indentured labor
Debt-bound work arrangement
Indentured labor is a system where workers are bound by contract to an employer for a fixed period, typically in exchange for passage, housing, or payment of debts.
The laborer cannot leave until the term is served.
Historically associated with colonial arrangements: Indentured servants worked Virginia tobacco fields for seven years to pay off their passage.
The system occupied a gray zone between free labor and slavery.
- coolieColonial-era Asian laborer
- slaveryOwnership of people
- plantation economyAgricultural system exploiting enslaved workers
- colonialismDomination through foreign settlement
- British EmpireVast colonial domain
diaspora · sugar plantations · cane fields · sugar trade · poverty · Mauritius · contract · years of service · migration · ship manifest · Fiji · oral histories · Suriname · work contract · serfdom · exploitation · servitude · Trinidad
- slaverychattel slavery, enslaved, slave, enslavement, slave traders
- Caribbean historyJamaica, Haiti, Barbados, Cuba, Trinidad
- colonial enterprisesBritish East India Company, Dutch East India Company, East India Company, Hudson's Bay Company, chartered companies
- Dutch EmpireDutch East India Company, VOC, Batavia, New Amsterdam, Suriname
- Indian DiasporaGujaratis, Punjabis, Sikhs, expatriates, expats
- bondageslavery, servitude, bondage, slaves, thrall
indentured laborself-employment
Working for yourself
wage labor · salaried work · at-will employment · freelance work · entrepreneurship
indentured laborchattel slavery
Persons owned as movable property
liberty · emancipation · freedom · manumission · debt bondage