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Freedom Of Contract And Freedom Of Person: A Brief History Of “Involuntary Servitude” In American Fundamental Law, Robert J. Steinfeld
Freedom Of Contract And Freedom Of Person: A Brief History Of “Involuntary Servitude” In American Fundamental Law, Robert J. Steinfeld
Contributions to Books
Published as Chapter 14 in Republicanism and Liberalism in America and the German States, 1750–1850, Jürgen Heideking, James A. Henretta & Peter Becker, eds.
Liberal ideas are normally taken to have played an important role in the development of free markets, and of free labor based on contract in those markets. A closer look at labor regimes in the nineteenth century, however, reveals that liberal commitments to freedom did not straightforwardly produce what we today would think of as free labor. Just as often they produced a form of coerced contractual labor. And this was quite simply because liberal commitments …