The invention of free labor : the employment relation in English and American law and culture, 1350-1870
Annotation Examining the emergence of the modern conception of free labor--labor that could not be legally compelled, even though voluntarily agreed upon--Steinfeld explains how English law dominated the early American colonies, making violation of labor agreements punishable by imprisonment. By the eighteenth century, traditional legal restrictions no longer applied to many kinds of colonial workers, but it was not until the nineteenth century that indentured servitude came to be regarded as similar to slavery
Print Book, English, 1991
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1991
History
viii, 277 pages ; 24 cm.
9780807819883, 9780807854525, 0807819883, 0807854522
23286570
1. Introduction
2. The master-servant relationship in early modern England and the American colonies
3. Labor imagined
4. The freeborn Englishman and the persistence of traditional service
5. The ambiguous impact of the American revolution
6. Working out the idea and practice of free labor
7. The federal anti-peonage act of 1867
Conclusion. Self-ownership and self-government in the nineteenth century
Appendix. Habeas corpus file of runaway laborers, chesapeake and ohio canal company (1829)