Transported labor, indentured servitude, and slavery in the americas  (Page 2/2)

Educators can choose to incorporate one lecture focusing specifically on transportation, or they can take a more integrated comparative approach and make the evolution of labor systems a theme within their courses, as the College Board suggests. This comparative approach can be accomplished through exercises analyzing the similarities and differences between transported labor, indentured labor, and slave labor. For example, in the lecture section focusing on colonial development, educators can ask students to compare the lives of the three ‘types’ of laborers in one location, such as Virginia. For this exercise the Revel poem serves as the source on the lives of a transported laborer, while primary documents from Warren Billings’s The Old Dominion provide personal accounts of indentured and slave life. Categories of comparison can include everything from daily diet to the nature of punishment. Revel facilitates this comparative approach by describing how, after his conviction, he was transported overseas “bound with an iron chain,” was sold in Virginia like a “horse,” and then worked with his “fellow slaves” among the “tobacco plants.”

An image of transportation

In addition, from the mid-seventeenth-century until the late-twentieth-century, all three groups of laborers could be found throughout the hemispheric Americas. Revel’s travels from Britain to Virginia and back again can serve as an entry point into a discussion of the movement of bodies to satisfy the labor needs of colonial plantation economies. In the course section on colonial development educators can focus on comparing the experiences of laborers across the globe. A wide variety of academic works feature essays on particular, local labor situations during the colonial period. One essay collection edited by Kay Saunders contains chapters describing colonial indentured labor in locations such as Jamaica, British Guiana, Trinidad, Mauritius, Fiji, Malaya, and Queensland. Asking students to compare the lives of the laborers described within these essays to the lives of laborers in colonial North America, including Revel, partially satisfies the emphasis on globalization recommended by the College Board.

After introducing Revel’s account in the colonial section of the course, it could also be useful to revisit the poem during a discussion of emancipation in the U.S. Although it is an abstract concept the 1660s can be linked to the 1860s through the questioning of the historical nature of freedom. An educator can begin by discussing how transported laborers, indentured servants, and slaves all were granted freedom in right by the conclusion of the U.S. Civil War. Then, foreshadowing the upcoming discussions of sharecropping and African-American debt peonage, educators can explore how emancipation, across the globe, has not always led to what is commonly considered freedom. Historian Walton Look Lai finds that post Emancipation in the British West Indies meant that “the phenomenon of labor coercion, far from dying out, assumed new and diverse forms” (Look Lai, xi). In this same vein, educators can ask that students explore the continuation of indentured labor and the problems associated with it throughout the Caribbean during the twentieth century. Maharani’s Misery (2002), the story of a young female Indian indentured laborer killed in 1885 on her way to Guyana, is an apt and appropriate work to assign to students at the introductory college level and upwards. Maharani’s experiences are in many ways connected to Revel’s account and together they offer an avenue through which students can understand labor patterns across place and time.

Bibliography

Billings, Warren, ed. The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1700 . Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Coldham, Peter Wilson. Bonded Passenger to America . Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1983.

Ekirch, A. Roger. Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775 . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.

Galenson, David. White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.

Look Lai, Walton. Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918 . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.

McLynn, Frank. Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England . New York: Routledge, 2002.

Shepherd, Verene. Maharani’s Misery: Narratives of a Passage from India to the Caribbean . Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2002.

Saunders, Kay, ed. Indentured Labor in the British Empire, 1834-1920 . London: CroomHelm, 1984.