| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Robert J. Steinfeld. Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century. (Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001. Pp. xi, 329. Cloth $59.95, paper $22.95.

Robert J. Steinfeld's new book begins with a stimulating attack on the typology that separates different legal forms of labor—chattel slave, serf, contract, and "free" wage—into discrete, timeless historical types. It proposes that all forms of labor are forcibly exacted by a scale of "combined pecuniary/nonpecuniary . . . coercive pressures running from severe to mild" that, whether legal or economic, are all commensurable and differ mainly in degree (p. 25). Coercive pressures include penal sanctions, wage forfeiture, hunger, and homelessness, which confront the workers with a choice between work and more or less "disagreeable alternatives" (p. 26). 1

This thesis promises a work that makes a significant advance on Steinfeld's earlier, innovative The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture,1350–1870 (1991), which argued that wage workers were "free" only when they were not compelled to fufill their contracts by penal sanctions. The new thesis, however, incorporates penal sanctions in a spectrum of techniques and conditions that coerce the production of labor. 2

It is disappointing to find that this boldy asserted and challenging thesis is not the focus of the book, which expands instead on Steinfeld's earlier work; it provides an account of the removal (1823–1875) of penal sanctions in Britain together with an overview of parallel legal struggles in the eighteenth through the early twentieth-century United States. . . .

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