Alessandro Stanziani

• phD economics, phd history
• Professor (Full) at School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

Sixteenth Through the Early Twentieth Century. 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 shows that Russian peasants were much less bound and "unfree" than usually...

Reciprocal comparison and history. A few proposals based on the case of Russia 1 . In a recent article, Gareth Austin took up the proposal put forward a few years ago by Kenneth Pomeranz and Bing Wong to develop a form of "reciprocal comparison" in which Africa (Austin's case) and China (Pomeranz and Wong) would not be compared exclusively to the W...

Global history collaborative project.

This paper compares the definitions, practices, and legal constraints on labour in Britain, France, Mauritius, and Reunion Island in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It argues that the way in which indentured labour was defined and practised in the colonies was linked to the definition and practice of wage labour in Europe and that their de...

France regulated competition through the gradual development of jurisprudence rooted in Old Regime practices of speculation and hoarding. This article aims to understand the reasons for this institutional legacy in order to determine if and how these norms could be adapted to the new phenomena of industrial concentration as they appeared at the tur...

Le défi de se nourrir a toujours été le plus angoissant pour les sociétés humaines et il s’est amplifié avec la croissance urbaine. Les échanges de cette table ronde essaient de voir comment les sociétés ont fait face à cet impératif. En balayant rapidement l’échelle du temps depuis le Moyen Âge, on voit que les intempéries ne sont pas le seul fact...

Introduction and conclusion of the book Capital terre, Paris, 2021

This book seeks to overcome the tension between 'western' and 'non-western' categories and tools in the study of global history, showing how most western approaches to the social sciences and history have developed through transnational and colonial interactions. Offering a transnational and global history of the main tools we have to understand th...

In most history departments on the European continent Europe is History while the history of other regions only can be described as “area studies.” This paper investigates the long-term origins of these attitudes, since Humanism and the Enlightenment, down to Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries forms of history writing. It finally suggests to overco...

Liberal utilitarianism is usually presented as a current of thought mostly inspired by Jeremy Bentham and other Western European thinkers, and eventually diffused in other parts of the world. This paper adopts a different approach and shows, on the one hand, how the Bentham brothers’ experiences in Russia and serfdom in particular inspired their in...

The history of political-economic thought has been built up over the centuries with a uniform focus on European and North American thinkers. Intellectuals beyond the North Atlantic have been largely understood as the passive recipients of already formed economic categories and arguments. This view has often been accepted not only by scholars and ob...

After reviewing the historiography of the Russian economic path, this chapter discusses the period running from the early eighteenth century to the abolition of serfdom (1861) and World War I; it argues that Russian economic dynamics were more important than is usually held in terms of rate of growth, that they were labour-intensive and mostly base...

Der Verbraucherschutz hat eine eigene Geschichte. Auch wenn man heute allgemein von „Verbraucherrecht“ spricht, hat sich dieses Konzept in den einzelnen Ländern auf sehr unterschiedliche Weise und in unterschiedlichen Zeitsprüngen entwickelt. Das erklärt auch die aktuellen Schwierigkeiten, die diversen nationalen Verbraucherschutzgesetze im Rahmen...

Over recent decades, almost every area of historical study has seen its global turn – from consumption to finance, from politics to migration, from social order to cultural patterns. This volume reflects the vibrant state of global history scholarship in Europe and examines to what extent global history is practiced and conceptualised distinctively...

In the West, human bondage remains synonymous with the Atlantic slave trade. But large slave systems in Africa and Asia predated, co-existed, and overlapped with the Atlantic system—and have persisted in modified forms well into the twenty-first century, posing major threats to political and economic stability within those regions and worldwide. Th...

The Russian Empire: 1450–1801. Nancy Shields Kollmann. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. viii, 497 pp. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Maps. $110.00, hard bound. - Volume 77 Issue 3 - Alessandro Stanziani

During the interwar period, history in general and global history in particular expressed the failure of conceiving globality beyond nationalist frameworks. The Bolshevik Revolution altered the way we conceive of history (the construction of temporalities and the relation between past and future). In the West, while philosophy and universal history...

This chapter shows that since antiquity, and especially since the second millennium of our era, there have been important connections between the Euro-Asiatic and African worlds as well as with respect to historiographical knowledge. Voyages, along with historical methods and books, connected the Arabo-Muslim, Chinese, and Indian worlds to one anot...

The decomposition of this world beginning in the 1970s, and even more so after 1989, opened the way for our current globalization, of which global history is a reflection. The success of capitalism, so celebrated after 1989, led to a paradoxical result: the West won the Cold War but lost peace, as the speculative and political crises of recent year...

The reconstruction of Europe after the war was not solely an economic affair but also a political and historiographical one. The reconstruction of history and memory participated in this movement by exploring the origins of Fascism and Nazism as well as the breaks and continuities in terms of ideas, ideology, and actors. Meanwhile, decolonization w...

