Indentured servitude facts for kids
Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years. The contract, called an "indenture", may be entered "voluntarily" for purported eventual compensation or debt repayment, or it may be imposed as a judicial punishment. Historically, it has been used to pay for apprenticeships, typically when an apprentice agreed to work for free for a master tradesman to learn a trade (similar to a modern internship but for a fixed length of time, usually seven years or less). Later it was also used as a way for a person to pay the cost of transportation to colonies in the Americas.
Like any loan, an indenture could be sold; most employers had to depend on middlemen to recruit and transport the workers so indentures (indentured workers) were commonly bought and sold when they arrived at their destinations. Like prices of slaves, their price went up or down depending on supply and demand. When the indenture (loan) was paid off, the worker was free. Sometimes they might be given a plot of land.
Indentured workers could usually marry, move about locally as long as the work got done, read whatever they wanted, and take classes.
Contents
The Americas
North America
Until the late 18th century, indentured servitude was common in British America. It was often a way for Europeans to migrate to the American colonies: they signed an indenture in return for a costly passage. However, the system was also used to exploit Asians (mostly from India and China) who wanted to migrate to the New World. These Asian people were used mainly to construct roads and railway systems. After their indenture expired, the immigrants were free to work for themselves or another employer. In some cases, the indenture was made with a ship's master, who sold the indenture to an employer in the colonies. Most indentured servants worked as farm laborers or domestic servants, although some were apprenticed to craftsmen.
The terms of an indenture were not always enforced by American courts, although runaways were usually sought out and returned to their employer.
Between one-half and two-thirds of European immigrants to the American Colonies between the 1630s and the American Revolution came under indentures.
Indentured servitude was also used by governments in Britain as a punishment for captured prisoners of war in rebellions and civil wars. Oliver Cromwell sent into indentured service thousands of prisoners captured in the 1648 Battle of Preston and the 1651 Battle of Worcester. King James II acted similarly after the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685, and use of such measures continued into the 18th century.
Indentured servants could not marry without the permission of their master, were frequently subject to physical punishment and did not receive legal favor from the courts.
Indentured servitude began its decline after Bacon’s Rebellion. Bacon's Rebellion was a servant uprising against the government of Colonial Virginia. This was due to multiple factors, such as the treatment of servants, support of native tribes in the surrounding area, a refusal to expand the amount of land an indentured servant could work by the colonial government, and inequality between the upper and lower class in colonial society. Indentured servitude was the primary source of labor for early American colonists up until the rebellion. Little changed in the immediate aftermath of Bacon's Rebellion; however, the rebellion did cause a general distrust of servant labor and fear of future rebellion. The fear of indentured servitude would eventually cement itself into the hearts of Americans, leading towards the reliance on enslaved Africans. This helped to ingrain the idea of racial segregation and unite white Americans under race rather than economic or social class. Doing so would prevent the potential for future rebellion and change the way that agriculture was approached in the future.
The American and British governments passed several laws that helped foster the decline of indentures. The UK Parliament's Passenger Vessels Act 1803 regulated travel conditions aboard ships to make transportation more expensive, so as to hinder landlords' tenants seeking a better life. An American law passed in 1833 abolished the imprisonment of debtors, which made prosecuting runaway servants more difficult, increasing the risk of indenture contract purchases. The 13th Amendment, passed in the wake of the American Civil War, made indentured servitude illegal in the United States.
Contracts
Through its introduction, the details regarding indentured labor varied across import and export regions and most overseas contracts were made before the voyage with the understanding that prospective migrants were competent enough to make overseas contracts on their own account and that they preferred to have a contract before the voyage.
Most labor contracts made were in increments of five years, with the opportunity to extend another five years. Many contracts also provided free passage home after the dictated labor was completed. However, there were generally no policies regulating employers once the labor hours were completed, which led to frequent ill-treatment.
Caribbean
In 1643, the European population of Barbados was 37,200 (86% of the population). During the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, at least 10,000 Scottish and Irish prisoners of war were transported as indentured laborers to the colonies.
A half million Europeans went as indentured servants to the Caribbean (primarily the English-speaking islands of the Caribbean) before 1840.
