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.