You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The first full examination of the English trade in indentured servants, who paid for their transportation and keep, and continued to work unpaid for years on their arrival. Often these people were deceived and coerced, despite half-hearted government efforts to curtail the activities of what was, after all, a useful crime for the English state.
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 fro...
None
In the record office of the City of London is a register containing the names of 3,398 servants bound out for service in the American colonies and the West Indies. Details concerning nearly 2,000 of these indentured servants, taken from the original indenture forms, were published over twenty years ago. Yet information on 1,544 additional servants, whose names appear in the register but for whom no indentures survive, had never been published. With this present work, however, we now have a published list of these missing servants as well as a digest of associated data. In addition to the servant's name and the name of the transporting agent, the tabulation includes the name of the colony to which the servant was shipped and the date--either the date of the indenture form itself or the Assize at which it was registered. The majority of these servants were destined for Maryland, Pennsylvania, or the West Indies.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 300,000 people or more became slaves there in all but name. Urchins were swept up from London's streets to labour in the tobacco fields, brothels were raided to provide 'breeders' for Virginia and hopeful migrants were duped into signing as indentured servants, unaware they would become chattels who could be bought, sold and gambled away. Drawing on letters, diaries, and court and government archives, the authors demonstrate that the brutalities associated with black slavery alone were perpetrated on whites throughout British rule. The trade ended with American independence but the British still tried to sell convicts in their former colonies, which prompted one of the most audacious plots in Anglo-American history. This is a saga of exploitation and cruelty spanning 170 years that has been submerged under the overwhelming memory of black slavery. White Cargo brings the brutal, uncomfortable story to the surface.
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.
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 s...
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.
Examines the origin, working conditions, and eventual fate of indentured servants in America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.