ABSTRACT
In the first half of the nineteenth century, agricultural labor in wide areas of the American hemisphere and the eastern and southern European peripheries was mostly associated with large landed estates. In all these areas, production of specific crops for sale in the world market led to the implementation of rigidly regimented systems of labor with different degrees of unfreedom—from slavery to serfdom, to various forms of sharecropping and tenancy. In other words, during the course of the nineteenth century, all these areas were commodity frontiers in the sense of the expression used by Jason Moore within a framework referring to Immanuel Wallerstein's model of analysis of the historical expansion of the European world-economy. 1
