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Forms of Labour usa
BA (Hons.) History
University of Delhi
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Forms of Labour in Colonial America
Indigenous Tribes Indentured Labour Slavery
The primary goal of British expansion and colonization in North America was to acquire land and resources to produce exports to sell for profit on the growing trans-Atlantic market. Profitable production demanded significant labour resources. The elite and entrepreneurial western Europeans who settled in the North America sought labourers to cultivate cash crops, mine for precious metals, tend livestock, provide domestic service, and work in various artisanal trades. The labour sources they drew from to fill this demand included European indentured servants and convicts, free and enslaved indigenous people in the Americas, and enslaved Africans purchased through the developing trans-Atlantic slave trade. This meant that early colonial labour forces in the Americas were often a mix of Europeans, American Indians, and Africans.
Access to land was an important factor in seventeenth-century colonial America. Land, English settlers believed, was the basis of liberty and economic freedom. Owning land gave men control over their own labour and, in most colonies, the right to vote. The promise of immediate access to land lured free settlers, and ‘freedom dues’ that included land persuaded potential immigrants to sign contracts as indentured servants. Land in America also became a way for the king to reward relatives and allies. Each colony was launched with a huge grant of land from the crown, either to a company or to a private individual known as a proprietor. Some such grants, if taken literally, stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. Land was a source of wealth and power for colonial officials and their favourites, who acquired enormous estates. However without labour land would have little value. Since European emigrants did not come to America intending to work the land of others (except in the case of indentured servants).
John Smith, one of the first leaders of Jamestown said that the emigrants “preferred the prospect for gold rather than farm. They “would rather starve than work.” However the colonists slowly realized that for the colonies to survive it would have to abandon the search for gold, grow its own food, and find a marketable commodity. It would also have to attract more settlers. The spread of tobacco farming produced a dispersed society with few towns and little social unity. The early Colonial American society was based on primarily farming, fishing, maritime activities, and a few small industries. Even as late as 1789 America was a nation of farmers. As the Europeans started settling in North America a demand for labour arose for building roads, homes, railway tracks; cultivate crops; mining, fishing, domestic work etc. The colonists tried to quell this demand for labour by adopting three broad forms of labour, chiefly – Native Americans, indentured white servants and
African slaves. The role of these groups in the growth of the colonial economy has been significant.
Small-scale industries that were set up by the colonists required skilled and semi-skilled workers. Depending on the availability of natural resources, the colonies established glass industries, brick and tile yards, and potters' kilns; bog ores proved suitable for making castings and hollow ware, and rock ores fed furnace and forge industries. A flourishing lumber industry supported related activities such as shipbuilding and the production of naval stores and potash. New England's white pine provided masts, yards, and spars for the Royal Navy; the white oak of the Middle Colonies supplied valuable stock for the cooperage industry, and other hard woods of that area were used in the cabinetmaker's trade; in the South, yellow pine was the principal source of tar, pitch, and turpentine. Fishing and whaling required substantial fleets and thousands of sailors.
Indigenous tribe
Land in North America, of course, was already occupied. And the arrival of English settlers presented the native inhabitants of eastern North America with the greatest crisis in their history. Unlike the Spanish, English colonists did not call themselves “conquerors.” They wanted land, not dominion over the existing population. They were chiefly interested in displacing the Indians and settling on their land, not intermarrying with them, organizing their labour, or making them subjects of the crown.
The English exchanged goods with the native population, and Indians often travelled through colonial settlements. Fur traders on the frontiers of settlement sometimes married Indian women, partly as a way of gaining access to native societies and the kin networks essential to economic relationships. Most English settlers, however, remained obstinately separate from their Indian neighbours. European nations justified colonization, in part, with the argument that they were bringing Christianity—without which true freedom was impossible—to Native Americans.
Many eastern Native Americans initially welcomed the newcomers, or at least their goods, which they appreciated for its practical advantages. Items like woven cloth, metal kettles, iron axes, fishhooks, hoes, and guns were quickly integrated into Native life. Natives also displayed a great desire for goods like colourful glass beads and copper ornaments that could be incorporated into their religious ceremonies.
As Native Americans became more and more integrated into the Atlantic economy, subtle changes took place in their way of life. European metal goods changed their farming, hunting, and cooking practices. Men devoted more time to hunting beavers for burgeoning fur trading. Older skills deteriorated as the use of European products expanded, and alcohol became increasingly common and disruptive. Natives learned to bargain effectively and to supply items that the Europeans desired. Later
courts. While the life of an indentured servant was harsh and restrictive, it wasn't slavery. Unlike slaves, these servants could look forward to a release from bondage once they had completed the term specified in their contracts. There were laws that protected some of their rights. But their life was not an easy one, and the punishments meted out to people who wronged were harsher than those for non-servants. An indentured servant's contract could be extended as punishment for breaking a law, such as running away, or in the case of female servants, becoming pregnant.
Many historians argue that they were better off than those new immigrants who came freely to the country. Their contract may have included at least 25 acres of land, a year's worth of corn, arms, a cow and new clothes. Some servants did rise to become part of the colonial elite, but for the majority of indentured servants that survived the treacherous journey by sea and the harsh conditions of life in the New World, satisfaction was a modest life as a freeman in a burgeoning colonial economy.
Once the indentured servants had completed their term as labourers they would receive a payment known as “freedom dues” and become free members of society. However, indentured servitude was not a guaranteed route to economic autonomy, because of the high death rate many servants did not live till the end of their terms. Freedom dues were sometimes so meagre that they did not enable recipients to acquire land and other resources. Many of these servants often found the reality of life in the New World less appealing than they had anticipated. Many employers, who employed indentured servants, constantly complained of servants running away, not working diligently or being unruly.
