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.