Building the Atlantic Empires: Unfree Labor and Imperial States in the Political Economy of Capitalism, ca. 1500-1914

Building the Atlantic Empires explores the relationship between state recruitment of unfree labor and capitalist and imperial development. Contributors show Western European states as agents of capitalist expansion, imposing diverse forms of bondage on workers for infrastructural, plantation, and military labor.Extending the prolific literature on racial slavery, these essays help transcend imperi...