Indentured Servitude

Indentured servitude is a labor system under which a person, the indentured servant, contracts to work for a fixed period, typically several years, in exchange for passage, room, board or an initial payment, with the contract, or indenture, legally binding the servant's labor to the employer for the agreed term. The system was extensively used to recruit European laborers to the British American colonies from the early seventeenth century onward, with historians estimating that well over half of European immigrants to the American colonies before the Revolution arrived under indenture, unable otherwise to afford transatlantic passage. Following the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and of slavery across the British Empire in the early to mid nineteenth century, indentured servitude was revived on a large scale as a source of plantation labor, with Britain, France and other colonial powers transporting large numbers of indentured workers, chiefly from India and China, to colonies including Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, British Guiana and South Africa, a system historians have often termed a new system of slavery for its coercive recruitment practices and harsh conditions. Unlike chattel slavery, indenture was nominally a voluntary contract of fixed duration rather than permanent, hereditary bondage, but the terms were frequently exploitative, poorly enforced in the servant's favor, and in the colonial indenture trade were often obtained through deception about conditions and pay.