Corvée in the context of "Unfree labor"

Forced labour, or unfree labour, is any work relation, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will with the threat of destitution, detention, or violence, including death or other forms of extreme hardship to either themselves or members of their families.

Unfree labour includes all forms of slavery, penal labour, and the corresponding institutions, such as debt slavery, serfdom, corvée and labour camps.

The Repartimiento (Spanish pronunciation: [repaɾtiˈmjento]) (Spanish, "distribution, partition, or division") was a colonial labor system imposed upon the indigenous population of Spanish America and the Philippines. In concept, it was similar to other tribute-labor systems, such as the mit'a of the Inca Empire or the corvée of the Ancien Régime de France: Through the pueblos de indios, the Amerindians were drafted work for cycles of weeks, months, or years, on farms, in mines, in workshops (obrajes), and public projects.

The cuneiform i sign is a common use vowel sign. It can be found in many languages, examples being the Akkadian language of the Epic of Gilgamesh (hundreds of years, parts of millenniums) and the mid 14th-century BC Amarna letters; also the Hittite language-(see table of Hittite cuneiform signs below).

In the Epic of Gilgamesh it also has a minor usage as a sumerogram, I. The usage numbers from the Epic are as follows: i-(698), I-(1).

The cuneiform Ri sign, or Re, is found in both the 14th-century BC Amarna letters and the Epic of Gilgamesh; it is in the top 25 most used cuneiform signs (Buccellati, 1979) for ri, or re, but has other syllabic or alphabetic uses, as well as the Sumerogram usage for RI (Epic of Gilgamesh).

The ri (cuneiform) sign has the following uses in the Epic of Gilgamesh:

The United States occupation of Haiti began on July 28, 1915, when 330 U.S. Marines landed at Port-au-Prince, Haiti, after the National City Bank of New York (now Citibank) convinced U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to take control of the country's political and financial interests. The occupation took place following years of socioeconomic instability within Haiti that culminated with the lynching of Haitian President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam by a mob angered by his executions of political prisoners.

During the occupation, Haiti had three new presidents while the United States ruled as a military regime through martial law, led by Marines and the U.S.-created Gendarmerie of Haiti. A corvée system of forced labor was used by the U.S. for infrastructure projects, resulting in hundreds to thousands of deaths. The occupation ended the constitutional ban on foreign ownership of land, which had existed since the foundation of Haiti.

Ranavalona I (born Rabodonandrianampoinimerina; 1778–16 August 1861), also known as Ramavo or Ranavalo-Manjaka I or Ranavalona reniny, was the sovereign of the Kingdom of Madagascar from 1828 to 1861. After positioning herself as queen following the death of her young husband Radama I, she pursued a policy of isolationism and self-sufficiency. She sought reduced economic and political ties with European powers and took vigorous measures to eradicate the small but growing Malagasy Christian movement initiated under Radama I by members of the London Missionary Society.

Ranavalona made heavy use of the traditional practice of fanompoana (forced labor as tax payment) to complete public works projects and develop an army. She had a standing army of between 20,000 and 30,000 Merina soldiers, whom she deployed to pacify outlying regions of the island and further expand the realm. The combination of regular warfare, slavery, disease, difficult forced labor and the practice of tangena (a harsh trial by ordeal using a poisonous nut from the Cerbera manghas tree) resulted in a high mortality rate among both soldiers and civilians during her 33-year reign, reducing Madagascar's population from 5 million in 1833 to 2.5 million in 1839.