Coerced and Semicoerced Labor

Although working-class people in industrialized nations had limited choices about the place and terms of their employment, many other workers did not have even this small degree of freedom. Slavery continued into the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States and Brazil, as did serfdom in Russia. In other forms of unfree labor, contract laborers and indentured servants performed agricultural and other work on every one of the six inhabited continents. Debt bondage also trapped many people, including African American sharecroppers in the United States and female textile workers in Japan. Prisoners were also often sentenced to perform labor as part of their punishment. These systems of coerced and semicoerced labor remained intact throughout the nineteenth century in various parts of the world.            All images referenced in this podcast can be found at https://openstax.org/books/world-history-volume-2/pages/10-3-coerced-and-semicoerced-labor            Welcome to A Journey into Human History.    This podcast will attempt to tell the whole human story.       The content contained in this podcast was produced by OpenStax and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.     Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/world-history-volume-2/pages/1-introduction    Podcast produced by Miranda Casturo as a Creative Common Sense production.

Om Podcasten

Welcome to a journey into human history. This podcast will attempt to tell the whole human story. You may be asking yourself what is history? Is it simply a record of things people have done? Is it what writer Maya Angelou suggested—a way to meet the pain of the past and overcome it? Or is it, as Winston Churchill said, a chronicle by the victors, an interpretation by those who write it? History is all this and more. Above all else, it is a path to knowing why we are the way we are—all our greatness, all our faults—and therefore a means for us to understand ourselves and change for the better. But history serves this function only if it is a true reflection of the past. It cannot be a way to mask the darker parts of human nature, nor a way to justify acts of previous generations. It is the historian’s task to paint as clear a picture as sources will allow. Will history ever be a perfect telling of the human tale? No. There are voices we may never hear. Yet each new history book written and each new source uncovered reveal an ever more precise record of events around the world. You are about to take a journey into human history. The content contained in this podcast was produced by OpenStax and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License. For more information please review the links and resources in the description. Podcast produced by Miranda Casturo as a creative common sense production.