Indentured Servitude

Indentured Servitude PDF Author: Anna Suranyi
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228007798
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Hundreds of thousands of British and Irish men, women, and children crossed the Atlantic during the seventeenth century as indentured servants. Many had agreed to serve for four years, but large numbers had been trafficked or “spirited away” or were sent forcibly by government agencies as criminals, political rebels, or destitute vagrants. In Indentured Servitude Anna Suranyi provides new insight into the lives of these people. The British government, Suranyi argues, profited by supplying labour for the colonies, removing unwanted populations, and reducing incarceration costs within Britain. In addition, it was believed that indigents, especially destitute children, benefited morally from being placed in indenture. Capitalist entrepreneurs who were influential at the highest levels of government made their fortunes from Atlantic trade in goods, indentured servants, and slaves, and their participation in the servant trade contributed to the commercialization of criminal justice. Suranyi breaks new ground in showing how indentured servitude was challenged: once in the colonies, indentured servants adapted resourcefully to their circumstances and rebelled against unfair conditions and abuse by suing their masters, by running away, or through outright revolt. Emerging ideas about race and citizenship led to vehement public debate about the conditions of indentured servants and the ethics of indenture itself, prompting legislation that aimed to curb the worst excesses while slavery continued to expand unchecked.

Indentured Servitude

Indentured Servitude PDF Author: Anna Suranyi
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228007798
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book

Book Description
Hundreds of thousands of British and Irish men, women, and children crossed the Atlantic during the seventeenth century as indentured servants. Many had agreed to serve for four years, but large numbers had been trafficked or “spirited away” or were sent forcibly by government agencies as criminals, political rebels, or destitute vagrants. In Indentured Servitude Anna Suranyi provides new insight into the lives of these people. The British government, Suranyi argues, profited by supplying labour for the colonies, removing unwanted populations, and reducing incarceration costs within Britain. In addition, it was believed that indigents, especially destitute children, benefited morally from being placed in indenture. Capitalist entrepreneurs who were influential at the highest levels of government made their fortunes from Atlantic trade in goods, indentured servants, and slaves, and their participation in the servant trade contributed to the commercialization of criminal justice. Suranyi breaks new ground in showing how indentured servitude was challenged: once in the colonies, indentured servants adapted resourcefully to their circumstances and rebelled against unfair conditions and abuse by suing their masters, by running away, or through outright revolt. Emerging ideas about race and citizenship led to vehement public debate about the conditions of indentured servants and the ethics of indenture itself, prompting legislation that aimed to curb the worst excesses while slavery continued to expand unchecked.

Colonists in Bondage

Colonists in Bondage PDF Author: Abbott Emerson Smith
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807839671
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
This is the story of the colonists of the kitchens, the stables, the fields, the shops, and those who came to America as indentured servants, men and women who sold" themselves to masters for a period of time in order to pay passage from an old world to a new and freer one. Their leaven has gone into the fiber of American society." Originally published in 1947. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Bound Over

Bound Over PDF Author: John Van der Zee
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 9780671541187
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
From 1609 until well after the founding of the Republic, half of all the colonists who came to America did so under some form of involuntary labor. Author John van der Zee draws on original memoirs, newspapers, and pamphlets to re-create the life stories of a number of the remarkable men and women whose enshacklement and destitution paved the way for American freedom. From the narratives of convicts, redemptioners (who accepted servitude in exchange for transportation to America), and those who were "spirited away" (snatched against their will), van der Zee weaves a colorful "people's history" of colonial and Revolutionary times. In their own words and through their own eyes, we meet such men and women as the first labor organizer in America; the young nobleman whose memoirs inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped; and a real-life Moll Flanders. The book also offers a surprising new interpretation of the Revolution as growing out of this widespread practice of servitude.--From publisher description.

Infortunate

Infortunate PDF Author: Susan E. Klepp
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271041131
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
A rare memoir from the early eighteenth century by an Englishman who traveled to the New World as an indentured servant.

Colonists for Sale

Colonists for Sale PDF Author: Clifford Lindsey Alderman
Publisher: MacMillan Publishing Company
ISBN: 9780027002201
Category : Indentured servants
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Examines the origin, working conditions, and eventual fate of indentured servants in America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Colonialism and Migration; Indentured Labour Before and After Slavery

Colonialism and Migration; Indentured Labour Before and After Slavery PDF Author: P.C. Emmer
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400943547
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description


Economic Aspects of Indentured Servitude in Colonial Pennsylvania

Economic Aspects of Indentured Servitude in Colonial Pennsylvania PDF Author: Robert Owen Heavner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description


Indentured Students

Indentured Students PDF Author: Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674251482
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
The untold history of how AmericaÕs student-loan program turned the pursuit of higher education into a pathway to poverty. It didnÕt always take thirty years to pay off the cost of a bachelorÕs degree. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer untangles the history that brought us here and discovers that the story of skyrocketing college debt is not merely one of good intentions gone wrong. In fact, the federal student loan program was never supposed to make college affordable. The earliest federal proposals for college affordability sought to replace tuition with taxpayer funding of institutions. But Southern whites feared that lower costs would undermine segregation, Catholic colleges objected to state support of secular institutions, professors worried that federal dollars would come with regulations hindering academic freedom, and elite-university presidents recoiled at the idea of mass higher education. Cold War congressional fights eventually made access more important than affordability. Rather than freeing colleges from their dependence on tuition, the government created a loan instrument that made college accessible in the short term but even costlier in the long term by charging an interest penalty only to needy students. In the mid-1960s, as bankers wavered over the prospect of uncollected debt, Congress backstopped the loans, provoking runaway inflation in college tuition and resulting in immense lender profits. Today 45 million Americans owe more than $1.5 trillion in college debt, with the burdens falling disproportionately on borrowers of color, particularly women. Reformers, meanwhile, have been frustrated by colleges and lenders too rich and powerful to contain. Indentured Students makes clear that these are not unforeseen consequences. The federal student loan system is working as designed.

'To Serve Well and Faithfully'

'To Serve Well and Faithfully' PDF Author: Sharon Vineberg Salinger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521334426
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Thousands crossed the Atlantic to labor as bound workers in the Quaker colony. They came with little more than vague promises that servitude would propel them toward a future that would enable them to lead independent lives. What motivated them to take th

Servants and Servitude in Colonial America

Servants and Servitude in Colonial America PDF Author: Russell M. Lawson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The dispossessed people of Colonial America included thousands of servants who either voluntarily or involuntarily ended up serving as agricultural, domestic, skilled, and unskilled laborers in the northern, middle, and southern British American colonies as well as British Caribbean colonies. Thousands of people arrived in the British-American colonies as indentured servants, transported felons, and kidnapped children forced into bound labor. Others already in America, such as Indians, freedmen, and poor whites, placed themselves into the service of others for food, clothing, shelter, and security; poverty in colonial America was relentless, and servitude was the voluntary and involuntary means by which the poor adapted, or tried to adapt, to miserable conditions. From the 1600s to the 1700s, Blacks, Indians, Europeans, Englishmen, children, and adults alike were indentured, apprenticed, transported as felons, kidnapped, or served as redemptioners. Though servitude was more multiracial and multicultural than slavery, involving people from numerous racial and ethnic backgrounds, far fewer books have been written about it. This fascinating new study of servitude in colonial America provides the first complete overview of the varied lives of the dispossessed in 17th- and 18th-century America, examining colonial American servitude in all of its forms.