Post-emancipation states revived compulsory labor to feed capitalist economies

Evidence

The French administration in West Africa was hardly the first “post-emancipation” state to suppress slavery only to justify and regulate other forms of compulsory labor. Such behavior was typical of nineteenth-century industrializing societies, seeking both at home and in their colonies to transform existing modes of labor organization through law and state authority, and to adapt them to the new demands of a capitalist economy. These economies could not condone the personal tyranny and violence associated with slavery and the slave trade. They required, instead, a system of “free” labor enforced by an objective authority, in which workers internalized such supposedly absent values as self-discipline and temperance. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 749

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Encapsulates the systemic tension: free-labor ideology required coercion to produce self-disciplined workers, a pattern repeated across post-emancipation states both metropolitan and colonial.
• XREF: connects to: Capital was reproduced by unwaged labour for the first time in history — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 861