Indentured LaborIndentured servitude was a labor system in which

people paid for their passage to the New World by working for an employer for a fixed term of

years. It was widely employed in the 18th century in the British colonies in the North

America and elsewhere. It was a way for the poor in Britain and the German

states to obtain passage to the American colonies. After the term expired, they became

free to work for themselves. The employer purchased the indenture from the sea captain

who brought the people over.

•Most indentured servants worked as farmers or helpers for farm wives; some were apprenticed to craftsmen. Both sides were legally obligated

to comply with the terms, but they were not always enforced by American courts. Runaways were sought out and returned. About half of the white immigrants to the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries were indentured.

• During the late 17th and early 18th centuries, children from England and France were

kidnapped and sold into indentured labor in the Caribbean for a minimum of five years, but

usually their contracts were bought and sold repeatedly and some laborers never obtained

their freedom.

Indenture contract signed with an X by Henry Meyer in 1737

*CaribbeanA half million Europeans went as indentured servants to the Caribbean (primarily the south

Caribbean, Trinidad and Tobago, French Guiana, and Suriname) before 1840.

Production of sugar in these areas was primarily driven by indentured immigrant labor. The

success and vitality of these plantations were heavily dependent upon the indentured labor system. Though cocoa production and gold mining were labor-intensive, sugar was the dominant industry that depended on bound

immigrant labor.

*North America

Between one-half and two-thirds of white immigrants to the American colonies between the 1630s and American Revolution had come

under indentures. Indentured people were numerically important mostly in the region from Virginia north to New Jersey. Other colonies saw

far fewer of them. The total number of European immigrants to all 13 colonies before 1775 was about 500,000; of these 55,000 were

involuntary prisoners

*Australia and the PacificConvicts transported to the Australian colonies before the 1840s often found themselves hired out in a form

of indentured labor. Indentured servants also emigrated to New South Wales. The

Van Diemen's Land Company used skilled indentured labor for periods of seven years or less. A similar

scheme for the Swan River area of Western Australia existed between 1829 and 1832.

During the 1860s planters in Australia, Fiji, New Caledonia, and the Samoa Islands, in need of

laborers, encouraged a trade in long-term indentured labor called "black birding". At the height of the labor trade, more than one-half the adult male population

of several of the islands worked abroad.

*Africa

A significant number of construction projects, principally British, in East Africa and South Africa, required vast quantities of labor, exceeding the

availability or willingness of local tribesmen. Coolies from India were imported, frequently under indenture, for such projects as the Uganda Railway,

as farm labor, and as miners. They and their descendants formed a significant portion of the population and economy of Kenya and Uganda,

although not without engendering resentment from others. Idi Amin's

expulsion of the "Asians" from Uganda in 1972 was an expulsion of Indo-Africans.

*Legal statusThe Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted

by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948) declares in Article 4 "No one shall be held in

slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms". More

specifically, It is dealt with by article 1(a) of the United Nations 1956

Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery

. Although illegal under international law, only national legislation can establish its unlawfulness in a specific jurisdiction. In the United States, the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act

(VTVPA) of 2000 extended servitude to cover peonage as well as Involuntary Servitude.

Thanks !!

Made by – Zainul X-A