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The labour-intensive cash crop tobacco was farmed in the Upper South of North America by indentured labourers in the 17th century.[1] Indentured Servitude was not the same as the apprenticeship system by which skilled trades were taught, but similarities do exist between the two mechanisms, in that both require a set period of work.
North AmericaIn Colonial North America, employers usually paid for European workers' passage across the Atlantic Ocean, reimbursing the shipowner who held their papers of indenture. In return, laborers agreed to work for a specified number of years. The agreement could also be an exchange for professional training: after being the indentured servant of a blacksmith for several years, one would expect to work as a blacksmith on one's own account after the period of indenture 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, tools, or money, and freed. On the other hand, this ideal was not always a reality for indentured servants. Both male and female laborers could be subject violence, occasionally even resulting in death. Female indentured servants in particular might be raped and/or sexually abused by their masters. Cases of successful prosecution for these crimes were very uncommon, as indentured servants were unlikely to have access to a magistrate, and social pressure to avoid such brutality could vary by geography and cultural norm. The situation was particularly difficult for indentured women, because in both low social class and gender, they were believed to be particularly prone to vice, making legal redress unusual.
Most indentured servants were recruited from the growing number of unemployed poor people in urban areas of England. Displaced from their land and unable to find work in the cities, many of these people signed contracts of indenture and took passage to the Americas. In Massachusetts, religious instruction in the Puritan way of life was often part of the condition of indenture, and people tended to live in towns. In the north, indentured servants were more likely to be integrated with the community to some extent, with more household chores and town-oriented trade skills associated with their work. What was often great mental stress and suppression in combination with hard work and the possibility of physical abuse took its toll on many indentured servants, particularly women, who were subject to even stricter social mores than their male counterparts. Historians have speculated that these conditions might have produced symptoms of “possession” that young women attributed to witches. By contrast, in Virginia, the majority of the population did not live in individual towns, and indentured servants were more likely to work on isolated farms. The majority of Virginians were Anglican, not Puritan, and while religion did play a large role in everyday lives, the culture was more commercially based. In the Upper South, where tobacco was the main cash crop, the majority of labor that indentured servants performed was related to field work. In this situation, social isolation could increase the possibilities for both direct and indirect abuse, as could lengthy, demanding labor in the tobacco fields. Indentured servants rebelled in Virginia in response to poor work conditions and the hardships they faced after they were freed, which could include landlessness, poverty, taxes, militia duty, and forced labor on county projects. Nathaniel Bacon's Rebellion found its support among white, disillusioned laborers in Virginia and slaves. While indentured servitude was different from slavery, there was a continuum between the designations “free” and “un-free” in the colonial period. In this sense, the development of racial thinking to separate and privilege the mainly white laborers from black slaves solidified the institution of slavery even as it opened, at least in name, opportunities for lower-class whites. Ultimately, Slavery persisted into the mid-19th century in the south, but indentured servitude did not. The system was still widely practiced 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:
In modern terms, the shipowner was acting as an contractor, hiring out his laborers. 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 also used by the Hudson's Bay Company, in what is now Canada, to staff the coal mines around Nanaimo well into the late 1800s.
The CaribbeanEuropean 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[citation needed], 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. Many white Irish slaves were taken to Montserrat during the slave trade: it is the only country in the world, other than Ireland, to have a public holiday for St Patrick Day. - - 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, a plurality in Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname, and a substantial minority in Jamaica. Australia and the PacificIn 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 of whether Islanders were 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 ([2]). 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. The Indian OceanThe islands of the Indian Ocean, specially Mauritius, specialized in sugar cane plantations, badly needed this intensive labour cheaper than the emancipated workforce negociating for higher wages. Mauritius was to act as a plaque tournante for this coolie or indentured population, despatching hundreds of thousands of coolies to Africa and the Indies. Between 1845 and 1917, 140,000+ Indians work contracted to work the plantations of the island of Trinidad. Anecdotal material suggests that there were some similarities between the experiences of the indentured workers and the African slaves who had been brought to Trinidad. See also
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