Contract and consent had important roles in early modern English labor relationships. The scholarship in social and economic history and legal studies has rarely tried to reconcile the legal framework of voluntariness with the practical unfreedom of early modern work. The Introduction proposes that the foundations of freedom of contract and the sanctity of an individual’s consent developed in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, in part, from the exploitative labor systems of parish apprenticeship, transatlantic indentured servitude, military impressment, and prisoner of war labor. Charity, colonization, and war were the key factors that drove masters and middlemen to reach for consent as a tool to bind people into labor. The ideology of "natural laborers" justified presuming consent in people of appropriate profiles. Moments of consenting were fraught with power imbalances, and they reinscribed social hierarchies. Contemporary examples of coerced consent show an ongoing acceptance of this pairing. The legal context, chapter summaries, and a consideration of the method of historicizing consent complete the Introduction.

Brokers and ship captains sent thousands of people from the British Isles to work in the English American colonies without indentures. These immigrants only entered written contracts after arrival. Here – and in other labor arrangements in England – the concept of “enticement” dominated. Subordinates’ consent to serve was imagined to be the result of campaigns of temptation to which they succumbed. While previous studies of enticement in early modern England have been limited to sexual seduction, at the time enticement also meant servant poaching. Claims of enticement allowed commentators to emphasize the power of personal interactions in servant procurement, instead of drawing attention to the structural conditions that made a segment of society disproportionately vulnerable to abuse by illicit brokers denounced as "spirits."

Guild and craft apprentices had entered written contracts (indentures) with their masters and mistresses since the late medieval era in England. Consent in these relationships was not a matter of great anxiety, and the documents treated the topic with minimal concern. From the 1570s, English parish officers adopted these indentures for the new system of parish apprenticeship. They carefully archived masters’ written consent for future reference, to help ensure that better-off householders fulfilled their roles in providing for the poor children bound to them. A small number of parish apprenticeship indentures included new “free will clauses,” which stated that the pauper child in question had offered free and willing consent to serve. Although little contemporary commentary exists on the matter, parish officers likely inserted such language as a defense against suspicions that they had excessively coerced poor children to enter unwanted labor contracts. The chapter concludes with a case study of a guild apprentice whose gentry status protected him from recruitment into colonial servitude.

The recruitment of men into armies had its counterpart in the placement of soldiers taken captive during war – and these, too, took place on the edge of consent. Customary laws of war prohibited hard labor for Christian prisoners of war. Yet a succession of English governments sent their European war captives into servitude with private masters. These governments and their collaborators instead operated under the logic of the English Poor Law, in which the indigent could meaningfully consent to serve a master even while under duress. The case of Scottish and Dutch prisoners of war in an East Anglian fen drainage project from 1648 to 1653 shows how the Council of State and the drainage company board members conceptualized lower-status prisoners as willing workmen. The broader arena of transatlantic and intra-European coercion of prisoner of war labor throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries further reveals how the discourse of consent permeated even those more convoluted international relations.

The Conclusion reviews the argument that English masters and brokers wielded consent as a tool of labor coercion in the early modern period. Presumptions, shaped by people’s age, gender, and social status, determined if consent had been given or not. While the subjects of this book largely aimed to stabilize their social worlds, their use of consent in labor relationships often had the opposite effect. In the discourse of enticement, individuals bore the burden of choosing correctly in a labor market where structural inequalities exposed some people to jobs that most would never accept. The conclusion further considers methods and sources for the history of consent. The connected study of charity, colonization, and war has allowed the identification of trends in contract labor coercion that might otherwise be seen as aberrations. The book ends by considering how captured consent was meaningful in the past and continues to have a significant legacy.

The treatment of alleged “spiriting” victims in London courts versus colonial American courts further reveals presumptions of consent to work. The lower courts in London offered redress to people targeted by illicit transatlantic servant brokers when they escaped before transportation. Early modern notions about how people’s behavior flowed from their intentions meant that contemporaries sympathized with rescued or escaped spiriting victims in London precisely because they had avoided transportation. By contrast, spirited servants who arrived in the colonies struggled to shift the perception that the mere fact of their arrival indicated that they had wanted to come. The colonial magistrates presumed that newly arrived servants had been complicit in their own transportation and oversaw the belated creation of servants’ indentures. Far fewer servants found redress for spiriting in the colonies than in London, because of this presumption and further procedural obstacles.

