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The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

David W. Galenson
David W. Galenson
Affiliation:
Professor of Economics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, and is a Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research.
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Abstract

Indentured servitude appeared in Virginia by 1620. Initially a device used to transport European workers to the New World, over time servitude dwindled as black slavery grew in importance in the British colonies. Indentured servitude reappeared in the Americas in the mid-nineteenth century as a means of transporting Asians to the Caribbean sugar islands and South America following the abolition of slavery. Servitude then remained in legal use until its abolition in 1917. This paper provides an economic analysis of the innovation of indentured servitude, describes the economic forces that caused its decline and disappearance from the British colonies, and considers why indentured servitude was revived for migration to the West Indies during the time of the great free migration of Europeans to the Americas.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , March 1984 , pp. 1 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1984

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References

1 Smith, Abbot Emerson, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776 (Chapel Hill, 1947), p. 336.Google Scholar

2 Indentured, or contract, labor was also used elsewhere in the nineteenth century, as, for example, significant movements of bound workers occurred within Asia. This paper will not treat these episodes, but will focus only on migrations to the Americas.Google Scholar

3 Throughout this paper, with reference to indentured servitude the term “institution” will be used broadly to refer to the sets of practices and rules—including both statute and common law—that governed the use of labor contracts written for specified periods and entered into by workers in order to finance migration. Contracts of servitude typically differed from hire labor contracts in specifying relatively long terms—e.g., in the colonial period four years or more–and by involving a greater degree of control of the worker's living and working conditions by the employer, and from debt contracts of service in failing to provide for automatic dissolution of the agreement at any time upon repayment of a stated principal sum by the worker. These differences tended to make indentured servitude a distinctive status at most times and places, with a set of rules and practices specific to it, although of course these might differ among particular episodes, or for a single episode over time.Google Scholar

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7 The large size of the debt meant that repayment would normally take longer than the single year that characterized the employment of farm servants in England. Thus although the early arrangements did not have all the characteristics of indentured servitude that would later develop, one important element of the indenture system–contracts binding the worker to a master for a number of years–appeared at an early stage.Google Scholar

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12 Kingsbury, , Records of the Virginia Company, Vol. III, p. 226; also pp. 246, 257–58.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., p. 221.

14 Ibid., p. 167.

15 Ibid., p. 227.

16 The difficulties of devising rental agreements that would provide the proper incentives for planters would have been enormous in view of the problems involved in determining the presence of negligence by masters in the case of death or escape by servants under the conditions of high mortality and poor communications that existed in early Virginia. Sale of the contracts to masters was therefore superior to rental, and it appears that the Virginia Company realized this very quickly, as the only definite evidence of rentals dates from the same year–1619–in which the first outright sales of servants' contracts occurred. Rentals do not appear to have continued in later years.Google Scholar

17 Smith, Colonists in Bondage, p. 12. The Contract that came to be used in these bargains was of a type commonly used in England for a variety of legal transactions, known as an indenture.Google Scholar

18 Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, Vol. III, p. 313.Google Scholar

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20 Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, p. 126.Google Scholar

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22 Indeed, Gloria Main concluded that servant's material condition in seventeenth-century Maryland was typically no worse than that of many small planters; Main, , Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650–1720(Princeton, 1982), p. 113.Google Scholar

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24 Main, Tobacco Colony, p. 118.Google Scholar

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28 The following four paragraphs are based on the analysis in Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, Chs. 8–9.Google Scholar

29 Dunn, Richard S., Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713, (Chapel Hill, 1972), pp. 59–72, 110–16, 301–34;Google ScholarSheridan, Richard B., Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775 (Barbados, 1974), pp. 131–33, 164, 194, 237–38.Google Scholar

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32 Thus Oldmixon, John noted in 1708 that slaves “that are born in Barbadoes are much more useful Men, than those that are brought from Guinea”; The British Empire in America (London, 1708), Vol. 2, pp. 121–22.Google Scholar On the relation between place of birth and training, see Menard, Russell R., “The Maryland Slave Population, 1658 to 1730,” William and Mary Quarterly (Third Series), 32 (01 1975), 36–37;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMullin, Gerald W., Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (London, 1972), pp. 39, 47;Google ScholarDuncan, John Donald, “Servitude and Slavery in Colonial South Carolina, 1670–1776” (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1971), pp. 436–37.Google Scholar

33 For quantitative outlines of the servants' destinations over time, see Smith, Colonists in Bondage, pp. 307–37, and Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, Ch. 6. During the eighteenth century a modification of indentured servitude appeared, particularly among German immigrants to Pennsylvania. Under the redemptioner system, a migrant would board a ship in Europe under a promise to pay for his passage after arriving in America. If he were unable to pay within two weeks after arrival, he would be indentured for a term sufficient to raise the fare. This arrangement is treated here as a variant of indentured servitude, for the basic form of the contract was similar, and there was no legal difference between indentured servants and redemptioners once the latter had been bound. For further discussion and references, see Ibid., pp. 13–15.

