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Indentured servitude was a method of increasing the number of colonists, especially in the English and later British colonies. Voluntary migration and convict labor only provided so many people, and since the journey across the Atlantic was dangerous, other means of encouraging settlement were necessary.
Indentured servants could not marry without the permission of their master, were frequently subject to physical punishment, and did not receive legal favor from the courts. Female indentured servants in particular might be raped and/or sexually abused by their masters. If children were produced the labour would be extended by two years. [14]
Many immigrants to the colonies came as indentured servants, with someone else paying their passage to the Colonies in return for a promise of service. At the end of his service, according to the contract, the indentured servant usually would be granted a sum of money, a new suit of clothes, land, or perhaps passage back to England.
Some historians such as Edmund Morgan and Lerone Bennett have suggested that indentured servitude provided a model for slavery in the 17th-century Crown colonies. In practice, indentured servants were teenagers in England whose fathers sold their labor voluntarily for a period of time (typically four to seven years), in return for free passage ...
In the seventeenth century, most voluntary colonists were of English origins who settled chiefly along the coastal regions of the Eastern seaboard. The majority of early British settlers were indentured servants, who gained freedom after enough work to pay off their passage. The wealthier men who paid their way received land grants known as ...
The first indentured servants arose centuries ago out of necessity and desperation on both sides of the Atlantic. An unskilled laborer from pre-industrial England might need to save up multiple ...
Prior to 1660, almost all immigrants to the English colonies of North America had migrated freely, though most paid for their passage by becoming indentured servants. [75] Improved economic conditions and an easing of religious persecution in Europe made it increasingly difficult to recruit labor to the colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The first successful settlement in the Chesapeake, Jamestown (1607), was set up by the Virginia Company and therefore its population was made up mostly of English. Because of its large reliance on labor for tobacco plantations that fueled the economy, the Chesapeake relied on indentured servants to work the land.