This chapter provides an overview of the main approaches to global history in the twenty-first century. World history, history of globalization, comparative and connected history, and subaltern studies are presented at length. The critics and definition of Eurocentrism and other forms of historical centrisms (Sinocentrism, Africa-centrism, and so o...

Europe did not have a monopoly on the Enlightenment, although expectations and projects differed within Europe and even more so between Europe and other areas of the world. The global enlightenment, widespread in all continents, provided a new perspective in which a plurality of worlds was less at issue than universalist visions. With Western domin...

Christian De Vito et Anne Gerritsen (dir.) Micro-Spatial Histories of Global Labour Londres, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, xxiii-357 p. et 21 p. de pl. - Volume 73 Issue 1 - Alessandro Stanziani

Sebastian Conrad What Is Global History ? Princeton, Princeton University Press, [2013] 2016, v-299 p. - Volume 73 Issue 1 - Alessandro Stanziani

This chapter discusses the main relevant approaches to the questions of labor coercion, first presenting the main economic explanations, followed by the sociology of labor, power, and the state. The ensuing sections specify the notion of resistance, starting with socioeconomic and historical approaches and presenting in detail the theories of law i...

The Indian case was extremely relevant in the nineteenth century and still is in the historiography because it tackled any predefined and ahistorical definition of slavery and freedom. To discuss the limits of utilitarianism and the failure of nineteenth-century liberalism to conceive of equal rights in the colonial context, it is essential to exam...

The conclusion summarizes the main limits of the French Enlightenment, British utilitarianism and contractualism, then French aids and the welfare state vis-à-vis labor and freedom, in particular in the colonial worlds. In the aftermath of the abolition of slavery, the colonial world was an extension of labor institutions and rules in the mainland....

The limits of European abolitionism in Africa testify not only to those of imperialism but also to a broader connection between neocolonialism and the transmutation of capitalism in Europe itself, notably, the second industrial revolution and the emergence of the welfare state. This chapter shows that new rules more favorable to working people in F...

Chapter 1 presents the chapters in the book, the main topics and arguments; it explains the relevance of the areas under investigation and discusses the concerned historiographies and sources. Current and past debates about abolitions have essentially focused on two interrelated questions: (1) whether the abolitions in the nineteenth and twentieth...

This chapter discusses the limits of contractualism on the labor market after the abolition of slavery. It presents the origins and forms of the indentured immigration to Mauritius, followed by the forms of coercion and resistance in great detail, using plantation, police and justice archives. The experiences of immigrants and the enormous difficul...

This chapter studies in detail how the French connected abolitionism in the colonies with labor dependence in the mainland. It presents discussion and the limits of the French abolitionism since the revolution of 1789; it then presents in detail the debates of the 1830s and the 1840s leading to the abolition of slavery in 1848. It presents a comple...

It is possible to identify a link between environment, debt bondage, and emigration; this chapter discusses the interplay between environment and dependence at the final destination for emigration (as opposed to all of the analyses carried out on the place of origin, which study the relationship between famine, drought, and the need to emigrate). I...

After the abolition of slavery in the Indian Ocean and Africa, the world of labor remained unequal, exploitative, and violent, straddling a fine line between freedom and unfreedom. This book explains why. Unseating the Atlantic paradigm of bondage and drawing from a rich array of colonial, estate, plantation and judicial archives, Alessandro Stanzi...

Global history locates national histories in the context of broader processes, in which the West is not necessarily synonymous with progress. And yet it often suffers from the same Eurocentrism that plagues national history, accepting Western categories and values uncritically and largely ignoring non-English historiographies. Alessandro Stanziani...

In nineteenth-century Britain, the status of seamen revealed the ambiguities of the modernisation paradigm: Were seamen slaves? Why did the abolitionist movement refuse to put them in this category? And how can we explain the fact that, even today, the global market for seamen includes a large number of ‘global seamen’ with no rights? The global ma...

Slavery and coerced labor have been among the most ubiquitous of human institutions both in time - from ancient times to the present - and in place, having existed in virtually all geographic areas and societies. This volume covers the period from the independence of Haiti to modern perceptions of slavery by assembling twenty-eight original essays,...

Slavery and coerced labor have been among the most ubiquitous of human institutions both in time - from ancient times to the present - and in place, having existed in virtually all geographic areas and societies. This volume covers the period from the independence of Haiti to modern perceptions of slavery by assembling twenty-eight original essays,...

Recent analyses of the economic impact of the abolition of serfdom mark a major return to quantitative approaches in the economic and social history of Russia. Tracy Dennison, Steven Nafziger, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, among others, make wide use of data produced by the zemstvo (provincial elected assembly), the Central Statistics Committee (TsSK)...

