DIVIn Unfree Masters, Matt Stahl examines recording artists' labor in the music industry as a form of creative work. He argues that the widespread perception of singers and musicians as free individuals doing enjoyable and fulfilling work obscures the realities of their occupation./div

This collection of essays examines the different forms of unfree labour that contributed to the development of the Atlantic world and, by extension, the debates and protests that emerged concerning labour servitude and the abolition of slavery in the West.

Examining the emergence of the modern conception of free labor--labor that could not be legally compelled, even though voluntarily agreed upon--Steinfeld explains how English law dominated the early American colonies, making violation of al labor agreements punishable by imprisonment. By the eighteenth century, traditional legal restrictions no longer applied to many kinds of colonial workers, but it was not until the nineteenth century that indentured servitude came to be regarded as similar to slavery.

This book examines how convicts played a key role in the development of capitalism in Australia and how their active resistance shaped both workplace relations and institutions. It highlights the contribution of convicts to worker mobilization and political descent, forcing a rethink of Australia’s foundational story. It is a book that will appeal to an international audience, as well as the many hundreds of thousands of Australians who can trace descent from convicts. It will enable the latter to make sense of the experience of their ancestors, equipping them with the necessary tools to understand convict and court records. It will also provide a valuable undergraduate and postgraduate teaching tool and reference for those studying unfree labour and worker history, social history, colonization and global migration in a digital age.

Two massive systems of unfree labor arose, a world apart from each other, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The American enslavement of blacks and the Russian subjection of serfs flourished in different ways and varying degrees until they were legally abolished in the mid-nineteenth century. Historian Peter Kolchin compares and contrasts the two systems over time in this magisterial book, which clarifies the organization, structure, and dynamics of both social entities, highlighting their basic similarities while pointing out important differences discernible only in comparative perspective. These differences involved both the masters and the bondsmen. The independence and resident mentality of American slaveholders facilitated the emergence of a vigorous crusade to defend slavery from outside attack, whereas an absentee orientation and dependence on the central government rendered serfholders unable successfully to defend serfdom. Russian serfs, who generally lived on larger holdings than American slaves and faced less immediate interference in their everyday lives, found it easier to assert their communal autonomy but showed relatively little solidarity with peasants outside their own villages; American slaves, by contrast, were both more individualistic and more able to identify with all other blacks, both slave and free. Kolchin has discovered apparently universal features in master-bondsman relations, a central focus of his study, but he also shows their basic differences as he compares slave and serf life and chronicles patterns of resistance. If the masters had the upper hand, the slaves and serfs played major roles in shaping, and setting limits to, their own bondage. This truly unprecedented comparative work will fascinate historians, sociologists, and all social scientists, particularly those with an interest in comparative history and studies in slavery.

"Playing to the Crowd explores and explains how the rise of digital communication platforms has transformed artist-fan relationships into something more intimate. Through in-depth interviews with musicians such as the Cure, UB40, and Throwing Muses, Nancy K. Baym reveals how new media has facilitated connections through the active participation of both the artists and their devoted digital fan base. Before the rise of online sharing and user-generated content, audiences were mostly seen as undifferentiated masses, often mediated through record labels and the press. Today, musicians and fans have built more active relationships through social media, fan sites, and artist sites, giving them a new sense of intimacy, while offering artists unparalleled access to and information about their audiences. But this comes at a price. For audiences, meeting their heroes can kill the mystique. And for artists, maintaining active relationships with so many people can be labor intensive and emotionally draining. Drawing on her own rich history as a deeply connected music fan, Baym offers an entirely new approach to media culture, arguing that the work musicians put into maintaining these intimate relationships reflects the demands of the gig economy, one which requires resources and strategies that we all music come to recognize"--Publisher's description.

At the turn of the millennium Canadian cinema appeared to have reached an apex of aesthetic and commercial transformation. Domestic filmmaking has since declined in visibility: the sense of celebrity once associated with independent directors has diminished, projects garner less critical attention, and concepts that made late-twentieth-century Canadian film legible have been reconsidered or displaced. Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium examines this dramatic transformation and revitalizes our engagement with Canadian cinema in the contemporary moment, presenting focused case studies of films and filmmakers and contextual studies of Canadian film policy, labour, and film festivals. Contributors trace key developments since 2000, including the renouveau or Quebec New Wave, Indigenous filmmaking, i-docs, and diasporic experimental filmmaking. Reflecting the way film in Canada mediates multiple cultures, forging new affinities among anglophone, francophone, and Indigenous-language examples, this book engages familiar figures, such as Denis Villeneuve, Xavier Dolan, Sarah Polley, and Guy Maddin, in the same breath as small-budget independent films, documentaries, and experimental works that have emerged in the Canadian scene. Fuelled by close attention to the films themselves and a desire to develop new scholarly approaches, Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium models a renewed commitment to keeping the conversation about Canadian cinema vibrant and alive.

This book presents a fundamental reassessment of the nature of wage labor in the nineteenth century, focusing on the common use of penal sanctions in England to enforce wage labor agreements. Professor Steinfeld argues that wage workers were not employees at will but were often bound to their employment by enforceable labor agreements, which employers used whenever available to manage their labor costs and supply. In the northern United States, where employers normally could not use penal sanctions, the common law made other contract remedies available, also placing employers in a position to enforce labor agreements. Modern free wage labor only came into being late in the nineteenth century, as a result of reform legislation that restricted the contract remedies employers could legally use.

A close look at the lives of working musicians who aren't the center of their stage.