6 - White Servitude

Summary

Despite marked geographical and temporal differences across the Western Hemisphere, white servitude remained a distinct and significant phenomenon to the end of the early modern period. The area is defined broadly to include the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and the specific cases of Russia and Eastern Europe are covered in greater detail in other chapters in this volume. White servitude was present to some degree throughout this vast area, but in a highly asymmetrical pattern of distribution. The largest concentrations were found around the Mediterranean, in Russia, and in the Middle East. Slavery proper was characterized by a lifetime of enforced labor, together with a chattel status that was passed on to descendants. Servitude is defined more widely to include serfdom, penal labor, the transportation of destitute minors, and, with reservations, indentured labor.

Free labor in the modern sense scarcely existed in Christian Europe before the nineteenth century, and yet the continent's experience was very diverse. Serfdom virtually disappeared from Western Europe, whereas it intensified and expanded in the east. Chattel slavery persisted in southwestern and central Europe, and yet it all but vanished in northwestern Europe. Russia's chattel slaves were all technically transformed into serfs by 1725, but at a time when the latter status was fast sinking to approximate that of slaves. Penal servitude was on the increase everywhere in Europe, and the lot of impoverished children and other marginal social groups worsened.