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Benefits Of Indenture Servitude

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Moreover, Indentured servitude began ten years after the first colonial settlement took place in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 as a necessity for cheap labor. Although indenture servitude was fundamental for the colonies economic growth, there were changes in its function. The timing of the first British settlements in North America was ideal since the end of the Thirty-Year war had destroyed Europe’s economy leaving several skilled and unskilled laborers without employment. Point in fact, most of the poor immigrants to the New World signed contracts of servitude to migrate to the colonies. Historian David Galenson state in his research on indenture servitude that there were more than 20,000 indenture immigrants. For poor immigrants to afford
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Even though they were European, indentured servants were not treated as fellow European workers, but as slaves; these indentured servants weren’t seen by the RAC as people, but as tools. “Any workman within an enterprise such as the Russian-American Company amounted to something like one slat in a water wheel. Laboring in a circle, a damp one at that” (Doig 165, 1982). The working conditions were brutal, according to historians Steven Hahn and S.B. Okun. In Jamestown, indentured servants were viewed as property, and could be bought and sold at a moment’s notice.

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Item #1, painting of 17th century English being transported to the colonies as Indentured Servants By 1617, tobacco was a booming and successful crop for the colonists. The first commercial shipment of tobacco to England was in 1617 and the tobacco sold for a very lucrative price. However, tobacco was very labor-intensive crop and the colonists were experiencing a shortage of labor to grow and cultivate their crops. Land in the colonies was cheap and readily available and most colonists preferred to own and work their own land rather than working for someone else; thus the importation of indentured servants. Approximately 80% of those immigrating to the Chesapeake during the 17th century came to the colonies as indentured servants.

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Indentured servants, were by all accounts, the main source of labor in the seventeenth century. The labor force was mainly needed for the newly discovery of the cash crop that was tobacco. It was a plant that need a lot of man power to be harvested and transported to port to be shipped back to England. “At first they turned to their overpopulated country for labor, but English indentured servants brought with them the same haphazard habits of work as their masters.” Indentured service being described as haphazard is an understatement; uprising.

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The first few years in Jamestown were difficult, but when a colonist named John Rolfe introduced tobacco, the new colony flourished. Large tobacco plantations were formed, and many people came to Jamestown to be indentured servants. These indentured servants would work for 7 years, then receive land from the plantation owners. This didn’t always work out, though: many plantation owners would simply refuse to give up valuable land. After a rebellion led by dissatisfied former indentured servants in 1676, rich tobacco plantation owners decided that indentured servants were too risky to employ, so they instead decided to purchase slaves.

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Slaves cost twice as much as indentured servants, they had little economic benefits. Chesapeake planters owned more indentured servant, then slaves. In the late 1600’s the slave population grow slowly. That chanced in 1670 when more and more slaves were imported in to North America. By 1700 the African population in Chesapeake stood at 22%.

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Virginian landowners did not see the need to incorporate slavery nor wanted to participate in the practices that occurred in the West Indies since most of the Virginians were individuals who wanted to settle in Virginia with their families, rather than the businessmen who would return to England like it was in the Caribbean (Takaki 52). Eventually, due to the boom of tobacco as a commodity and the potential of its production overseas, more servants were needed to provide for the demand of labor. Some estates valued their indentured blacks more than their white counterparts, Takaki provides documents showing a landowner’s inventory and the differences in their production in comparison between black and white servants; this fluctuation can be attributed to blacks becoming indentured for significantly longer periods then those white servants from Ireland (Takaki 55-56). Because of the lack of regulation with indentured servants and the disenfranchisement of blacks, the trend began to shift from blacks indentured for life to selling blacks as property; during this period of time, wealthy landowners gained control of Virginian Assembly and pushed any ordinance that would benefit their business’s (Takaki 58).

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While the northern colonists sought religious freedom, Virginia’s settlers sought only wealth. They failed miserably in the first decade to even feed themselves, and it eventually survived only by developing a one-dimensional economy that depended upon the ruthless exploitation of servants and eventually thousands of Africa slaves. The founders of Jamestown wanted to create a complex and progressive colony that would integrate the Indians, offer opportunities to England’s poor, and refuse, emphatically, to imitate the Spanish Empire’s brutal use of African slaves. But their idealistic vision of the Jamestown colony proved impossible to implement. Hundreds of early Virginia settlers died during their first harsh winter, and the colony teetered

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Although, many of the settlers were men who were not willing or incapable of the hard work and long hours required to complete the tasks of farming and planting. The landowners quickly acknowledged the need for a large workforce of manual laborers. The numbers of men needed to grow large crops was difficult to come by, as labor in colonial America was scarce. This shortage of manpower for labor forced Colonists to find ways of increasing the workforce. This paper will discuss how indentured servitude began along with advantages and disadvantage of indentured servitude and why indentured servitude was abandoned.

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At the beginning, most of the slaves were indentured servants, who chose free labour in the colonies for several years over a death penalty. Those were mostly European, but in the seventeenth century, Africans were sent to Virginia to work as indentured servants. While some were able to gain freedom, others fell into permanent servitude, and by 1661, all black people in Virginia were considered slaves, and their numbers raised significantly. Nonetheless, slavery started as early as the 1530s in Meso-American colonies, as their aims with agriculture were much larger, and they had difficulty employing natives outside the areas where there had been large empires, such as Peru and Mexico. It can be argued that slavery in Latin America was not only more common; but also more brutal.

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In 1607, the first wave of colonial settlers arrived in Virginia and began to establish Jamestown. Many of the new settlers came from wealthy families never performing a day of manual labor. With agricultural farming, being the revenue source of the new colonial settlers there would soon be a great demand for labor. Contracts of indentures were expiring and with much devastation in England, there was a shortage of English servants.

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Indentured Servitude in Massachusetts Indentured servitude, the practice of signing oneself into a slave-like servitude for an agreed upon amount of time in exchange for various provisions, was widely popular in early Massachusetts as a way for American people to build a workforce and immigrants to migrate to the New World. Indentured men, women, and children, largely from Europe, became a crucial part of the fabric of the society, culture, and economy of this state and the city of Boston. Boston’s economy was shaped by immigrant indentured servants due to their vast impact in building the city to begin with, as well as the practice allowing for immigrant communities to be established in America. Plymouth Colony, one of the original colonies

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But the majority of the young white males who came to Jamestown were poor, uneducated, and unskilled. They had no families and no means of supporting themselves, which meant that they caused a potential problem to the political and economic challenge for stability. Since these men had no skills, they would become indentured servants, trading their labor for free passage to the colonies. Elite landowners used this unfree labor to their advantage by growing cash crops like tobacco and exporting their agricultural products, eventuating establishing Jamestown as a boomtown. Once the colony had become stabilized, the first representative legislature general assembly met in the Jamestown church in 1619.

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