violence in the colonial world were extremely useful for the second industrial revolution in Europe, for imperialism, and for the growth of the welfare state in Europe. Welfare, however, was extended to only a few categories of European workers: most of the French and Britain population – including the sailors and agricultural workers who lived in highly coactive and precarious conditions – were excluded from its provision.