Changing conceptions of servitude in the British Atlantic, 1640 to 1780 (Virginia, Barbados)

This dissertation examines popular attitudes toward white servitude in the early modern British Atlantic. Because opinions on servants were informed by evolving conceptions of labor and human difference, they shed light on the emergence of the assumption that whiteness should preclude formal bondage. I argue that the ascendancy of such beliefs was far more contested, prolonged, and uneven than many scholars have suggested.; This study concludes that the substance of servitude's reputation was marked by a significant degree of continuity. From the establishment of Virginia and Barbados to the imperial crises of the 1770s, the image of servitude was paradoxical. People were generally critical of the practice, condemning its systemic characteristics and sensational cases of abuse. But they also asserted the legitimacy of the master-servant relationship and the appropriateness of subjecting the laboring classes to a severe form of bondage in the plantations.; Ideas about servitude were never static, however. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, servant autobiographies sanctioned formal bondage even they censured specific features of the practice---most notably the alienability of servants. In a period of heightened concern about social hierarchy and religious loyalties, servants invoked their social and religious status to assert the injustice of their particular circumstances. Promotional pamphlets of the century attested to the unfavorable reputation of servitude even as they rallied to its defense. Imaginative portraits of servitude from this period---found in plays, ballads, and novels---were conceived in dialogue with historical accounts and shared with them many of the same preoccupations. In the eighteenth century servant accounts registered emergent conceptions of race and liberty that might have eroded support for white servitude. But the institutionalization of convict transportation after 1718 reinforced the perception that servants constituted a criminal, alien, and thus exploitable class.