In 1654 the Bristol City Council passed an ordinance requiring that a register of servants destined for the colonies be kept, the purpose being to prevent the practice of dumping innocent youths into servitude. The registers, covering the period 1654 to 1686, are the largest body of indenture records known, and they also are a unique record of English emigration to the American colonies.Of the total of 10,000 servants in these registers, almost all came from the West Country, the West Midlands, or from Wales. Most entries give the name of the servant, his place of origin (until 1661), length of service, destination (usually Virginia, Maryland, or the West Indies), name of master, and, after 1670, the name of the ship. Four indexes have been included, one each for servants, masters, places of origin, and ships. [from Ancestry.com]
"In the record office of the City of London is a register containing the names of 3,398 servants bound out for service in the American colonies and the West Indies. Details concerning nearly 2,000 of these indentured servants, taken from the original indenture forms, were published over twenty years ago. Yet information on 1,544 additional servants, whose names appear in the register but for whom no indentures survive, had never been published. With this present work, however, we now have a published list of these missing servants as well as a digest of associated data. In addition to the servant's name and the name of the transporting agent, the tabulation includes the name of the colony to which the servant was shipped and the date--either the date of the indenture form itself or the Assize at which it was registered. The majority of these servants were destined for Maryland, Pennsylvania, or the West Indies." [from GoogleBooks]
Revision of the author's thesis (Ph.D.--Harvard University, 1979) with the title: The indenture system and the colonial labor market.
Includes index.
Bibliography: p. 279-283.
African American resources at Lancaster County Historical Society
Contents
Chapters: Part I. Introduction: 1. The significance and origins of the colonial indenture system - Part II. Characteristics of the servant population - 2. The age and sex distributions of the indentured servants - 3. The occupations of the indentured servants in the seventeenth-century - 4. Occupations of the eighteenth-century indentured servants - 5. Literacy and the occupations of the indentured servants - Part III. Migration and the transatlantic market for indentured servants - 6. Patterns of servant migration from England to America - 7. The market for indentured servants - Part IV. White servitude in the colonial labour market: - 8. The role of the indenture system in the colonial labour market - 9. The indenture system and the colonial labour market - Part V. Indentured servitude in American history - 10. Indentured labour in the Americas
Appendices include the following: English laws and documents related to servant registration / Possible biases in the age distribution of the indentured servants / Destinations of the indentured servants within the colonies
Summary
Amazon Books description: "White servitude was one of the major institutions in the economy and society of early colonial British America. In fact more than half of all the white immigrants to the British colonies sold themselves into bondage for a period of years in order to migrate to the New World. Professor Galenson's study of the system of indentured servitude analyses rigorously the composition of this labour force and provides a quantitative description of the demographic, social and economic characteristics of more than 20,000 indentured immigrants. The author examines the interactions between indentured, free and slave labour and provides a framework for analysing why black slavery prevailed over white servitude in the British West Indies and the southern mainland colonies and why both types of bound labour declined to insignificance in the northern colonies of the mainland." Appendices include: English laws and documents related to servant registration/ Possible biases in the age distribution of the indentured servants/ Destinations of the indentured servants within the colonies
