AHC: Serfdom/Slavery plus industrialization

Is there any way for serfdom, slavery, or any other form of bonded labor to remain widespread throughout the world, while industrialization and technological advancement stays at roughly the same pace as OTL, or at least, not too far behind?
 
Is there any way for serfdom, slavery, or any other form of bonded labor to remain widespread throughout the world, while industrialization and technological advancement stays at roughly the same pace as OTL, or at least, not too far behind?

The kind of societies that are going to maintain serfdom/slavery are not the kind that are going to embrace industrialization in any but the crudest sense (See: Russia).

It's not so much that you can't have both serfs and industry, as that the people who will insist on the social order that is based around serfdom or slavery are not the kind who will embrace any sort of revolutionary transformation of society, even to the bourgeoisie.
 
What do you mean by "widespread"? You could argue that you're describing OTL if you are content with it affecting a few tens of millions of people. As regards another form of bonded labour, surely the USSR and the PRC would qualify. Not even talking of colonial Africa.

Early industrialisation coexisted with formal slavery for a long time, and with informal bonded labour to this day. There is nothing inherent in it that makes that impossible, but its OTL origins from a dynamic and liberal culture makes it unlikely. If you are not going to posit a very different world (such as, e.g., Song industrialisation), then I think your best bet is going with indentures as a common tool on the labour market. In theory, an indenture is a mutual contract freely entered into. In practice, these things tended to be so close to slavery that people on the receiving end often enough did not distinguish. Have them become more prevalent (in the context of a racial ideology for maximum nastiness) and you have a system where labour comes in three tiers: professional, protected by labour laws, public or private insurances, and ablke to negotiate for pay and benefits individually, industrial, enjoying more marginal protections, subject to competition from below, and tied to collective bargains, and indentured, bonded for long periods of time on saleable contracts. Sure, these things were originally meant for colonial contexts, but mobility does increase, and employers know a good idea when they see one.
 
Decades of Darkness did a acceptably decent, of pulling it off, and allowing it to survive in some form as of the 1950s(though how much longer even peonage, TTL America's serfdom equivalent, let alone slavery itself can plausibly survive is another matter altogether), although not without risktaking on Jared's part.

Truth is, though, you would need LOTS of influence from those who would benefit most(possibly going as far as buying local elections and such) from such a system, and, in a country like the U.S., which has many regions that aren't favorable to either, at least economically if not popularly(you don't need it to be totally banned, though; in DoD, nearly every state in 1900 had at least a few slaves & peons along with free whites and whatever other full citizens were in them), a great deal of apathy in the minds of many would work wonders.
 

Delvestius

Banned
We're all slaves to the man, man! Every auto worker, every pencil pusher.. Slaves, man. Free your mind and be free!
 
The Soviet Union under Stalin offers the most obvious example of this. However this reflected that Tsarist-era industrialization had itself been uneven and primarily a creation of the state, so the Soviet-era industrialization was an extrapolation of existing trends. Ironically, too, the Russian capital during this process was precisely in a strategically vulnerable area chosen for political, not military purposes.
 
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