Labor coercion, Im/mobility, and the Environment

In the articles included in this issue, people of diverse backgrounds, statuses, and sexes move along different trajectories and become immobilized in various sites due to multiple intersecting circumstances. Among them are people who were legally free as well as semi-free villagers, convicts, and slaves whose mobility was impacted by diverse factors and at different scales. In the stories narrated in the contributions, coercive forms of labor emerge as being temporally flexible, irregular, and informal as well as spatially varied, mobile, and migratory. In this context, governmental measures also feature as an important aspect that could be employed both as a means of controlling and coercing and as a tool to increase the autonomy of workers.