Evelyn Jennings has co-edited the book “Building the Atlantic Empires: Unfree Labor and Imperial States in the Political Economy of Capitalism, ca. 1500-1914.”

Jennings is a St. Lawrence University professor, Margaret Vilas chair of Latin American history, and associate dean for academic advising programs.

“Building the Atlantic Empires” explores the relationship between state recruitment of unfree labor and capitalist and imperial development.

Contributors to the book show Western European states as agents of capitalist expansion, imposing diverse forms of bondage on workers for infrastructural, plantation and military labor, according to a press release from the university.

The book also raises new questions for scholars seeking connections between the history of servitude and slavery and the ways in which capitalism and imperialism transformed the Atlantic world and beyond, the release said.

The book, published by Brill, also features an essay written by Jennings titled “The Sinews of Spain’s American Empire: Forced Labor in Cuba from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries.”

For more information contact St. Lawrence University at www.stlawu.edu/history.