Laborers, Contract

An integral part of European overseas expansion was the use of explicit, multiyear indentured-labor contracts to facilitate transoceanic migration. Workers voluntarily traded contracts on their future labor for transportation to a new land, thus becoming bound servants for a limited time. Most were unmarried young adult males moving from places such as Europe, India, China, Japan, and Melanesia to newly expanded commercial agriculture in the Americas, Australia, South Africa, and the South Pacific. The term of the typical adult contract was between three and five years.

This system became prominent during the seventeenth century among English, Scots, and Irish workers moving to the British Caribbean and North American colonies. By the eighteenth century French and German servants joined this trade, going primarily to Canada and Pennsylvania, respectively. The transatlantic servant trade disappeared among British, Irish, and French migrants by the Napoleonic Era, and among German migrants by 1820. Approximately half of all European transatlantic migrants were indentured before 1820, representing around 500,000 souls. These servants dominated the colonial labor force early on, but by 1700 African slaves south of Pennsylvania and colonial-born free workers north of Virginia eclipsed them in importance.

After 1830, the repression of the transoceanic trade in African slaves and the abolition of African slavery in many European colonies led to a revival of the transoceanic servant trade, especially for tropical sugar plantations. This revival focused on recruiting Asian labor. Between 1834 and 1918 around 1.5 million indentured servants from India, 250,000 from China, 80,000 from Japan, 50,000 from Portuguese Atlantic islands, and 100,000 from Melanesia were sent to British, French, Dutch, Spanish, German, and U.S. colonies in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, South and West Africa, Malaya, Australia, Peru, Hawaii, Fiji, and Samoa.

The typical servant contract in the transatlantic trade was a preprinted, single-page form with blank spaces where negotiated handwritten terms were added. It specified the destination, payment of passage, length of servitude, rights of resale, and "freedom dues" to be paid to the servant upon contract completion—a payment fixed by law in most colonies. In the pre-1820 European trade, freedom dues typically were two suits of clothing. In the post-1830 Asian trade, freedom dues typically were return-passage tickets. The servant's work effort and master's provisioning effort were not completely specified. Contracts typically stated only that servants were to perform customary labor and masters were to provide food, apparel, and lodging.

Because the servant's passage fare was paid up front, the servant had an incentive to run away or not work hard. Running away was criminalized and harshly penalized with whippings and forced contract extensions. The disincentive to work could be remedied through the contract's incompleteness. With the servant's daily provisions not completely specified in the contract, masters could adjust daily provisions to elicit the optimal daily diligence from servants.

In the pre-1820 European trade, markets were relatively unregulated and competitive. Prospective servants bargained with shippers over the length of servitude, fixing the terms of the contract before sailing. At debarkation the shipper sold the contract to the highest bidder, thereby recouping the shipping expense. Competition led to servants signing the shortest contracts necessary to secure passage, and to shippers earning zero economic profits on servant cargo. With contracts fixed preembarkation, servants were insured against unexpected changes in the amount of labor needed to cover the cost of passage.

The transatlantic cost of passage for all servants was constant, but labor productivity was not. Less-productive servants had to sign longer contracts to sell for the same passage cost. Contract lengths were negatively related to, whereas auction prices in America were unrelated to, servant productivity known at embarkation. Servant passengers were charged about 15 percent more than free passengers (who paid cash in advance) to compensate shippers for the added cost of servant default (mortality, morbidity, and escape) and forgone investment opportunities.

By the mid-eighteenth century a new variant called redemption came into use in the transatlantic trade, particularly among German immigrants. These immigrants signed fixed-debt passage contracts which required them to sell themselves into servitude at debarkation, if necessary, to clear the debt. Redemption shifted the voyage risk and resulting forecast error over the amount of labor needed at debarkation to clear the passage debt from shipper to migrant. With passage debts, but not contract lengths, fixed before embarkation, the shippers' compensation was a guaranteed quantity. Shippers no longer had to forecast at embarkation the amount of labor needed in a servant contract for it to sell at debarkation for enough to cover shipping costs. Instead, at debarkation, migrants had to offer however much labor was needed to clear the passage debt contracted at embarkation. Migrants accepted this forecast risk because it gave them more flexibility in selecting their masters and negotiating contingency clauses into their servant contracts upon debarkation. It also allowed them to combine preembarkation debts with the passage debt to make one total migration debt to be paid through servitude.

