ABSTRACT

The fiery growth and dogged survival of unfree labour regimes in Eastern Europe, European Russia and the Americas, from the trailing end of the medieval era well into the late modern epoch, was very much the rule and not the exception. 2 The size of the landmass involved enormously dwarfed that of Western Europe, whose evolving free labour practices from the mid-fourteenth century have been customarily valorized by historians and others as an inevitable model. Pre-twentieth-century, modern unfree labour regimes spanned nearly 500 years. The Portuguese inaugurated this period in the early and mid-1400s by shipping enslaved West Africans into the Canary Islands, Cape Verde Islands and Madeira and by fashioning in these places the forced-labour plantation economy destined to benight the Americas. This half-millennium epoch ended with Stolypin’s juridical abolition of Russia’s serfdom between 1907 and 1910. The market for unfree labour, the incentives for its maintenance and the resultant, acculturating mindsets skewed enormously evolving civilizational practices in the Americas and Western Eurasia. 3