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Immigrant Servant Labor: Their Occupational and Geographic Distribution in the Late Eighteenth- Century Mid-Atlantic Economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Farley Grubb
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Extract

Contract Labor played a critical role both in financing European trans-Atlantic migration and in providing a hirable labor force to work the estates of the New World. During the seventeenth century at least three-quarters of the Chesapeake colonists arrived under some form of short term contract (Walsh, 1977: 111). By the American Revolution, a majority of English, German, and southern Irish emigrants still used servant contracts to finance their migration to Pennsylvania (Grubb, 1985). For the year 1773, 61% of the 387 southern Irish immigrants, 18% of the 1,420 Ulster immigrants, 25% of the 382 Scotch immigrants, and 52% of the 174 English immigrants to Pennsylvania entered servitude. For the years 1771–1773, out of 747 German adult male immigrants to Pennsylvania 58% entered servitude. For 1785–1804, 45% of the 7,837 German immigrants to Pennsylvania entered servitude.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , Summer 1985 , pp. 249 - 276
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1985 

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