Indentured Migration and the Servant Trade from London to America, 1618–1718: "There is Great Want of Servants." by John Wareing (review)

The indentured servant trade to English colonial North America has attracted considerable interest from historians since at least the 1940s, when Abbott Emerson Smith published his extensive study, Colonists in Bondage.¹ Interrogating the "quality" or "sort" of servants who made these voyages, ascertaining the push and pull factors that took them across the Atlantic, and examining the experiences of indentured servants in the Americas were the key areas of scholarly debate that shaped the study of servitude until the 1980s.² More recently, scholars have focused on servitude's place in the transition to slavery in colonial settings, often framing their discussions around the "spectrum of coercion of labor" that influenced the lives of many early modern people.³ John Wareing's contribution to this arena focuses almost exclusively on the London side of the equation, revealing a good deal about the sorts of people who made up migrant populations and the factors (legal and illegal) that caused servants to find themselves aboard ships bound for the Americas. He also investigates a group largely overlooked by historians: the individuals who controlled and shaped the trade in the capital. Indentured Migration and the Servant Trade from London to America contributes to the vast scholarship on this subject by focusing on the system of servitude itself through its often unsavory entrepreneurs, rather than on the experiences of servants in the Americas.

To best analyze the new economic system that arose around indentured servitude, Wareing's book is divided into three parts. The brief first section (just one chapter) explains how demands for labor in the Americas precipitated the trade in people, as well as how new migration practices infused the broader cultural milieu of early modern England. The second section explores the trade prior to the Transportation Act of 1718—when the parameters of servitude shifted in law as criminals were sentenced to indentured service in the colonies in lieu of prison time—and Wareing spends three lengthy chapters analyzing how the noncriminal system developed. Many of his findings here will be familiar to scholars of labor and migration in the early modern English Atlantic world: servants often migrated first from other parts of England to London before departing for the colonies; servants came from a range of social positions (not just the stereotypical "Rogues, whores and vagabonds"); and some servants had more freedom of choice when sailing for North America than others.⁴ However, Wareing does add additional nuance to the category of indentured servants, identifying four specific groups: Redemptioner, Consigned, Exchanged, and Customary servants. Focusing on the last three groups, he demonstrates the significance of these distinctions, explaining how "Consigned" (42) servants made contracts with a specific master prior to departing London and were generally better able to set the terms of their service. "Exchanged" (42) servants, however, signed general contracts and did not often have a choice in destination or master, and their contracts could be bought and sold in the Americas, while "Customary" (45) servants were transported across the Atlantic and bound by the customs of the colony in which they were sold.

Customary and Exchanged servants were also the women and men most likely to be coerced or kidnapped into servitude, the subject of the third section of Wareing's book, which concentrates on the criminal elements of the trade. The servant trade was lucrative, but only if procurers continued to supply a steady stream of migrants to ships' captains. Wareing notes that procurers and the "Spirits" (25 n. 44) who worked for them almost always used persuasion to convince their marks of the benefits of selling their labor in the Americas, but he reveals how they frequently also turned to coercion, lying, and, in some cases, kidnapping to achieve their goals. The hierarchy in the trade becomes clear in this section as Wareing uncovers how...