The role of indentured servitude as a form of unfree labor in England’s American colonies has been explored by many scholars. Most, such as Edmund Morgan and Hilary McD. Beckles, have argued that indentured service laid the legal and cultural foundations for the widespread acceptance of slavery because it allowed people to see others as things to be bought and sold. What is far less well known is how the servant trade worked in England. Although there have been studies that trace where English indentured servants came from, their demographic makeup, and the servant trade’s relationship to broader domestic migration patterns, there have been few successful attempts to uncover how and why such people became indentured servants in the first place. For this reason alone, John Wareing’s new book is a welcome contribution to the fields of colonial labor studies, early modern migration studies, and legal history. Wareing offers a careful analysis of the categories of indentured servitude as it existed in the seventeenth century: consigned, exchanged, redemptioner, or customary. The most common category was the exchanged servant, recruited in England and sold to another merchant or planter in the colonies. As in his earlier work, Wareing places such servants in the context of domestic migration and investigates their geographic origins and demographic characteristics. He also explores where servants went, their terms of service, and the kinds of work they did. But the major contribution of Wareing’s work is that he uncovers how the trade operated, focusing on London.

One of the main reasons why the organization of the indentured servant trade has been so difficult to uncover is the lack of any systematic records. For the most part it was not that records did not survive; it is that they were likely never created in the first place. Different institutions and entities as well as individual merchants were involved in this trade throughout the 1600s, and only occasionally were local or national authorities involved in any attempt to regulate the trade through servants’ registries or other means. But what little has survived, particularly for London, Wareing has utilized. He uncovers how the trade operated by focusing on merchants and procurers, the people who lured or otherwise convinced people to indenture themselves or their children to a term of service in the colonies. Through a creative use of legal and colonial archives, Wareing unearths the seedy underbelly of a trade that was often dishonest in its practices, if not outright illegal. This was an unsavory world of deceit, abuse, false promises, and occasional kidnapping in the docks of East London. But the state was usually unable or unwilling to do much about such quasi-legal activity; as Wareing rightly points out, not only was there a need for labor in the colonies, but plenty of people saw no particular problem with sending poor people out of the country so they would no longer burden the nation. The halfhearted responses of the national government and local authorities in the form of voluntary servants’ registries (that were only sporadically enforced), not to mention the unwillingness to make kidnapping, even of children, a felony via Parliamentary statute, speaks to this deep ambivalence. However unpleasant, the indentured servant trade served a variety of social and economic purposes.

Throughout the book, Wareing rightly argues that indentured servitude was not in any way the same as chattel slavery, however much contemporaries used words like slavery to describe the working conditions of servants in the colonies. Wareing carefully emphasizes the human toll of the servant trade in important ways by focusing on how exploitation in the trade was representative of a key moment in the evolution of early capitalism. The book is slightly less successful at placing this trade into a broader imperial and political framework. For example, I was left wondering what the indentured servant trade and how it evolved over time indicated about England’s imperial endeavors during the seventeenth century. Did the haphazard nature of the trade reflect a larger ambivalence about empire or the role of the state in imperial designs? However, this is a relatively minor quibble with what is otherwise a very important book. Wareing’s detailed analysis of indentured servant recruitment and the structure of the servant trade in England is a much needed contribution to the field.