Indentured servant

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An indentured servant is a labourer under contract (an indenture--explained below) to work (for a specified amount of time) for another person or a company/corporation, often without any monetary pay, but in exchange for accommodation, food, other essentials, training, or passage to a new country. After working for the term of the contract (traditionally seven years) the servant was then free to farm or take up trade of his own. The term comes from the medieval English "indenture of retainer" — a contract written in duplicate on the same sheet, with the copies separated by cutting along a jagged (toothed, hence the term "indenture") line so that the teeth of the two parts could later be refitted to confirm authenticity. They were also used to make the labour-intensive cash crop tobacco in the 17th century.

It was the legal basis of the apprenticeship system by which skilled trades were learned.

Indentured servitude is not identical with involuntary servitude and slavery.

There have been multiple occasions where the indentured servitude has been abused. For example, indentured servants need goods or services not available or supplied at a cost within the terms of the indenture and find obtaining such goods or services requires an extension to the period of their indenture. In these circumstances, the system can represent a form of unfree labour.

Contents

1 Caribbean Islands
2 North America
3 Australia and the Pacific
4 Further reading
5 See also

Caribbean Islands

Most of the European settlers who came to the Caribbean islands during the 16th and 17th centuries did so as indentured servants. Commoners, most of whom were young men, with dreams of owning their land or striking it rich quick would essentially sell years of their freedom in exchange for passage to the islands. The landowners on the islands would pay for a servant’s passage and then provide them with food and shelter during the term of their service. The servant would then be required to work in the landowner’s (master) field for a term of bondage (usually four to seven years). During this term of bondage the servant was considered the property of the master. He could be sold or given away by his master and he was not allowed to marry without the master’s permission. An indentured servant was normally not allowed to buy or sell goods although, unlike an African slave, he could own personal property. He could also go to a local magistrate if he was treated badly by his master. After the servant’s term of bondage was complete he was freed and paid “freedom dues”. These payments could take the form of land or sugar, which would give the servant the opportunity to become an independent farmer or a free labourer.

Indentured servitude was a common part of the landscape in England and Ireland during the 1600s. During the 1600s, many Irish were also kidnapped and taken to Barbados. The term Barbadosed was coined for these actions, and Redlegs for the group concerned. Many indentured servants were captured by the English during Cromwell’s expeditions to Ireland and Scotland, who were forcibly brought over between 1649 and 1655.

After 1660, the Caribbean saw fewer indentured servants coming over from Europe. On most of the islands African slaves now did all the hard fieldwork. Newly freed servant farmers that were given a few acres of land would not be able to make a living because sugar plantations had to be spread over hundreds of acres in order to be profitable. The landowners’ reputation as cruel masters in dealing with the large slave populations became a deterrence to the potential indentured servant. Even the islands themselves had become deadly disease death traps for the white servants. Africans, on the other hand, were excellent workers: they often had experience of agriculture and keeping cattle, they were used to a tropical climate, resistant to tropical diseases, and they could be "worked very hard" on plantations or in mines. Yellow fever, malaria and the diseases that Europeans had brought over contributed to the fact that during the 17th century between 33 to 50 percent of the indentured servants died before they were freed.

When slavery ended in the British Empire in 1838, plantation owners turned to indentured servitude for inexpensive labour. These servants emigrated from a variety of places, including China and Portugal, though a majority came from India. This system was pioneered at Aapravasi Ghat in Mauritius and was not abolished until 1917. As a result, today Indo-Caribbeans form a majority in Guyana and Mauritius, a plurality in Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname, and a substantial minority in Jamaica.

North America

In North American history, employers usually paid for European workers' passage across the Atlantic Ocean, reimbursing the shipowner who held their papers of indenture. In return, the servants agreed to work for a specified number of years. The agreement could also be an exchange for professional training: after being the indentured servant to a blacksmith for several years, one would expect to work as a blacksmith on one's own account after the period was over. During the 17th century most of the white labourers in Maryland and Virginia came from England this way. Their masters were bound to feed, clothe, and lodge them. Ideally, an indentured servant's lot in the establishment would be no harder than that of a contemporary apprentice, who was similarly bound by contract and owed hard, unpaid labour while "serving his time." At the end of the allotted time, an indentured servant was to be given a new suit of clothes and set loose.

However, according to author Michael A. Hoffman, of They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America (1993), the system was rife with abuse. Unscrupulous creditors could buy the debts of the unwitting poor in Britain and Ireland, and these people might find themselves involuntarily separated from their families and shipped off to America as indentured servants. Some masters also found ways to keep their charges indebted to them, and therefore unable to leave their bondage.

Indentured servitude was a method of increasing the number of residents/emigrants, especially in the British colonies. Convict labour only provided so many people, and since the journey across the Atlantic was dangerous and disease-stricken, resulting in deaths on every journey, other means of encouraging settlement were necessary. In fact contract-labourers were so important a group of people and so numerous that they were mentioned in the US Constitution:

"Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons".

Thus the system was still going strong in the 1780s, picking up immediately after a hiatus during the American Revolution. Fernand Braudel (The Perspective of the World 1984, pp 405f) instances a 1783 report on "the import trade from Ireland" and its large profits to a ship owner or a captain, who:

"puts his conditions to the emigrants in Dublin or some other Irish port. Those who can pay for their passage—usually about 100 or 80 [livres tournois]— arrive in America free to take any engagement that suits them. Those who cannot pay are carried at the expense of the shipowner, who in order to recoup his money, advertises on arrival that he has imported artisans, labourers and domestic servants and that he has agreed with them on his own account to hire their services for a period normally of 3, 4, or 5 years for men and women and 6 or 7 years for children."

In modern terms, the shipowner was acting as a contractor, hiring out his labourers. Such circumstances affected the treatment a captain gave his valuable human cargo. After indentures were forbidden, the passage had to be prepaid, giving rise to the inhumane conditions of Irish "coffin ships" in the second half of the 19th century.

Indentured Servitude was used by the Hudson's Bay Company to staff the coal mines around Nanaimo well into the late 1800's.

Australia and the Pacific

In the article on the history of Vanuatu, it states that:

During the 1860s, planters in Australia, Fiji, New Caledonia, and the Samoa Islands, in need of labourers, encouraged a long-term indentured labour trade called "blackbirding." At the height of the labour trade, more than one-half the adult male population of several of the Islands worked abroad.

Over a period of 40 years, from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century, labour for the sugar cane fields of Queensland, Australia included an element of coercive recruitment and indentured servitude, of the 62,000 South Sea Islanders (from Melanesia, mainly the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, with a small number from the Polynesian and Micronesian islands such as Samoa, Kiribati and Tuvalu).

The question of how many Islanders were kidnapped or blackbirded is unknown and remains controversial. The question:

Were Islanders legally recruited, persuaded, deceived, coerced or forced to leave their homes and travel by ship to Queensland?

is difficult. Official documents and accounts from the period often conflict with the oral tradition passed down to the descendants of workers. Stories of blatantly violent kidnapping tended to relate to the first 10–15 years of the trade.

Australia repatriated many of these people to their places of origin in the period 1906-1908 under the provisions of the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901 ([link]).

The Australian colonies of Papua and New Guinea (joined after the Second World War to form Papua New Guinea) were the last jurisdictions in the world to use indentured servitude.

Indentured servant

Caribbean Islands

North America

Australia and the Pacific

Further reading

See also