Jamaica’s history between the American Revolution and the Morant Bay rebellion was full of turbulent change. Sugar still dominated the island economy, though other marketable crops, livestock pens, a complex web of internal exchange and provision grounds were additional features of Jamaica’s economy. Until 1834 slaves dominated the labour force. Planters were on the back foot in dealing with the movement to abolish the British slave trade, passed by Parliament in 1807, and they faced greater challenges from abolitionists after 1823, culminating in a well-mobilised and strongly supported campaign for slave emancipation, which was granted by Britain in 1834.

During a major rebellion in 1831–2, many sugar properties were destroyed. The revolt was quashed by British military forces. Planters were compensated for the loss of their slaves, but the island’s black population received nothing. A brief period of apprenticeship was followed full freedom in 1838. Many ex-apprentices left estates and became independent peasants. But despite positive signs of progress, low wage levels, poor housing, a restricted franchise and the continuance of whites in positions of power made life problematic for Jamaicans. Difficult economic conditions influenced the violence of the Morant Bay rebellion in 1865, which the authorities put down.

Chapter 5 deals extensively with tutelle in the late nineteenth century by concentrating on the working lives of minors, mostly as apprentices and domestics. Minors performed a wide variety of tasks, some of them gender-specific. Young girls did mostly household and domestic tasks; boys became apprentices and learned artisanal crafts. Of the artisanal crafts, carpentry was the most popular, but masons, blacksmiths, tailors, seamstresses, and grain pounders took wards as apprentices. In the 1880s and 1890s, the state confided minors to institutions including Catholic missions, though not always to serve as apprentices. Case studies detail the ways in which their labor was exploited and how they responded to coercion and abuse. They reveal considerable delinquency and misery, which sometimes led to incarceration. The relationship between minors and their guardians in work settings was often characterized by discord, even violence. The chapter explores abuses in tutelle including the hiring out of minors without informing French authorities and the refusal of guardians to compensate minors for their labor when warranted. The chapter analyzes complaints lodged by guardians about minors and the ways in which minors exercised agency. It ends with an exploration of sexual exploitation and prostitution.

Chapter 4 covers their final decade, during which the company underwent a series of changes to the core membership following two decades of stability. The company shifted around 1578 from supplementing personnel by hiring boy players to shoring up membership with an apprenticeship system. This enabled them to survive the departure of James Burbage by 1581 and the cull of members to help form the Queen’s Men in 1583. I identify evidence that several of the Queen’s Men not previously attached to any other company were likely members of Leicester’s Men, which also means the cull was greater than has been imagined in the past. A final crisis hit the company when five of their members were sent by Leicester into service in Europe for a year, but I show that Will Kempe’s development of the stage jig was ideally timed to enable the remaining few members to still tour widely with jigs as their primary play stocks. The final section explains reasons to doubt that Richard Burbage or Shakespeare were ever in Leicester’s Men, but did undoubtedly forge ties with this company’s members after Dudley died, ensuring the legacy of this company was carried forward to Shakespeare’s own career.

The chapter provides a transnational perspective on how the apprenticeship’s end caused new challenges for the free labor experiment, as British West Indian colonial economies faltered in the 1840s and former slaves asserted their rights as working people. In their pursuit of expanded liberty, black West Indians forced American antislavery to examine the limitations of a strict free labor ideology, and to envision the experiment’s success on other terms, as the issue of slavery moved to the center of national politics.

The chapter provides a study of how the apprenticeship implemented through much of the emancipated British West Indies posed problems for the free labor defense of the experiment, as it sought to maintain the structures of slavery — in deed if not in name. None understood this better than former slaves, who viewed the repression doled out by magistrates and planters as a subversion of both labor and freedom. Through testimonies and acts of resistance, I illustrate how freedpeople forced an end to the apprenticeship even as American abolitionists sought to use their laboring potential as a defense of the experiment.

This chapter provides a thorough revision of the status of boys and youths in the early modern period, attending to the neglected question of physical skill and training. It argues that attending to historically situated forms of physical expectation can shed light on how particular bodily skills are culturally cultivated, placing a more active emphasis on boys' bodies than scholars of early modern culture have typically tended to. The chapter draws on religious writings, conduct books, memoirs, apprenticeship manuals, and educational tracts in order to provide a wide-ranging picture of how boys' physical capacities were understood, improved, and manipulated in this period. Examining the ways in which boys and their bodies are situated in these works – often with an emphasis on physical labour and potential for activity – the chapter argues for a shared culture of expectation around the bodies of early modern boys in which physical movement and productivity is at the forefront. This culture, it moves to suggest, is everywhere discernible in contemporary attitudes to the early modern theatre, which articulated a pervasive fascination with the moving, working bodies of boy performers.

The Foreword by John Borrows, the famous Indigenous legal scholar, presents a perspicuous representation of the guiding spirit of the volume from his Anishinaabe perspective. Mutually sustainable and ecosocially just democracies should be grounded in relationships of self and other co-determination with each other and with all our more-than human-relatives.

