Introduction: Free Wage Labor in the History of the West

Summary

This is a book about the history of free wage labor. It argues that that history needs to be radically revised. We drink of wage labor as having always been free and take for granted that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as today, wage workers enjoyed rights to work for whom they wished and to leave a job whenever they wished. Their lot may not always have been an easy one economically, but they could not be physically forced to perform labor as unfree workers could.

This picture of free wage labor was first developed as part of a larger rethinking of European history undertaken during the Scottish Enlightenment. The new history sought to depict change as unfolding in stages, with the latest stage representing a decisive rupture with the past. Each historical stage possessed its own distinctive form of social and economic organization that included a distinctive labor type. The feudalism of the Middle Ages, for example, was defined in part by the use of a particular form of labor, serfdom. When feudalism began to give way to a mercantilist version of market society, new forms of labor began to replace serfdom. In mercantilism, markets were heavily regulated, as was the wage labor used in these markets. Over time, however, state regulation was relaxed, and by the nineteenth century, free market society, with its characteristic labor type, free wage labor, had triumphed almost completely. In general, the movement from feudalism to free market society brought greater and greater freedoms to more and more people. Unfree serf labor gave way to regulated wage labor and finally to free wage labor as part of this larger historical process.