In the post-1830 Asian trade, markets were more regulated. For example, in the Melanesian trade to Queensland, Australia, the British government fixed the length of labor contracts at three years, fixed servant wages at £6 per annum, did not allow unrestricted recruiting, and did not allow servants to be auctioned at debarkation. Only when planters requested servants were shippers licensed to recruit the number requested in exchange for a set fee per recruit. Officials then assigned arriving servants to planters according to the number requested.

The transatlantic servant trade ended because the supply of European immigrant servants disappeared, not because American demand waned. Prospective European migrants found better employment alternatives, such as military service during the Napoleonic Wars, or found better ways to financing passage to America, such as securing remittances from family and friends already in America. The post-1830 Asian servant trades often were ended by government action, in conjunction with the shifting fortunes of the global sugar industry.

The legacy of these servant trades can be seen in sizable populations of descendants of these transplanted peoples in diverse locations around the globe, such as Western Europeans in North America; Asian Indians in Fiji, South Africa, and the Caribbean; Japanese in Hawaii and Peru; Chinese in South Africa and the Caribbean.

CONVICT CONTRACT LABOR

In 1718 Britain began to turn from whipping and branding convicts to banishing them to work in overseas colonies. Between 1718 and 1775 approximately 50,000 British convicts were sentenced to labor contracts, transported to America, and sold to private employers. They represented half of all English arrivals to British North America during this period. Most were convicted of property theft. Although transported convicts were predominantly English and male, approximately 13 to 23 percent were Irish, and 10 to 15 percent were female.

Convict transportees were sentenced either to seven years (74%), fourteen years (24%), or a lifetime (2%) of banishment; these terms became the lengths of their labor contracts. Whereas British courts fixed convict sentences/contract lengths, it was the private shipping market that transported and sold the convicts for profit. Shippers carried voluntary and convict servants, and upon arrival in the colonies auctioned both groups to the private employers who bid the highest to defray their transportation expenses. Shippers were required to show employers the conviction papers that stated each convict's sentence and crime. Convicts had longer contracts than voluntary servants, typically seven versus four years, and sold for higher prices than voluntary servants, £11 versus £8.5 sterling on average. The higher sale price was matched by the higher cost of chaining convicts during shipment and paying jailers' fees, and most shippers did not earn excess profits on convicts. The British government subsidized one shipper in the London market, who realized excess profits, gross of political bribes, on transporting convicts.

Before 1776 most convicts were landed in Virginia and Maryland and employed in agriculture. After auction, convicts were indistinguishable from voluntary servants, living and dining with their masters. Criminal conviction carried a stigma for which employers demanded a price discount. Per year of labor, convicts sold for an average discount of 21 percent over similar voluntary servants, and convicts guilty of worse crimes, such as arson, sold for even greater discounts. Because a longer sentence signaled incorrigibility, employers demanded higher price discounts per year of labor for fourteen-year versus seven-year convicts who had committed the same crime. Employers also paid a premium or received a discount for certain convict attributes: for example, the very tall sold for a 20 percent premium, and females who had venereal disease sold at a 19 percent discount. The fate of convicts in America postsale is largely unknown, though roughly 16 percent were advertised as having run away.

Although individual colonies tried to legally prevent convicts from being imported, the British government disallowed such laws. With independence, the United States legally stopped convict importation. In 1788 British convict transportation was shifted to Australia—which eventually received more than three times as many convicts as colonial America. Newly constructed penitentiaries designed for long-term incarceration increasingly replaced transoceanic convict transportation during the nineteenth century.

SEE ALSO Australia and New Zealand;Labor, Types of.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ekirch, A. Roger. Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Emmer, P. C., ed. Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour Before and After Slavery. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986.

Galenson, David W. White Servitude in Colonial America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Grubb, Farley. "The Statutory Regulation of Colonial Servitude: An Incomplete-Contract Approach." Explorations in Economic History 37, no. 1 (January 2000): 42–75.

Grubb, Farley. "The Transatlantic Market for British Convict Labor." Journal of Economic History 60, no. 1 (March 2000): 94–122.

Grubb, Farley. "The Market Evaluation of Criminality: Evidence from the Auction of British Convict Labor in America, 1767–1775." American Economic Review 91, no. 1 (March 2001): 295–304.

Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787–1868. London: Collins Harvill, 1987.

Northrup, David. Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Smith, Abbot Emerson. Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776. New York: W. W. Norton, 1947.

Farley Grubb