On Coerced Labor focuses on forms of labor which, unlike chattel slavery, have received little scholarly attention. It provides discussions of legal definitions of unfree labor as well as empirical findings on convict and military labor, indentured labor, debt bondage, and sharecropping.

Marcel van der Linden is Senior Fellow at the International Institute of Social History, Professor of Social Movement History at the University of Amsterdam, and President of the International Social History Association.
Magaly Rodríguez García is Assistant Professor at the University of Leuven, Belgium. She has published on human trafficking and child labor, the history and definitions of prostitution, including "Defining Commercial Sexualities, Past and Present" (Ashgate, 2016).