Servants and Servitude in Colonial America

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.

Russell M. Lawson is a professor at Tulsa Community College, USA, and the author or editor of five encyclopedias. A specialist in intellectual and scientific history, he has also written numerous works on exploration and early American science.

Prologue: Human Bondage Acknowledgments Chapter 1: The Children of Jamestown Chapter 2: Indian Bondage Chapter 3: The Captives of New France Chapter 4: English Town by the Sea Chapter 5: The Dutch Servants of New Netherland and New York Chapter 6: Daniel Defoe's London Chapter 7: The Voyage of the Free-Willers Chapter 8: Infortunate Servants Chapter 9: Oglethorpe's Dream Chapter 10: The Prisoners of Culloden Chapter 11: John Harrower and Servitude in the Colonial South Chapter 12: New England Apprentices Chapter 13: Servants and the American Revolution Afterword Appendix: Documents in the History of Colonial American Servitude Sources Consulted Index