Indentured Labor

American historians have long been fascinated by the "peopling" of North America in the seventeenth century. Who were the immigrants, and how and why did they make their way across the ocean? Most of the attention, however, has been devoted to British immigrants who came as free people or as indentured servants (primarily to New England and the Chesapeake) and to Africans who were forced to come as slaves. Trade in Strangers focuses on the eighteenth century, when new immigrants began to flood the colonies at an unprecedented rate. Most of these immigrants were German and Irish, and they were coming primarily to the middle colonies via an increasingly sophisticated form of transport.

This volume is an innovative history of major worldwide population movements, free and forced, from around 1500 to the early twentieth century. It explores the shifting levels of freedom under which migrants traveled and compares the experiences of migrants (and their descendants) who arrived under drastically different labor regimes.

The themes of the collection are structured around changes in migration regimes over time, as well as the implications of those changes for the source and host societies, and the migrants themselves. The central and unifying issue is the varying degrees of freedom in the different migratory regimes and what this meant in the long run. In the initial period covered by the book, freedom to migrate had steadily eroded, and migration itself became gradually more free only in the nineteenth century.

All eleven authors have widely acknowledged expertise not only in particular geographic or national branches of migration but also in more than one migratory or labor regime. The volume's wide geographical range incorporates the expansion of Europe eastward (under serfdom), as well as the extension of Africa and Europe westward across the Atlantic (slave, free, and indentured servant regimes), and movements from Asia and Africa by contract laborers. For the first time, experts on the various kinds of migrants have combined to address the issue of migration from the standpoint of the labor arrangement under which the migrants traveled. The result is a collection rich in comparative insights yet cohesive in terms of the issues addressed.

Rosemarijn Hoefte explores the rise of indentured servitude on the sugar plantations of Suriname after the end of slavery in that Dutch Caribbean colony in South America. In this first study ever of bonded labor in Suriname, she discusses and compares the social, cultural, and economic consequences of migration and plantation life and offers insights into the system of indentured immigration in general.

Slavery was abolished in Suriname in 1863. Between 1873 and 1940 more than 34,000 British Indians and nearly 33,000 Javanese (a unique presence in the Caribbean) entered Suriname and effectively replaced the former slaves. Working under a contract that included the so-called penal sanction, they were forced to place their labor power at the unqualified disposal of their employers; the employers had the right to press criminal charges against the laborers who broke their contract.

Focusing on Plantation Marienburg, the largest and longest-surviving sugar mill in Suriname, Hoefte examines the reactions of the planters, the colonial state, and the former slaves to this influx of two large ethnic groups with different cultural backgrounds. She describes the hierarchical organization of the plantation and discusses such aspects of indenture as wages, housing, medical care, religion, and education. Both an economic analysis and a pioneering social history, the book fills a gap, in the study of immigration in the Caribbean.

This collection of essays is concerned with two main issues: first, the way in which the local origins of English colonists influenced their attitudes and adaptation to North America; and second, the contrast between the settlements of Massachusetts and Virginia.