The majority of the first European settlers in the US were indentured servants, a form of labor debt that one willingly sells oneself into. Additionally, the initial settlements were funded by capital and new forms of business organization such as the joint-stock company. Most people are pretty well-informed about Indentured servitude and the trading companies, so this entry focuses mainly on the conditions responsible for the populating of the Americas with people from the Old World. ...

This is a reposting of a contribution to the "How did India go from Being a Rich Country to a Poor Country" thread.

Two of the earliest policies in India were to establish monopolies in key industries such as salt, tobacco, and essential spices, as well as to discourage manufacturing.

The most significant early economic policy of the British was the salt tax. It is said that in hot regions salt is worth more than gold. It was a necessity of life, which is...

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ostensibly is a fictional account of Joyce's early life in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth-Century. But why go to the trouble of fictionalizing his life? Part of it is in recounting his past the fictionalizing gives him control over it, to define it the way he sees fit. Everything then becomes endowed with meaning. Even something as simple as his name, something given to him at birth, becomes...

All the movement and change in Fathers and Children caused by the arrival of Bazarov and his conflict with Pavel is not so with Stavrogin in Demons. Stavrogin has no natural enemy, although for awhile the town is hostile towards him. The plot in Demons is convoluted and sometimes hard to follow. The actions of the characters in Demons do not make sense. And that is precisely the point. Stavrogin cannot be a catalyst in the same way that Bazarov is a catalyst, because that would somehow imply...

Works like Young Russia and A History of Russian Thought from Enlightenment to Marxism provide similar narratives on the radicalization of the Russian Intelligentsia and the emergence of nihilism. Exposure to French culture in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars created an inferiority complex in Russians towards Europe. Some young men who had fought in the Napoleonic Wars wanted to reform Russia. They would eventually lead the Decembrist revolt to overthrow the Czarist regime. The revolt failed....