Convinced that England was overpopulated, the British government encouraged emigration to America of the unemployed poor and vagrant class and permitted skilled workers to go to the colonies. Gradually, with England's rise to commercial and industrial primacy by the end of the seventeenth century, the official attitude changed, culminating in the enactment by Parliament in 1765 of a law forbidding the emigration of skilled workers. This was followed in turn by statutes of 1774, 1781, and 1782 forbidding the exportation of textile machinery, plans, or models. Toward the poor, the untrained, the vagrants, and the criminal class the government felt no such inhibitions; they were encouraged to immigrate to the colonies if someone, somewhere, would foot the bill for the passage.
The importation of skilled artisans continued virtually unabated throughout the colonial years. Nor was the source confined to England. Swedes came to the Delaware, Walloons and Dutch to settle New Amsterdam. To Virginia came Polish workers for the naval stores industry, French to cultivate vineyards, Italians to set up glassworks, and Dutch to erect sawmills. Georgia recruited Italians for silk culture; emigrants from the Germans shipped out in large numbers to become farm workers and ultimately owners, to labour in the burgeoning iron industry, and to
produce naval stores. Irish flax workers developed the linen industry in New England as well as on Maryland's Eastern shore. The Scotch Irish worked the far reaches of Pennsylvania and the Shenandoah Valley. In the lower South, sizable forces of Greeks and Italians were transported to British-controlled East Florida.
Attracted by higher wages and the opportunity to set tip an independent business or to acquire a homestead, skilled workers continued streaming into the colonies, down to the moment of war with Britain. In the post-war years, as immigration resumed, American agents scoured English towns to persuade trained mechanics to emigrate in large numbers. The transportation of convicts from Britain provided another source of bound labour in the colonies. This practice, stepped up in the latter half of the seventeenth century, was spelled out by a Parliamentary act in 1718 authorizing seven-year terms of servitude for those convicted of lesser crimes and fourteen years for those guilty of offenses punishable by death. An estimated 10,000 convicts were sent from Old Bailey alone between 1717 and 1775, with double that number entering the single province of Maryland. Other convicts were shipped to Virginia and the West Indies.
With continuous expansion of colonies, the demands for labour grew, so did the cost of indentured servants. Many landowners also felt threatened by newly freed servants demand for land. The colonial elite realized the problems of indentured servitude. Landowners turned to African slaves as a more profitable and ever-renewable source of labour and the shift from indentured servants to racial slavery had begun. Most of the indentured servants, returned home after their contracts expired
Slavery
In 1619 the first black Africans came to Virginia. With no slave laws in place, they were initially treated as indentured servants. That is they were treated as bound servants and were freed when their terms expired and given pretty much the same opportunities for freedom dues as the white indentured servants. Sometime in the 1640s, the practice began of selling imported blacks as servants for life. In short, this form of de facto slavery preceded legalized slavery. Slave laws were soon passed – in Massachusetts in 1641 and Virginia in 1661 – and any small freedoms that might have existed for blacks before, were taken away. In the 1660s and 1670s statutes in Virginia and Maryland gave slavery its formal distinguishing features, an inheritable status of servitude for life. Soon restrictions on slave mobility, along with a harsh system of discipline, were written into the "Black Codes" of all the Southern colonies.
Although the practices of indentured servitude and the enslavement of Native Americans was already in place, planters in the southern British colonies quickly came to favour enslaved Africans.
industry in northern cities attracted many rural northerners to wage labour.
Even though slavery was not a prevalent institution in the North, the commercial urban centres that sprang up in these colonies meant that most northerners had a vested stake in ensuring that American slavery flourished in the South. This is particularly true after the advent of the cotton gin, which supplied the North with the surplus of raw cotton necessary to produce finished goods for export. Northern industry and commerce relied on southern cash crop production; therefore, while slavery was actively abolished in the North, most northerners were content to allow slavery to flourish in the southern states. Indeed, it wasn’t until later arguments over the admission and representation of states in the union and the threat of southern states overpowering their northern counterparts because of their higher slave populations that many northerners began to oppose the expansion of southern slavery.
Slavery and the African slave trade quickly became a building block of the colonial economy and an integral part of expanding and developing the British commercial empire in the Atlantic world.
The transport of slaves to the American colonies accelerated in the second half of the 17th century. In 1660, Charles II created the Royal African Company to trade in slaves and African goods. His brother, James II, led the company before ascending the throne. Under both these kings, the Royal African Company enjoyed a monopoly to transport slaves to the English colonies. Between 1672 and 1713, the company bought 125, captives on the African coast, losing 20% of them to death on the Middle Passage, the journey from the African coast to the Americas.
In the North American colonies, the importation of African slaves was directed mainly southward, where extensive tobacco, rice, and later, cotton plantation economies, demanded extensive labour forces for cultivation.
Slaves everywhere resisted their exploitation and attempted to gain freedom through armed uprisings and rebellions, such as the Stono Rebellion and the New York Slave Insurrection of 1741. Other less violent means of resistance included sabotage, running away, and slow labour paces on the plantations. Unlike their counterparts in the Caribbean, however, American slaves never successfully overthrew the system of slavery in the colonies and would not gain freedom until legislative decree made after the United States Civil War.
Slavery was outlawed in the USA after the American Civil War but the repercussions of this cruel form of labour are still felt by the descendants of the African slaves in form of racism and evident economic divide between the black and white populations of North America.
Forms of Labour usa
Course: BA (Hons.) History
University: University of Delhi
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