34 Herrick, Cheesman A., White Servitude in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1926), p. 254.Google Scholar

35 Miller, William, “The Effects of the American Revolution on Indentured Servitude,” Pennsylvania History, 7 (07 1940), 131–41.Google Scholar

36 For a survey of these views, and a discussion of the timing and causes of the decline of indentured servitude for Europeans migrating to the United States—and its subsequent failure to revive—see Erickson, Charlotte, “Why Did Contract Labour Not Work in the 19th Century USA?” (unpublished paper, London School of Economics, 1982).Google Scholar It might be noted that recent research has raised the possibility that the volume of immigration to the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was substantially greater than has generally been believed; Gemery, Henry A., “European Emigration to the New World, 1700–1820: Numbers and Quasi-Numbers” (unpublished paper, Colby College, 1983). Both the overall magnitude of immigration and the role of indentured servitude during this period remain to be established firmly.Google Scholar

37 Laurence, K. O., “The Evolution of Long-Term Labour Contracts in Trinidad and British Guiana, 1834–1863,” Jamaican Historical Review, 5 (05 1965), 9–27.Google Scholar

38 On the Indian indentured migration, see Adamson, Alan H., Sugar Without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838–1904 (New Haven, 1972);Google ScholarWood, Donald. Trinidad in Transition: The Years After Slavery (London, 1968);Google ScholarTinker, Hugh, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London, 1974).Google Scholar On Chinese indentured migration see Corbitt, Duvon Clough, A Study of the Chinese in Cuba, 1847–1947 (Wilmore, Kentucky, 1971);Google ScholarStewart, Watt, Chinese Bondage in Peru: A History of the Chinese Coolie in Peru, 1849–1874 (Durham, North Carolina, 1951);Google ScholarCampbell, Persia Crawford, Chinese Coolie Emigration to Countries Within the British Empire (London, 1923).Google Scholar In addition to these movements, during the nineteenth century relatively small migrations of indentured workers occurred from Africa and Madeira to the West Indies and South America. For an overview of these bound migrations, see Engerman, Stanley L., “Contract Labor, Sugar, and Technology in the Nineteenth Century,” this JOURNAL, 43 (09 1983), 635–59;Google Scholar also Roberts, G. W. and Byrne, J., “Summary Statistics on Indenture and Associated Migration affecting the West Indies, 1834–1918,” Population Studies, 20 (07 1966), 125–34.Google ScholarPubMed

39 For example, see Tinker, A New System of Slavery, Ch. 6. It might be noted that the Asian migrants to the West Indies often appear to have chosen not to return to their native countries after becoming free.Google Scholar

40 Coman, Katharine, The History of Contract Labor in the Hawaiian islands, Publications of the American Economic Association, Third series, 4 (08 1903), 7–10;Google ScholarGlick, Clarence, “The Chinese Migrant in Hawaii: A Study in Accommodation” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1938), pp. 38–39.Google Scholar

41 Zo, Kit Young, Chinese Emigration into the United States, 1850–1880 (New York, 1978), pp. 95–96.Google Scholar

42 The magnitudes of these population movements were very different. Thus it has been estimated that 45.2 million free Europeans migrated to the Americas during 1846–1920, compared to a total of 775,000 bound Indians and Chinese who migrated to the West Indies and South America in the nineteenth century, and another 100,000 bound Chinese and Japanese who migrated to Hawaii; Engerman, Stanley L., “Servants to Slaves to Servants: Contract Labor and European Expansion,” in van den Boogart, H. and Emmer, P. C., eds., Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour Before and Afler Slavery (The Hague, forthcoming)Google Scholar, Table II. Yet in spite of the imbalance between these relative magnitudes, due to the enormity of the free European migration, the migration of bound Asians was clearly a significant one for the Americas. For some interesting recent comments on these nineteenth-century migrations, see McNeill, William H., The Great Frontier: Freedom and Hierarchy in Modern Times (Princeton, 1983), pp. 39–55.Google Scholar

43 The test proposed here might be seen as an implication of a special case drawn from a more general analysis. In general, a migrant might choose between financing migration costs out of savings or by borrowing by comparing the levels of his income before and after the move; if income after moving is expected to be considerably higher than before, the migrant might prefer to repay moving costs out of the higher post-migration income, in order to smooth the path of his consumption overtime. Therefore, if the question is simply one of whether the migrant will borrow in order to migrate, the answer would depend on a comparison of income levels in the countries of origin and destination. Yet although indentured servitude was a form of credit, it involved more than many credit transactions. For an indentured migrant not only agreed to repay his loan, but to give up much of his freedom during the period of repayment; thus servants typically gave up the freedom to marry during their terms, to engage in business on their own account, to determine where they would live, and so on. The assumption is therefore made here that given these conditions, migrants would strongly prefer not to borrow to migrate by indenturing themselves, but would instead prefer to save prior to migration in order to migrate as free workers. The test of the difficulty of doing this therefore involves a comparison of the wealth of migrants and the costs of migration; the variables examined in the text are intended to be considered as proxies for these less readily measurable variables.Google Scholar

