White indentured servitude persisted in the colonies even as African slavery grew
Evidence
The emigrant indentured servant, whose origins were most frequently and casually traced to England, was another of the labor forces upon which the colonial settlements of the seventeenth century depended. They would fare little better than the native American in the traditions being shaped in American historiography by ruling-class ideologues. Of course, it is now generally presumed that the “white servant” as a class had soon disappeared in the English mainland colonies as a result of the trade in African workers that had begun to reach substantial numbers beginning in the late seventeenth century. This, however, was not the case. Richard Hofstadter tells us: “ ‘The labor of the colonies,’ said Benjamin Franklin in 1759, ‘is performed chiefly by indentured servants brought from Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany, because the high price it bears cannot be performed in any other way.’” And as late as the years immediate to the American Revolution, servants still constituted approximately 10 percent of the two and one-half million people occupying the rebellious colonies. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 415
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Connects to the broader theme of how racial proletarianization did not erase earlier labor forms.
Related
- White indentured servants gained no liberation across the eighteenth century (similarity 0.84)
- African slaves replaced white indentured peasants as the sugar labor force (similarity 0.83)
- Indentured European peasants were displaced by enslaved Africans as sugar demand grew (similarity 0.81)
- Scholars downplay that European indentured servitude preceded American racial slavery. (similarity 0.80)
- Contemporary colonial observers denounced indentured servants as near-worthless (similarity 0.80)
- Colonial lower classes were ranked by national-racial stereotypes serving labor control (similarity 0.79)
- European indentured laborers initially worked alongside African slaves (similarity 0.78)