In 1838, with the abolition of slavery at its onset, the British were in the process of transporting a million Indians out of India and into the Caribbean to take the place of the recently freed Africans (freed in 1833) in indentureship. Women, looking for what they believed would be a better life in the colonies, were specifically sought after and recruited at a much higher rate than men due to the high population of men already in the colonies. However, women had to prove their status as single and eligible to emigrate, as married women could not leave without their husbands. Arrival in the colonies brought unexpected conditions of poverty, homelessness, and little to no food as the high numbers of emigrants overwhelmed the small villages and flooded the labor market. Many were forced into signing labor contracts that exposed them to the hard field labor on the plantation.
Despite Irish slave myths stating otherwise, indentured servitude of Irish and other European peoples occurred in seventeenth-century Barbados, and was fundamentally different than enslavement: an enslaved African’s body was owned, as were the bodies of their children, while the labour of indentured servants was under contractual ownership of another person. Laws and racial hierarchy would allow for the “indentured” and “slaves” to be treated differently, as well as their identities to be defined differently.
Barbados is an example of a colony in which the separation between enslaved Africans and “servants” was codified into law. Distinct legal “acts” were created in 1661 treating each party as a separate group. While enslaved Africans - and for a period, free Africans - were not allowed to use the court system in any manner, even to act as a witness, Barbados would allow “white servants” to go to court if they felt that they had received poor treatment. Additionally, children of African descent were offered no supplementary protection, while children of English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh extraction who were sent to Barbados as indentured servants could not work without a parent’s consent.
Such differences in social classes would ensure that alliances between the two groups would not lead to revolts towards plantation owners and managers.
Colonial Indian indenture system
The Indian indenture system was a system of indenture by which two million Indians called coolies were transported to various colonies of European powers to provide labour for the (mainly sugar) plantations. It started from the end of slavery in 1833 and continued until 1920. This resulted in the development of a large Indian diaspora, which spread from the Indian Ocean (i.e. Réunion and Mauritius) to Pacific Ocean (i.e. Fiji), as well as the growth of Indo-Caribbean and Indo-African population.
The Indian indenture system was finally banned in 1917.
Oceania
Convicts transported to the Australian colonies before the 1840s often found themselves hired out in a form of indentured labor. Indentured servants also emigrated to New South Wales. The Van Diemen's Land Company used skilled indentured labor for periods of seven years or less. A similar scheme for the Swan River area of Western Australia existed between 1829 and 1832.
During the 1860s planters in Australia, Fiji, New Caledonia, and the Samoa Islands, in need of laborers, encouraged a trade in long-term indentured labor called "blackbirding". At the height of the labor 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, labor for the sugar-cane fields of Queensland, Australia included an element of coercive recruitment and indentured servitude of the 62,000 South Sea Islanders. The workers came mainly from Melanesia – mainly from the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu – with a small number from Polynesian and Micronesian areas such as Samoa, the Gilbert Islands (subsequently known as Kiribati) and the Ellice Islands (subsequently known as Tuvalu). They became collectively known as "Kanakas".
Australia deported many of these Islanders back to their places of origin in the period 1906–1908 under the provisions of the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901.
The Australian administrated territories 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.
Africa
A significant number of construction projects in British East Africa and South Africa, required vast quantities of labor, exceeding the availability or willingness of local tribesmen. Indentured Indians from India were imported, for such projects as the Uganda Railway, as farm labor, and as miners. They and their descendants formed a significant portion of the population and economy of Kenya and Uganda, although not without engendering resentment from others. Idi Amin's expulsion of the "Asians" from Uganda in 1972 was an expulsion of Indo-Africans.
The majority of the population of Mauritius are descendants of Indian indentured labourers brought in between 1834 and 1921. Initially brought to work the sugar estates following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire an estimated half a million indentured laborers were present on the island during this period. Aapravasi Ghat, in the bay at Port Louis and now a UNESCO site, was the first British colony to serve as a major reception centre for indentured Indians from India who came to work on plantations following the abolition of slavery.
Legal status
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948) declares in Article 4 "No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms". More specifically, it is dealt with by article 1(a) of the United Nations 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery.
See also
In Spanish: Trabajador no abonado para niños
- Debt Bondage
- English Poor Laws
- Indenture (document)
- Penal transportation
- Redemptioner
- Scottish poorhouse
- Slavery
- United States labor law
