Indentured Servitude: Unfree Labour and Citizenship in the British Colonies by Anna Suranyi

Abstract

Reviewed by: Indentured Servitude: Unfree Labour and Citizenship in the British Colonies by Anna Suranyi Nicole K. Dressler Indentured Servitude: Unfree Labour and Citizenship in the British Colonies. By Anna Suranyi. States, People, and the History of Social Change. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021. 292 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. The role of indentured servitude was central to critical debates concerning state building, capitalist development, and the nature of unfreedom in the British Atlantic world. In the 1940s, Abbott Emerson Smith and Richard B. Morris conducted key studies on white colonial servitude with special attention to servants' legal and socioeconomic conditions.1 Especially since the 1980s, historians have made great strides in advancing understandings of indentured servants, convict servants, and redemptioners, revealing important demographic and economic data and uncovering illuminating accounts of servants' lived realities. Scholars have also examined the transition from indentured servitude to the brutal, perpetual, and racialized practice of African chattel slavery that burgeoned in the eighteenth century.2 Though African slavery was unequivocally unlike other forms of bound labor because of the chattel principle, recent historians have increasingly studied servitude on a continuum of unfreedom, illuminating the complexity of labor, race, and coercion in the British Atlantic.3 Anna Suranyi's Indentured Servitude builds on this scholarship by encouraging readers to understand servitude as a critical element in the conceptualization of citizenship in the early British Atlantic world. Above all, Suranyi seeks to show the widening distinctions in legal categories of servitude and slavery by addressing how indentured servants influenced notions of participatory membership in the body politic over the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Though historians have long debated the periodization and transition from servitude to slavery, Suranyi challenges the long-held contention that Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia in 1676 was the major impetus encouraging [End Page 350] colonists to distance categories of servitude from slavery.4 Instead, she argues that "from the beginning of the seventeenth century, colonial governments as well as settler communities strove to delineate servants and enslaved people, not only to define divergent forms of labour bondage but also to define different categories of people" (9). Though early English subjects did not understand their roles as "participatory citizens" the way they would come to in the mid-eighteenth century, she shows how in the seventeenth century they viewed "themselves as rights-bearing individuals" (14). This status entailed maintaining certain social responsibilities and entitlement to some privileges, such as voting and jury participation. The clarification of servants' legal rights—which, for example, allowed them to request courts to hear their complaints and seek redress for legal wrongs—vitally informed developing ideas of citizenship in the British Empire. Suranyi begins by outlining how people became servants—sometimes voluntarily, other times not. As David W. Galenson, Hilary McD. Beckles, and others have noted, economic interests were a key motive in expanding unfree labor.5 Many of the poor servants who went to the Americas often signed fixed-term contracts. England's royalist and parliamentary governments alike viewed banishment and such tenures of servitude as a means to remove the poor, criminals, rebels, and others deemed undesirable from local communities, at one stroke reducing the costs of imprisonment and populating the colonies. With the Transportation Act of 1718, moreover, English authorities widened and institutionalized the punishment of transportation, sentencing certain criminals to seven or fourteen years of banishment. Shippers and merchants sold many in this position as convict servants in the American colonies. Government-sponsored contractors, as well as those who transported people as servants illegally—"spirits" (xi), as these career kidnappers were called—found that shipping these unfree laborers was quite profitable. The increasing practice of forced indentures ushered in [End Page 351] critical debates on labor and coercion while unsettling comparisons of temporary servitude with African chattel slavery. Concurrently, this discourse prompted broader and crucial discussions on the meaning of rights for freeborn Britons. Using an array of court records, legal documents, fictionalized narratives, and servant accounts, Suranyi details the difficult, sometimes brutal, living circumstances servants faced in the colonies. Many found inadequate provisions, encountered neglect, and suffered vicious beatings. The majority landed in the Chesapeake, Barbados...