Abstract
The Liberation of the Serfs was already decided in 1806 in Prussia to be effective in 1810 two centuries ago. (In the new model kingdom of Westphalia, it was made effective a little earlier.) More generally, unfree labour is, of course, still with us: The trafficking of domestic labour (girls with a complete high school education and a second negative aids test fetch US $10,000), e.g. from Kenya to Arabia, is flourishing. The largest transaction in unfree labour ever recorded occurred in Yalta; more than 6.5 million prisoners of war were handed over to Russia and France, making Roosevelt the biggest slave trader in recorded history.
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© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Backhaus, J.G. (2012). Introduction. In: Backhaus, J. (eds) The Liberation of the Serfs. The European Heritage in Economics and the Social Sciences, vol 14. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0085-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0085-1_1
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