Justin Roberts University of Kansas Department of History Lawrence KS U.S.A.
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Anna Suranyi, Indentured Servitude: Unfree Labour and Citizenship in the British Colonies. Montreal QC , Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021. xiv + 278 pp. (Paper US $ 37.95)
One of the implicit questions often asked in studies of indentured servitude is how servitude differed from slavery. The debate over this question, waged since the seventeenth century, has sometimes spilled out beyond academia. Arguments that equate indentured or convict servitude with slavery have “persistently appear[ed] in popular culture” (p. 6), where we can see a proliferation of social media memes identifying servants in the British American colonies, especially the Irish, as White slaves. Indentured Servitude explicitly counters such “false narratives.” In this deeply researched study, Anna Suranyi argues that servants in the British colonies were vulnerable, exploited, and abused, but they were also increasingly accorded “civil and contractual protections” (p. 14) as subjects—protections that slaves were denied. Suranyi sees subjecthood as effectively synonymous with citizenship. By highlighting this critical distinction between slaves and servants, she makes an important intervention in these debates, which have largely focused either on whether servants were sold as chattel like slaves or on the degree to which servitude was voluntary.
Indentured Servitude is a rich social history, offering remarkable insight into the lived experience of servitude. It is based on a wide array of sources, but Suranyi focuses on court records, key resources for tracing the lives of the underclasses. Through court records from both Britain and its colonies, she is able tease out the texture of everyday life while, at times, conveying the voices of indentured servants through their testimony. These court records are particularly useful for exploring points of contention between servants and their masters. Suranyi shows that servants used courts to assert their rights of subjecthood and that the courts sometimes acknowledged those rights.
The book is organized, for the most part, in thematic categories of perspective (contemporary criticisms and promotions of indentured servitude), experience (commodification of servants, physical abuse, or runaway attempts), or identity (indentured women or indentured children). Suranyi clearly demonstrates how vulnerable servants were to “violence, overwork, and neglect by their masters” (p. 97), especially indentured women and children. The odds were stacked against servants in court, but Suranyi consistently reminds readers that the exploitation of slaves was worse: “While servants existed in an ambiguous category between dependents and chattel, slaves definitely occupied the latter category” (p. 110) and there was an “increasing distinction between servants and slaves over the seventeenth century” (p. 13).
The thematic organization of Indentured Servitude helps to immerse readers in the lived experience of servitude, but it flattens differences across space and time. Suranyi maintains that there was increasing recognition over time of “servants as rights-bearing members of society” (p. 125), and that the neglect of servant rights was worse in the Caribbean islands than on the mainland. The claims themselves are certainly believable but the thematic organization of her book makes it difficult to clearly demonstrate those variations. Her many fascinating examples of servants fighting for their rights in court seem to leap episodically out of the past, too often disconnected from a timeline, entrenched in monolithic categories of experience and identity. The book could have more precisely articulated both when and why change occurred. The arguments about subjecthood are most cogently expressed in the introduction and conclusion. Citizenship becomes a framing device for the study, but the central thesis gets buried in chapters addressing the lived experiences and perspectives of servitude.
Suranyi articulates her argument about the difference between the continental colonies and the Caribbean most clearly in the conclusion, where she states, unequivocally, that “Indentured servants were the most protected in the continental colonies and … Caribbean colonies … generally provided the least recognition of rights and recourse to legal relief” (p. 196). She follows these summations with an intriguing but somewhat muted speculation about the long-term significance of that geographic difference, suggesting that the experience with indentured servitude helped mainland colonists to understand themselves “as independent actors and possessors of individual rights that required legislative acknowledgment” (p. 197). This process was a factor—albeit not the only factor—in shaping “the new conceptions of nationalism and citizenship that arose in the American colonies in the late eighteenth century” (p. 197).
Overall, Indentured Servitude deserves to be widely read. It is grounded in painstaking and careful archival research, and Suryani’s focus on the subjecthood of servants—however buried it might be in the central chapters—is important. The evidence she gleans from court records captures servants’ lived experiences in ways that few books have, but with that payoff comes some vagueness about the nature of geographical variations and change over time.