Indentured Servitude In The English Colonies

2978 Words12 Pages
This report, 7 pages in length, relying on 6 sources and in Chicago/Turabian style, describes the economic conditions that encouraged indentured servitude in the English colonies, the conditions under which such servants lived, and efforts to ameliorate them. Indentured servitude: the experience in England’s American colonies in the 17th century INTRODUCTION Indentured servitude, the practice of contractual exchange of personal service (usually with only limited monetary compensation) for a period of years in return for some other good (e.g., occupation training, an agricultural plot), was a long established English labor practice. While indenture has certain similarities to apprenticeship, it more closely resembles ‘service in husbandry,’ an employment practice that evolved as serfdom fell into disuse. While men (and women) contracted terms of indenture in all of England’s American colonies, it was in Virginia (with its enormous demand for labor to grow and harvest tobacco) that the system was most prevalent. And it was in Virginia that the system’s singularly harsh conditions were the most pronounced. “The ordinary term of service that a man agreed to work in Virginia was not a year but several years; and the wages to which he was entitled had been paid in advance in the form of transportation across the ocean. Almost all servants were therefore in a condition resembling that of the least privileged type of English servant, the parish apprentice, a child who (to relieve the community of supporting him) was bound to service by court order, until he was twenty-one or twenty-four, with no obligation on his master’s part to teach him a trade or pay him.” While the African slave trade provided significant numbers of laborers to the English colonies during the decades of the seventeenth century, most of the agricultural labor performed under coerced
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