Empires of Labor: Coercion and the Making of the Modern World
Wednesday 25 November 2026, 5pm
Schwarzman Building, Seminar Room 20.402 (History Faculty)
Speaker: Alessandro Stanziani, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris
All Welcome
From the seventeenth century to the First World War, both free and unfree labor were essential for building an empire. Overturning conventional explanations of serfdom, slavery, indentured migration and wage labor, Alessandro Stanziani will present his analysis of aristocratic capitalism across Europe and Eurasia until the end of the nineteenth century. This ambitious book, which he is presenting for the first time in Oxford, examines the relationship between capitalism and coercion across the British, French and Russian empires throughout centuries of economic transformation. He will link the Industrial Revolution, the Great Divergence and the Great Transformation into a single narrative in which the coercion and emancipation of labor are crucial steps. Stanziani’s new book argues that, if the modern state is now beset with labor inequalities and tensions surrounding mobility, it is not because Western values have been hijacked but because they were built on empire, labor and coercion. Empires of Labor: Coercion and the Making of the Modern World was released by Cambridge University Press in 2025.
Biography:
Alessandro Stanziani is a professor at the EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) and a senior researcher at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifiques), Paris. He is the author of fourteen monographs, ten edited volumes, and more than one hundred articles. His books include Rules of Exchange: French Capitalism in Comparative Perspective; Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Bâtisseurs d’empires. Russie, Chine et Inde à la croisée des mondes (Liber, 2012).