44 An interesting feature of the fares shown in Table 1 is the significant decline in passage costs from Great Britain to the United States during the early nineteenth century. Although the greater regularity of the schedules of steamships apparently did reduce the variability of fares due to such factors as seasonality and the decisions of individual shipping agents–and the greater speed of the steamships reduced the full cost of passage by the opportunity cost of the saved time of passengers–the major decline in fares appears to have been complete by about 1830, well before steamships replaced sailing vessels in the Atlantic passenger trade in the 1860s. For discussion see Gould, J. D., “European InterContinental Emigration 1815–1914: Patterns and Causes,” Journal of European Economic History, 8 (Winter 1979), 611–14;Google Scholar also see North, Douglass C., “Sources of Productivity Change in Ocean Shipping, 1600–1850,” Journal of Political Economy, 76 (09 1968), 953–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45 For example, see Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, Ch. 2.Google Scholar

46 For example, see Hvidt, Kristian, Flight to America: The Social Background of 300,000 Danish Emigrants (New York, 1975), pp. 91–102;Google ScholarErickson, Charlotte, “Emigration from the British Isles to the U.S.A. in 1831,” Population Studies, 35 (07 1981), 175–97;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed and Swierenga, Robert P., “International Labor Migration in the Nineteenth Century: The Dutch Example,” paper presented to Economic History Workshop, University of Chicago, 05, 1979.Google Scholar During the colonial period, virtually all English indentured servants were unmarried (indeed, standard servant contracts in the eighteenth century included a declaration that the individual bound was single, as shown in Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, pp. 201–02).Google Scholar The same was not true for German redemptioners, who often came in families; quantitative information on their distribution by family status is poor, but the proportions in families generally appear to have been low. For a discussion of the evidence see Wokeck, Marianne, “The Flow and the Composition of German Immigration to Philadelphia, 1727–1775,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 105 (07 1981), 249–78.Google Scholar

47 Farley Grubb has found that among German immigrants arriving in Philadelphia during 1785–1804, 51 percent of single males and 59 percent of single females were indentured, compared with only 35 percent of married adults and 40 percent of children traveling with parents; “Indentured Labor in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania” (dissertation in progress, University of Chicago). This result is consisent with the hypothesis that an increase in the importance of families in migration would have tended to reduce the amount of servitude.Google Scholar

48 Kuznets, Simon, Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure, and Spread (New Haven, 1966). pp. 235–40.Google Scholar On the rising ratio of wealth to per capita output in Great Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century, see Feinstein, C. H., “Capital Formation in Great Britain,” in Mathias, Peter and Postan, M. M., eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Vol. VII, Part I (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 90–92.Google Scholar

49 Erickson, Charlotte, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 1860–1885 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1957). The Act to Encourage Immigration of 1864 made it legal for immigrants to pledge their wages for a period of up to one year to repay costs of their migration that had been advanced to them. That indentures were not openly used for Chinese might have been due to the fact that in practice they were held for terms substantially longer than one year, but evidence on their actual terms is elusive.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50 For example, see the defense of the system by Seward, George F., Chinese Immigration, in Its Social and Economical Aspects (New York, 1881), pp. 136–58.Google Scholar For a brief but interesting discussion of the actual contractual agreements of the Chinese immigrants in California, see Sandmeyer, Elmer Clarence, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Urbana, 1973)Google Scholar, Ch. 2. I plan to present a further investigation of these arrangements, and of their deviation in practice from the descriptions given at the time by the “Chinese Six Companies” largely responsible for the importation of the Chinese, in a forthcoming paper coauthored by Patricia Cloud.

51 Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, Ch. 1. On the politics of contract labor in the late nineteenth-century United States, and the opposition of unions, see Ibid., Chs. 8–10.

52 The experience of the Chinese in California might offer an example of a significant additional means of enforcement. Gunther Barth wrote of the enforcement of their debt contracts that “the kinship system supplied an extra-legal control in a country where courts and customs failed to support any form of contract labor,” as the families the migrants had left behind them in China remained “as hostages within the reach of their creditors;” Barth, Gunther, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 1850–1870 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1964), pp. 56, 86.Google Scholar Yet it might be noted that even in this case the ownership of the debt contract by the worker's immediate employer apparently remained typical; Ibid., pp. 55–56. The padrone system used in Italy and Greece in the late nineteenth century was based on securing the loan of passage money to the migrant through mortgages on land held by relatives who remained behind; Taylor, Philip, The Distant Magnet: European Emigration to the U.S.A. (New York, 1971), p. 98.Google Scholar It might be noted here that the American Emigrant Company and the other companies that recruited laborers for northern manufacturers during the mid-1860s in effect operated on a basis similar to the English merchants who sent servants to colonial America, for these companies relied on American employers to provide the working capital to pay for transportation of workers, as well as to secure repayment from the wages of the contract laborers; Erickson, “Why Did Contract Labour Not Work in 19th Century USA?,” p. 19.Google Scholar

53 The quotation is from the prophetic formulation of the indenture system of Sir George Peckham in 1583 in his A True Reporte, of the late discoveries, and possessions, taken in the right of the Crowne of Englande, of the Newfound Landes, By that valiaunt and worthy Gentleman, Sir Humfrey Gilbert Knight, Ch. 7.Google Scholar