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The history of early America cannot be told without considering unfree labor. At the center of this history are African and Native American adults forced into slavery; the children born to these unfree persons usually inherited their parents' status. Immigrant indentured servants, many of whom were young people, are widely recognized as part of early American society. Less familiar is the idea of free children being taken from the homes where they were born and put into bondage.
As Children Bound to Labor makes clear, pauper apprenticeship was an important source of labor in early America. The economic, social, and political development of the colonies and then the states cannot be told properly without taking them into account. Binding out pauper apprentices was a widespread practice throughout the colonies from Massachusetts to South Carolina-poor, illegitimate, orphaned, abandoned, or abused children were raised to adulthood in a legal condition of indentured servitude. Most of these children were without resources and often without advocates. Local officials undertook the responsibility for putting such children in family situations where the child was expected to work, while the master provided education and basic living needs.
The authors of Children Bound to Labor show the various ways in which pauper apprentices were important to the economic, social, and political structure of early America, and how the practice shaped such key relations as master-servant, parent-child, and family-state in the young republic. In considering the practice in English, Dutch, and French communities in North America from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, Children Bound to Labor even suggests that this widespread practice was notable as a positive means of maintaining social stability and encouraging economic development.
Contributors: Monique Bourque, Willamette University; Holly Brewer, North Carolina State University; Gillian Hamilton, University of Toronto; Ruth Wallis Herndon, Bowling Green State University; Steve Hindle, University of Warwick; Paul Lachance, University of Ottawa; Timothy J. Lockley, University of Warwick; Gloria L. Main, University of Colorado, Boulder; John E. Murray, University of Toledo; Jean B. Russo, Historic Annapolis Foundation; Jean Elliott Russo, independent scholar; Adriana E. van Zwieten, Biographical Dictionary of Pennsylvania Legislators; T. Stephen Whitman, Mount St. Mary's University
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Roger Hancock
reviewed Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America on June 18, 2014 Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America
Four stars, though I admit being torn between three and four stars. Honestly, three and a half. I would happily say four if I hadn't gotten completely bogged down in the long middle section of the book giving the history of American whaling ports.
The political background on the American whaling colonies didn't interest me nearly as much as the material on whaling itself - the lives and methods of the whalers, details of ships, whaling grounds, and so on. As a result, I put this book aside sometime last year and never managed to pick it up again until about a week ago, when I doggedly ploughed through the (to me) drier middle section into some (again, to me) livelier chapters (chapters 14-19, to be precise) which provided the information on whalers and whaling that I'd hoped to find.
On the whole, I enjoyed the author's approach to the subject, which gave me enough information to understand unfamiliar material but wasn't overwhelming. As a bonus, I've read a fair number of books on overlapping and related events mentioned in this book, such as In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, and recently have been reading Patrick O'Brien's famed Aubrey/Maturin series along with a few other nonfiction nautical books, which largely account for my decision to pick this book up once again. To put it simply, I'm on a bit of a seafaring book binge.
As another reviewer, Matt, has pointed out, this book tends to be anecdotal, and the quality of the anecdotes varies. While I am, on the whole, usually fond of such books, I do wish there had been some underlying theme to unify these anecdotes in a more cohesive way.
However, having said that, I do have a much better picture of whaling as an industry and a better appreciation for its economic role, a surprisingly significant one, in our nation's history. I was surprised to learn, for example, that in 1846, 735 ships out of a worldwide total of 900 whaling ships were American, and that at the height of the "Golden Age" of whaling (1812 to the late 1850s), whaleships accounted for "roughly of the nation's registered merchant tonnage" and employed approximately 70,000 people.
I have two of the author's other books, Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America and When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail on my to-read list and am looking forward to reading them. All in all, these books by Eric Jay Dolin promise to be fine additions to my growing "commodity history" shelf.
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Add Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America, The history of early America cannot be told without considering unfree labor. At the center of this history are African and Native American adults forced into slavery; the children born to these unfree persons usually inherited their parents' status. Immi, Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America to the inventory that you are selling on WonderClubX
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Add Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America, The history of early America cannot be told without considering unfree labor. At the center of this history are African and Native American adults forced into slavery; the children born to these unfree persons usually inherited their parents' status. Immi, Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America to your collection on WonderClub |
