GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century. By Robert J. Steinfeld. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xi, 329. $59.95, cloth; $22.95, paper.

Extract

Published in 1991, Robert J. Steinfeld's The Invention of Free Labor was something of a milestone in the relationship between the fields of legal and economic history. Through a detailed comparative study of employment law in England and America across several centuries, Invention showed that meaning of “free labor” was by no means self-evident to historical players. The clearest evidence for this proposition is that law and practice were very different in two self-proclaimed free-labor societies, England and the U.S. North. In England criminal prosecutions for breach of employment were common until 1875, whereas they had all but disappeared in America by the time of the Revolution. Beyond its substantive conclusions, Invention was noteworthy as a rare example of legal history that looked to empirical evidence from outside the courtroom in an effort to understand the law in historical context.