Servants and Servitude in Colonial America

by Russell M. Lawson (Author)

The dispossessed people of Colonial America included thousands of servants who either voluntarily or involuntarily ended up serving as agricultural, domestic, skilled, and unskilled laborers in the northern, middle, and southern British American colonies as well as British Caribbean colonies.


• Illustrates how a majority of residents in Colonial America at any given time from 1607 to 1776 were dispossessed of basic freedoms
• Explains how the dispossessed Colonial American, deprived of basic rights, generated principles of freedom and equality that resulted in the American Revolution
• Shows that the basic rights of children were ignored in Stuart and Georgian England, which resulted in their transportation to America
• Describes how thousands of inhabitants of Colonial America were felons reprieved of the death penalty and prisoners of war

Review
"Russell M. Lawson has performed a valuable public service by shattering some popular myths of America's origins as a 'Land of the Free.' More so than any other work on the subject, Servants and Servitude in Early America details the many forms of servitude that were tightly and broadly woven into the fabric of early American economy and society. In vibrant and elegant prose, Lawson brings to life the myriad and various servant experiences, allowing readers to feel their desperation, their hope, their exploitation, their abuse, their hunger, their sickness, their failures, and their successes. Lawson's compelling study will reward readers with its edifying insights into the social values that supported and defended the commodification and often times cruel exploitation of human beings, many of them children, in early America." (Keith Krawczynski, Distinguished Research Professor of History, Auburn University at Montgomery, and Author of Daily Life in the Colonial City)

"Russell M. Lawson's Servants and Servitude in Colonial America provides an impressive introduction to the multifaceted world of unfree labor in colonial America. This well-written and thoroughly-researched book serves as a resource for students and scholars alike, and Lawson's comprehensive coverage of servitude involving groups that are oftentimes themselves marginalized in other studies―children, women, and Indians―are judiciously treated in this book, making it one of the better single-volume treatments of the unfree to appear in many years." (James E. Seelye Jr., Associate Professor of History, Kent State University at Stark)

About the Author
Russell M. Lawson, PhD, is professor of history at Bacone College, Muskogee, OK. His published works include ABC-CLIO's Poverty in America: An Encyclopedia, cowritten with Benjamin A. Lawson, and Science in the Ancient World: An Encyclopedia.