Suffrage and the Terms of Labor

Published as Chapter 9 in Human Capital and Institutions: A Long Run View, David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis & Kenneth L. Sokoloff, eds. Great books often harbor deep tensions, which are one source of their enduring power. Time on the Cross by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman is a good example (Fogel and Engerman 1974). On the one hand, Time on the Cross argued that the economic science of Cliometrics was indispensable for a proper understanding of the past. Human beings have always been primarily motivated by the desire for gain, and to understand their behavior it is essential to reconstruct the economic contexts in which they acted. Somewhat surprisingly, therefore, in light of the rigorous quantitative economic methodology the book adopted, the enormous labors the authors devoted to counting, measuring, and precisely assessing the profitability of slavery were all devoted, in the end, to demonstrating that economic factors did not explain why slavery had disappeared in the United States. Slavery had not perished because it was unprofitable. It had disappeared as the result of war and because the nation had come to a political (and moral) decision to end it, despite its continuing profitability. And so ironically one of the principal messages of Time on the Cross turned out to be that economic factors could not always be invoked to explain why one set of economic practices had succeeded and another failed. Non-economic political and moral factors and the legal rules they generated often played determinative roles in the fate of economic institutions, including the fate of labor systemshttps://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1217/thumbnail.jp

Subjectship, Citizenship, and the Long History of Immigration Regulation

Aerial view of Cedar Lake and portions of Cedarville College. From the Strobridge Collection in the Centennial Library\u27s Archives and Special Collectionshttps://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/cedarville_historical_images/1017/thumbnail.jp

Freedom of Contract and Freedom of Person: A Brief History of “Involuntary Servitude” in American Fundamental Law

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 to freedom embraced a basic conflict between freedom of contract and freedom of person. To the extent that one possessed absolute freedom of contract, one would have been free to contract away one\u27s personal liberty. One would have been free to contract into slavery or bind one\u27s labor irrevocably for long periods of time. To the extent that the state found it desirable to prevent this result, it could only do so by imposing limitations on the freedom of contract in the interest of preserving the freedom of persons. Modern free labor is the result of just such a choice to restrict freedom of contract. Before this basic issue within liberalism was finally resolved in favor of freedom of person and against freedom of contract, many of the first market regimes based on free contract produced coerced contractual labor rather than free labor. In the first flourishing of free contract in the nineteenth century, lawmakers in many different countries seem to have believed that labor markets based on promises could only function properly if contracts could be rigorously enforced against workers. As a result they often gave employers harsh remedies for contract breach so that they could compel workers to perform their agreementshttps://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1222/thumbnail.jp