One essential activity that organisations must review as they capitalise on digital technologies' potential is their existing business processes. Put simply, they must examine 'how things are done around here' and, in doing so, identify if there is any way of improving these activities. In this chapter, I seek to offer an account of delivering a module on 'Innovation, Creativity and Critical Thinking' to final year students of a BA Honours Degree in Insurance Practice. This programme, which commenced in 2016,is Ireland's first apprenticeship towards awarding a level 8 honours degree. The three-year, work-based training programme combines digital academic learning with on-the-job learning, allowing students to acquire various skills. This chapter will demonstrate how students can practically apply techniques learnt in their online class to industry, bridging the theory-practice gap by adopting a learning-by-doing approach to business process re-engineering (BPR).

This chapter reviews how people learn during apprenticeships, ways of guiding beginners while they engage in authentic situated activity with more experienced people. Apprenticeship practices are found throughout the world both in cultures with formal schooling and in those without. Traditional apprenticeship practices tend to focus on physical and visible activities, but most schooling is directed toward conceptual learning outcomes which are usually not physical and visible – like formulas in mathematics or theories in physics. This chapter extends apprenticeship research to cognitive apprenticeship, and describes apprenticeships that are designed to lead to abstract or conceptual knowledge. These involve scaffolding, metacognitive reflection, problem-based learning, and situated social practices. Effective apprenticeship often involves productive failure, when learners initially develop potential solutions that are wrong but that can be productively guided toward conceptually correct answers.

Among the foundational projects in the study of childhood and culture is the “Six Cultures” survey from the late 1960s. Observational data were collected to map children’s daily activity in six village/small town settings around the world. Only in the single US middle-class community of “Orchard Town” were children not routinely engaged in chores (Whiting and Whiting 1975: 84). Nowhere are the gerontocracy and neontocracy perspectives further apart than on the issue of work.2 Indeed, “the dissociation of childhood from the performance of valued work is considered a yardstick of modernity” (Nieuwenhuys 1996: 237). While we hamstring our children to keep them from working, fearing their loss of innocence and studiousness, the norm elsewhere is to open the pathway to adulthood.

Chapter 4 analyses the banishment and penal transportation of enslaved people in the British Caribbean. The first part of the chapter shows the links between punitive mobility and the management of colonial labour. Magistrates sentenced and resold enslaved runaways, rebels, and lawbreakers to colonies like Puerto Rico, Cuba, and St Thomas. They also instigated mass banishments and transportations following so-called conspiracies and plots, and revolts, including to British settlements and colonies in Honduras, Sierra Leone and Australia. Such sentencing became a key element of the larger question of legal reform, following the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the reform of the ‘Bloody Code’ in England in the 1820s, and the amelioration of enslavement (c. 1823-38). The second part of the chapter constructs a detailed narrative of the penal transportation of a group of over one hundred enslaved rebels following the Barbados Rebellion of 1816, via Honduras to their final destination, Sierra Leone. It views their journey as an allegory for a slave voyage in reverse, analysing the layers of connection between and the multi-directional circulations associated with enslavement, imperial governmentality, penal transportation, and other forms of colonial bondage and repression.

A carefully adapted indenture, made for a boy and rewritten for a girl, shows the ambivalence with which young women were bound into London’s Livery Companies, or guilds. Chapter 2 uses new data to estimate for the first time the numbers of London’s female apprentices, which were considerably higher than they appear from the formal record. The complex relationship between women, work and guilds across early-modern Europe often excluded and marginalised women, whilst in some places providing a parallel route to recognition. London’s distinctive customs presented particular opportunities as well as constraints for women. Within the companies, both officially and unofficially, and alongside them, the female apprenticeship sector was growing, prompted in part by economic and social dislocations and by family ambitions. Apprenticeship for girls was coming to be a significant and familiar option through the social spectrum.

In the Gorgias, Socrates famously declares that he is alone among contemporary Athenians in taking up the “true craft of politics.” But the claim is extremely puzzling, since Socrates also claims to be ignorant and lacking in any significant wisdom of any kind. Crafts, for Socrates, involve cognitive achievement. But Socrates declares that he has accomplished little of such achievement. Shows how the model of craft-knowledge can resolve this paradox by allowing Socrates to regard taking up the craft of politics as an attempt to improve his ability in achieving the goals of that craft: benefiting others. Shows how Plato’s early dialogues give abundant evidence of Socrates’ activities in both of what he characterizes as the branches of politics: legislation and correction.

This chapter examines the networks and connections within the early modern legal community of Aberdeen, Scotland. It reconstructs a particular master-apprentice network of the early-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, showing the importance of this educational mechanism both for entrance into the local legal profession and for establishing professional contacts. This chapter also reconstructs the networks which were focused on two of Aberdeen’s most important courts of the period—the sheriff and commissary courts. It shows the extent to which the men who held offices in these courts were interconnected, both personally and professionally, and reflects on what this discovery reveals about contemporaneous local court practice. Finally, this chapter concludes by reflecting on how men of law may have regarded their own networks, through an examination of their children’s god-parentage records.