This chapter explores the entanglement of the process to inaugurate the Casa de Correção with the political crisis that culminated in the suppression of the slave trade after 1850. I argue that the inauguration of the penitentiary in 1850 belongs to the articulation of policies to restructure slavery geographically in Brazil as the country moved decisively, under considerable British pressure, to suppress the contraband slave trade. The chapter probes the July 1850 decree that regulated the Casa de Correção as Brazil’s first penitentiary. It contends that the continued utilization of unfree labor proved to be a crucial part of the campaign to repress the slave trade and the entangled processes through which authorities deployed the prison to administer the ripple effects of the ending of human trafficking. I also interrogate how administrators of the Casa de Correção struggled to implement the congregate regime for prisoners sentenced to “prison with work” while overseeing its other dependencies. This demonstrates how penitentiary labor was deeply shaped by larger societal and economic forces of the Atlantic World.

Increasingly jobs are impermanent, insecure, and gig-based. From a neoliberal perspective gig work is imagined as granting more freedom than traditional forms of employment and gig workers are portrayed as entrepreneurs who work for themselves, maximizing their human capital in a flexible manner. In this chapter Elliott writes about what its like to be a tea plantation worker in Kenya, particularly given the rise of gig work in that sector. What Elliott found in the course of her field work is that many tea plantation worker are nostalgic for the permanent job and its attendant benefits, legacies of latecolonial welfare paternalism. In fact, what remaining permanent plantation jobs there are often seem like a good deal compared to gig work, since it may offer benefits absent in the gig economy, such as housing, water, and some kind of pension scheme and health insurance. Elliot does not argue in favor of a return to the “security” and “benefits” of traditional plantation labor, a highly hierarchized, exploitative, and often oppressive system with limited possibilities for social mobility. Rather, she suggests that something is fundamentally wrong with the way work happens and is conceived under neoliberal conditions when traditional plantation offers preferable options to gig work. Human flourishing requires options beyond colonial tyrany and the neoliberal conception of freedom. She thus suggests that we may need to imagine ways of making a living that don’t involve a job.

Conventional workplace law includes the law of collective bargaining and employment contracts. This chapter argues that, to fully understand how law constructs worker power, industrial democracy, and political democracy, workplace law should greatly broaden in scope. The “new labor law” should encompass components of many fields of law that influence worker power and democracy as much as many components of conventional labor law. These additional components are lodged in domestic and international finance law, social wage law, constitutional law, communication law, tax law, and many more fields. The chapter applies the new labor law to critique and offer proposals to reconstruct existing law in the service of empowering workers in the workplace and polity, within both capitalist economies and imagined democratic socialist regimes.

Chapter 2 examines Burke’s fundamental beliefs on market economies. I first provide an outline of the agricultural economy in late eighteenth-century England in order to draw a specific historical context for Burke’s economic thought during that period. Then I use Thoughts and Details to explain his commentary on market liberty. I discuss Burke’s support for a free domestic grain trade; government restraint; supply and demand laws; and the competitive price system. For Burke, the internal grain market should be largely protected from state intrusion. The silent efficiency of supply and demand laws channeled provisions to communities without requiring the hand of government. Prices of goods should be determined by the market, not by magistrates, who lacked the knowledge of local market conditions necessary to establish equitable prices and create fair labor contracts. I also investigate Burke’s firm defense of middlemen in Thoughts and Details, and describe his efforts in 1772 to repeal long-standing statutes that had banned the middlemen trading activities of forestalling, regrating, and engrossing. According to Burke, middlemen played a crucial role in the provisions trade by helping promote the smooth distribution of goods and lower prices.