From the 1610s in London, servant brokers, merchants, and eventually justices of the peace and their clerks recorded consent to transatlantic colonial indentured servitude with heightened attention. In doing so, they were responding to the vastness of the distances servants crossed, compounded with the multi-year length of their contractual terms and the unlikeliness of the servants returning home. The assignability of these contracts further differentiated them from the contemporaneous forms of indentured labor. In this newer system, contracts more often specified the voluntary nature of servants’ agreement with a free will clause, precisely because their willingness seemed implausible. The treatment of different categories of recruits, including adults, children, convicts, and paupers, are compared. Unwilling recruits could sometimes secure their release before the ships departed England. Sealed indentures made escape far less achievable.

This chapter explores the journey from principles to the practical implementation of sustainable development and subsequently the codified global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It begins by examining the foundational principles of international law that guide sustainable development efforts by reviewing in detail the history and motivation behind adopting a global set of goals to achieve holistic and measurable sustainable development by 2030. Then, the chapter focuses on the intersection between Indigenous peoples and the SDGs, acknowledging the historical disparities faced by these communities and how treaties have the potential to foster or frustrate the achievement of these goals. It then delves into guidelines for sustainable resource management and Indigenous development within the SDG framework, emphasizing inclusive approaches and participatory decision-making. By bridging principles with practical strategies, this chapter underscores the importance of integrating Indigenous knowledge, fostering partnerships, and implementing the SDGs to achieve sustainable development while respecting Indigenous rights and aspirations.

As part of the major premise of the Declaration’s syllogism and of a general theory of rightful government, it is unlikely that the main ideas in the Declaration’s second paragraph exist as separate, free-floating nuggets of indeterminate meaning. My task in this essay is to reconstruct the theory of rightful government contained in that paragraph in order to progress toward fixing meaning for those ideas – equality, rights, liberty, and others – that have been so important to the self-understanding and political aspirations of Americans from 1776 on.

Many of us might imagine that it was the early modern period during which an individual right to property was first conceived as something that we could claim against all other people and against the state itself. The reason we could do so is because such a right was grounded in natural law and therefore preceded the creation of political society. Indeed, the state, according to this account, was created to protect such rights. We would probably have John Locke in mind as the basis for this argument and it is true that such an account of the right to property could be derived from his work. However, Locke’s understanding of property was not typical in the early modern period. Instead, it was far more common for early modern political theorists to see the right to property as something that was established by civil society and therefore completely dependent upon the laws of the state.

From the late sixteenth century, foreign engineers promoted new hydraulic technologies in England. Yet, their techniques were not alone sufficient to implement wetland improvement at a grand scale. Drainage projects generated local controversy almost everywhere they were proposed. Disputes pivoted on thorny questions about who was empowered make decisions about the management of water and land, and by what means. Under the early Stuarts, the crown and its ministers began to act as instigators and facilitators driving forward fen projects. The use of increasingly coercive methods to suppress and circumvent local opposition became entangled in wider constitutional controversies about the limits of royal authority and definitions of the public good. Wetland communities were active participants in debates about the economy and morality, environments and justice, consent and legitimate authority. Customary politics proved a powerful force, unravelling a litany of proposed projects in the early seventeenth century. This impasse was broken when Charles I launched the first state-led drainage project in Hatfield Level in 1626, yoking coercive authority to transnational expertise.

Chapter 6 follows Scott’s army through 1847 during its advance toward Mexico City. It considers how the army sought to pacify the Mexican people by paying for what it took and explains the (sometimes violent) consequences for Mexican women. Although women made a vast array of choices in response to the US invasion, from seizing economic opportunities to armed resistance, regulars insisted that women welcomed them – an interpretation that still predominates in military histories. This misconception had strategic benefits. To the extent that army protection of women was real, martial law and army money maintained sufficient order to allow US forces to secure foodstuffs and supplies to continue military operations. To the extent that protection was rhetorical, the army used its claims of legitimacy to make levies on occupied areas (and women), fund operations, and harshly punish those who threatened military interests. The US Army found both strategies, the real and the rhetorical, critical to its invasion of Mexico.

The popes of the first decretal age addressed uncertainties about baptism, but left long loose ends for popes of the second decretal age to tie up.