Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America

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Description

The history of early The us cannot be told without considering unfree labor. At the center of this history are African and Native American adults forced into slavery; the children born to these unfree persons on a regular basis inherited their parents’ status. Immigrant indentured servants, many of whom were young people, are widely recognized as a part of early American society. Less familiar is the idea of free children being taken from the homes where they were born and put into bondage.

As Children Bound to Labor makes clear, pauper apprenticeship used to be a very powerful source of labor in early The us. The economic, social, and political development of the colonies and then the states cannot be told properly without taking them into account. Binding out pauper apprentices used to be a widespread practice all the way through the colonies from Massachusetts to South Carolina-poor, illegitimate, orphaned, abandoned, or abused children were raised to adulthood in a legal condition of indentured servitude. All these children were without resources and incessantly without advocates. Local officials undertook the responsibility for putting such children in family situations where the child used to be expected to work, even as the master provided education and basic living needs.

The authors of Children Bound to Labor show the quite a lot of ways in which pauper apprentices were important to the economic, social, and political structure of early The us, and how the practice shaped such key relations as master-servant, parent-child, and family-state in the young republic. In considering the practice in English, Dutch, and French communities in North The us from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, Children Bound to Labor even suggests that this widespread practice used to be notable as a positive means of maintaining social stability and encouraging economic development.

Contributors: Monique Bourque, Willamette University; Holly Brewer, North Carolina State University; Gillian Hamilton, University of Toronto; Ruth Wallis Herndon, Bowling Green State University; Steve Hindle, University of Warwick; Paul Lachance, University of Ottawa; Timothy J. Lockley, University of Warwick; Gloria L. Main, University of Colorado, Boulder; John E. Murray, University of Toledo; Jean B. Russo, Historic Annapolis Foundation; Jean Elliott Russo, independent scholar; Adriana E. van Zwieten, Biographical Dictionary of Pennsylvania Legislators; T. Stephen Whitman, Mount St. Mary’s University

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