Here we have a bestselling global history, which was a dazzling success in Germany, even among nonspecialized readers, and subsequently translated into many other languages. Its success is well deserved, for it is truly exceptional in the wealth of materials it contains; its complex, subtle arguments; and the number of aspects, issues, and perspect...

This article analyzes the indentured labour in Mauritius between the 1840s and the 1870s. In particular it focuses on labour forms and relationships, the salaries level and payment, debt and eventually savings, health assistance and the conditions for repatriation. As all these aspects were highly differentiated in different districts and from each...

Depuis que l’economie des institutions a pris son essor au tournant des annees 1960-1970, cette approche particuliere a rencontre un tres large succes non seulement en economie, mais aussi en histoire economique et sociale, voire en sociologie et en management. Suivant cette demarche, ce sont les institutions – institutions publiques, entreprises,...

Since 1750, the world has become ever more connected, with processes of production and destruction no longer limited by land- or water-based modes of transport and communication. Volume 7 of The Cambridge World History, divided into two books, offers a variety of angles of vision on the increasingly interconnected history of humankind. The second b...

This article discusses the specificity of Western economies and, within this framework, of inequality as envisaged by Thomas Piketty. To this end, it considers the relevance of national, regional, trans-regional, and above all imperial scales of analysis, particularly in regard to the historical dynamics of development (the “Great Divergence”), the...

Cet article discute de la spécificité des économies occidentales et, dans ce cadre, des inégalités telles qu’elles sont analysées par Thomas Piketty dans Le capital au xxi e siècle. À cette fin, la pertinence des échelles nationales, régionales, transrégionales et surtout impériales sera discutée par rapport à l’économie historique du développement...

Slaves, convicts, indentured immigrants, and unfree seamen have traveled the world's oceans at many times and places throughout human history. Across the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, this bondage took divergent forms and exhibited a range of historical dynamics. In spite of this variety, the conventional Atlantic World histo...

In his introduction to the forum “Freedom, Labor, and Empires: Reciprocal Comparisons and Entanglements” Alessandro Stanziani briefly outlines the scope of each contribution to the forum and formulates their understanding of the method of reciprocal comparisons. At the core of this approach is the idea of relativizing any normative yardstick as an...

The article argues that the status and conditions of Russian peasants before the abolition of serfdom were more fluid than is usually held. The author maintains that serfdom-based agriculture sustained a considerable rate of economic growth before 1861. A more nuanced look into the institution of serfdom reveals the complex economic and legal relat...

From the seventeenth century, through the eighteenth century, and on into the nineteenth century, the image of the sailor as an expression of liberty swept through North American and European literature. Whether fighting the elements, changing ports and women, or even “redeeming” himself, the sailor was at the heart of many a tale. Well before Conr...

According to a first approach, the indentured contract resembled forced labor and slavery, and contracts were expressed as legal fiction. 1 Such an approach deprives the abolition of slavery of any historical significance 2 while neglecting all the efforts indentured immigrants made to fight for their own rights.

Conventional historiography opposes land to maritime empires and justifies the supremacy of Europe by the strength of its fleets, capital, and technical progress. 1 We have shown that the maritime option did not become decisive until the eighteenth century and even later in the Indian Ocean, when local traders and ships were overpowered by steam-op...

It would be a mistake to consider that modern colonial slavery emerged only with the rise of the plantation system in the Americas. Long before that, sugar plantations using slave labor were developed in the eastern Mediterranean by both Venice and the Islamic powers. From 1450 increasing numbers of African slaves were shipped to Sicily, Portugal,...

To understand the scope and aim of our study, it is important to discuss the main approaches and historiographies to which this book refers. We will then go on to present an overview of the environment, trade, shipbuilding, and institutions in the Indian Ocean to provide the background for the notions and practices of labor to be analyzed.

As a master in Great Britain had the right to recover fugitives, so too in the colonies, indentured servants who fled were subject to criminal penalties. Without the Masters and Servants Acts, indenture would not have been possible. This means that the labor contract was not a “fiction” but a real tool in the master’s hands. This is all the more im...

Duress and violence are even more deeply rooted on the seas than on land. The long history of French seamen was that of the slow decline of the galleys and of the ever insufficient and increasingly problematic separation between military conscription and the merchant navy. Marseille was the main port of registry for galley slaves; in 1630, Marseill...

The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment. By VardiLiana. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2012. Pp. 315, viii. $99.00, hardcover. - Volume 73 Issue 3 - Alessandro Stanziani

The way bonded labour was defined and practised in the colonies was not only linked to the definition and practise of wage labour in Europe but their development was interconnected. The engagés (equivalent to indentured servants) and bonded labourers in the French colonies would have been inconceivable without hiring for services and domestic servi...

This main aim of this ambitious book is to trace the creation of slavery rather than examine its features as a legal institution. As such, this book is also a refiection on history as a process. The author's hope is that "historicizing slaving will suggest relevant strategies of moderating the circumstances that render some people vulnerable to ens...