by Rob Winfield
Jeffrey J. Williams of Dissent magazine, linked from Alternet below, made an apt metaphor; “College students as Indentured Servants.” Before you go on to read the article, I wanted to tell you that EAU offers its members a path to a college degree. John Young’s book, http://www.westernvoices.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=1_2&zenid=a945389c3e9eec865e09de9b7050cd81 will show you how to get a perfectly legitimate college degree on the cheap, if you are willing to work for it. There are also volunteer tutors willing to help you on our private message board. So save yourself from student loans! I sure wish I had known I could do this about 15 years ago!
When we think of the founding of the early colonies, we usually think of the journey to freedom, in particular of the Puritans fleeing religious persecution to settle the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But it was not so for a majority of the first Europeans who emigrated to these shores. “Between one-half and two-thirds of all white immigrants to the British colonies arrived under indenture,” according to the economic historian David W. Galenson, a total of three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand people. Indenture was not an isolated practice but a dominant aspect of labor and life in early America.Rather than Plymouth, Jamestown was a more typical example of colonial settlement, founded in 1607 as a mercantile venture under the auspices of the Virginia Company, a prototype of “joint-stock” corporations and venture capitalism. The first colonists fared badly because, coming primarily from gentry, they had little practical skill at farming and were ravaged by starvation and disease. In 1620, the Virginia Company shifted to a policy of indentured servitude to draw labor fit to work the tobacco colonies.
Indenture had been a common practice in England, but its terms were relatively short, typically a year, and closely regulated by law. The innovation of the Virginia Company was to extend the practice of indenture to America, but at a much higher obligation, of four to seven years, because of the added cost of transit, and also because of the added cost of the brokerage system that arose around it. In England, contracts of indenture were directly between the landowner and servant, whereas now merchants or brokers in England’s ports signed prospective workers, then sold the contracts to shippers or to colonial landowners upon the servants’ arrival in America, who in turn could re-sell the contracts.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/121955/are_students_the_new_indentured_servants/