Servants and Servitude in Colonial America

The dispossessed people of Colonial America included thousands of servants who either voluntarily or involuntarily ended up serving as agricultural, domestic, skilled, and unskilled laborers in the northern, middle, and southern British American colonies as well as British Caribbean colonies.

• Illustrates how a majority of residents in Colonial America at any given time from 1607 to 1776 were dispossessed of basic freedoms

• Explains how the dispossessed Colonial American, deprived of basic rights, generated principles of freedom and equality that resulted in the American Revolution

• Shows that the basic rights of children were ignored in Stuart and Georgian England, which resulted in their transportation to America

• Describes how thousands of inhabitants of Colonial America were felons reprieved of the death penalty and prisoners of war