Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T14:25:24.976Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Disappearance of Organized Markets for European Immigrant Servants in the United States: Five Popular Explanations Reexamined

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Extract

Organized markets for European immigrant servants in North America began in Jamestown around 1620 and ended in the ports of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans around 1820. For two centuries these markets survived, even flourished, in spite of numerous wartime interruptions, political revolutions, depressions in the transatlantic shipping market, cyclical recessions in the American economy, and competition from both slave and native-born free labor. During the eighteenth century roughly half of the European emigrants to British North America entered servitude to pay for their transatlantic passage (Galenson 1981; Grubb 1992b).

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1994 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams, W. F. (1932) Ireland and Irish Emigration to the New World from 1815 to the Famine. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Bailyn, B. (1986) The Peopling of British North America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Barnard, E. K. (1904) Letters and Other Papers of Daniel Kent Emigrant and Redemptioner. Baltimore: New Era Printing.Google Scholar
Barzel, Y. (1989) Economic Analysis of Property Rights. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bezanson, A., Gray, R. D., and Hussey, M. (1936) Wholesale Prices in Philadelphia, 1784-1861. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Book A of redemptioners, 1785-1804.” Manuscript, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.Google Scholar
Book C of redemptioners, 1817-1831.” Manuscript, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.Google Scholar
Carlton, F. T. (1908) “Abolition of imprisonment for debt in the United States.” Yale Review, O. S. 17: 339-44.Google Scholar
Clark, D. (1977) “Babes in bondage: Indentured Irish children in Philadelphia in the nineteenth century.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 101: 475-86.Google Scholar
Clemens, P. G. E., and Simler, L. (1988) “Rural labor and the farm household in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1750-1820,” in Innes, S. (ed.) Work and Labor in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press: 106-43.Google Scholar
Cloud, P., and Galenson, D. W. (1987) “Chinese immigration and contract labor in the late nineteenth century.” Explorations in Economic History 24: 2242.Google Scholar
David, P. A. (1987) “Industrial labor market adjustments in a region of recent settlement: Chicago, 1848-1868,” in Kilby, P. (ed.) Quantity and Quiddity: Essays in U.S. Economic History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press: 4797.Google Scholar
Davis, L. E., and Hughes, J. R. (1960) “A dollar-sterling exchange, 1803-1895.” Economic History Review 13: 5278.Google Scholar
Diffenderffer, F. R. (1899) “The German immigration into Pennsylvania through the port of Philadelphia, and ‘The Redemptioners.'Pennsylvania German Society 10: 1328.Google Scholar
Erickson, C. (1984) “Why did contract labour not work in nineteenth-century United States?” in Marks, S. and Richardson, P. (ed.) International Labour Migration, Historical Perspectives, vol. 24. Hounslow, England: Maurice Temple Smith: 3456.Google Scholar
Galenson, D. W. (1981) White Servitude in Colonial America. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Galenson, D. W.(1984) “The rise and fall of indentured servitude in the Americas: An economic analysis.” Journal of Economic History 44: 126.Google Scholar
Geiser, K. F. (1901) Redemptioners and Indentured Servants in the Colony and Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. New Haven, CT: Tuttle, Morehouse, and Taylor.Google Scholar
Goldin, C, and Sokoloff, K. (1984) “The relative productivity hypothesis of industrialization: The American case, 1820-1850.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 99: 461-87.Google Scholar
Grubb, F. (1985a) “The incidence of servitude in trans-atlantic migration, 1771-1804.” Explorations in Economic History 22: 316-39.Google Scholar
Grubb, F. (1985b) “Immigrant servant labor: Their occupational and geographic distribu tion in the late eighteenth-century mid-Atlantic economy.” Social Science History 9: 249-75.Google Scholar
Grubb, F. (1986) “Redemptioner immigration to Pennsylvania: Evidence on contract choice and profitability.” Journal of Economic History 46: 407-18.Google Scholar
Grubb, F. (1988) “The auction of redemptioner servants, Philadelphia, 1771-1804: An eco nomic analysis.” Journal of Economic History 48: 583603.Google Scholar
