From Slavery to Illegality? Labor Coercion and Capitalism in the Americas, 1840-1914

The historical literature on slavery is vast, especially on the major regions where slavery lived longest: Brazil, Cuba, and the United States. Eventual abolition did not translate into full equality before the law, and political participation and socioeconomic mobility of formerly enslaved and other non-White people was strategically hampered. However, research on how this impacted work remains limited.

In the transition from slavery to wage labor, new social and political pressures had to be invented to “incentivize” people to work. This project compares the illegalization of workers as a key mechanism of coercion between the 1840s and 1914 in Baltimore, Havana, and Rio de Janeiro, where legal slavery continued relatively long. It explores how unequal access to the justice system as a consequence of illegality provided employers with asymmetrical degrees of control over labor. The results will foster scholarly and public debates about the interplay between illegality, labor coercion, and capitalism, a topic of ongoing political and social significance.