The new helots : migrants in the international division of labour

Since its first publication in 1987, this book has been reprinted several times and translated into Japanese. The New Helots is a wide ranging work of comparative and historical sociology, in which Robin Cohen argues that a major engine for the growth of capitalism lies in the employer’s ability to find successive cohorts of quasi-free or unfree workers to deploy in the lands, mines and factories of an expanding international division of labour. These workers, like the helots of ancient Greece are found at the periphery of ‘regional political economies’ or, in the form of modern migrants, sucked into the vortex of the metropolitan service or manufacturing industries. The regions of southern Africa; the USA and circum-Caribbean; Europe and its colonial southern hinterlands, are systematically compared – yielding original, in some case uncomfortable analogies between countries previously thought to be wholly different in terms of their political structures and guiding values. Though it presents a challenging thesis, The New Helots has been written with both an undergraduate and professional readership in mind. Students of history, sociology and economics as well as those interested in patterns of migration and ethnic relations will all find something new to disturb conventional wisdom found in their fields.