Grubb, F. (1989) “Servant auction records and immigration into the Delaware valley, 1745— 1831: The proportion of females among immigrant servants.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 133: 154-69.Google Scholar
Grubb, F. (1990a) “German immigration to Pennsylvania, 1709-1820.” Journal of Interdis ciplinary History 20: 417-36.Google Scholar
Grubb, F.(1990b) “The transition from colonial currency to the U.S. dollar: A market re vealed analysis.” Working Paper No. 90-20. Economics Department, University of Delaware.Google Scholar
Grubb, F. (1992a) Runaway Servants, Convicts, and Apprentices Advertised in the Pennsyl vania Gazette, 1728-1796. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing.Google Scholar
Grubb, F. (1992b) “The long-run trend in the value of European immigrant servants, 1654- 1831: New measurements and interpretations.” Research in Economic History 14: 161234.Google Scholar
Hancock, H. B. (1974) “The indenture system in Delaware, 1681-1921.” Delaware History 16: 4759.Google Scholar
Hansen, M. L. (1940) The Atlantic Migration, 1607-1860. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Henninghausen, L. P. (1909) History of the German Society of Maryland. Baltimore: Sun Job Printing.Google Scholar
Herrick, C. A. (1926) White Servitude in Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: John Joseph McVey.Google Scholar
Jacoby, D. (1991a) “The transformation of industrial apprenticeship in the United States.” Journal of Economic History 51: 887910.Google Scholar
Jacoby, D.(1991b) “The legal foundations of human capital markets.” Industrial Relations 30: 229-50.Google Scholar
Jameson, J. F., ed. (1896) “Letters of Phineas Bond, British consul at Philadelphia, to the Foreign Office of Great Britain, 1787-1794.” Annual Report of the American Historical Association 1: 513659.Google Scholar
Jameson, J. F. (1897) “Letters of Phineas Bond, British consul at Philadelphia, to the Foreign Office of Great Britain, 1787-1794.Annual Report of the American Historical Association 2: 454568.Google Scholar
Jones, M. A. (1969) “Ulster emigration, 1783-1815,” in Green, E. E. R. (ed.) Essays in Scotch-Irish History. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul: 4668.Google Scholar
McCormac, E. I. (1904) White Servitude in Maryland, 1634-1820. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
McCusker, J. J. (1978) Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600-1775: A Handbook. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Menard, R. R. (1977) “From servants to slaves: The transformation of the Chesapeake labor system.” Southern Studies 16: 355-90.Google Scholar
Morris, R. B. (1981) Government and Labor in Early America. Boston: Northeastern University Press.Google Scholar
Muhlenberg, H. M. (1942) The Journal of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press.Google Scholar
Officer, L. H. (1983) “Dollar-sterling mint parity and exchange rates, 1791-1834.” Journal of Economic History 43: 579616.Google Scholar
Page, T. W. (1911) “The transportation of immigrants and reception arrangements in the nineteenth century.” Journal of Political Economy 19: 732-49.Google Scholar
Pfund, H. (1964) History of the German Society of Pennsylvania, 1764-1964. Philadelphia: German Society of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
“Philadelphia customs house records, 1800-1883.” Manuscript, National Archives, Washington, DC, microfilm #425, rolls 16-50.Google Scholar
Risch, E. (1936) “Immigrant aid societies before 1820.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 60: 1533.Google Scholar
Salinger, S.V. (1987) To Serve Well and Faithfully: Labor and Indentured Servitude in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, A. E. (1947) Colonists in Bondage. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Soltow, L., and Keller, K. W. (1982) “Rural Pennsylvania in 1800: A portrait from the septennial census.” Pennsylvania History 49: 2447.Google Scholar
Steinfeld, R. J. (1991) The Invention of Free Labor. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Strassburger, R. B. (1934) Pennsylvania German Pioneers. Norristown, PA: Pennsylvania German Society. 3 vols.Google Scholar
Sundstrom, W. A. (1988) “Internal labor markets before World War I: On-the-job training and employee promotion.” Explorations in Economic History 25: 424-45.Google Scholar
Trautmann, F. (1981) “Pennsylvania through a German's eyes: The travels of Ludwig Gall, 1819-1820.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 105: 3565.Google Scholar
Virchaux, H. T. (1818) “Report to the German Society of Pennsylvania on the ship April.Manuscript, German Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.Google Scholar
Walker, M. (1964) Germany and the Emigration, 1816-1885. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Wust, K. G. (1958) Pioneers in Service: The German Society of Maryland, 1783-1958. Baltimore: German Society of Maryland.Google Scholar