Reinventing Free Labor: Immigrant Padrones and Contract Laborers in North America, 1885-1925

1996 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 848 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gunther Peck
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
Contract Laborers

The Disappearance of Organized Markets for European Immigrant Servants in the United States: Five Popular Explanations Reexamined

1994 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. W. Grubb
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
British North America ◽  
American Economy

Organized markets for European immigrant servants in North America began in Jamestown around 1620 and ended in the ports of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans around 1820. For two centuries these markets survived, even flourished, in spite of numerous wartime interruptions, political revolutions, depressions in the transatlantic shipping market, cyclical recessions in the American economy, and competition from both slave and native-born free labor. During the eighteenth century roughly half of the European emigrants to British North America entered servitude to pay for their transatlantic passage (Galenson 1981; Grubb 1992b).

Rock Oil, Civil War, and Industrial Slavery Interrupted

2019 ◽  
pp. 214-255
Author(s):  
Jeremy Zallen
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Civil War ◽  
North America ◽  
Coal Mining ◽  
Center Of Gravity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
Organized Violence ◽  
Industrial Slavery ◽  
Capital Intensive

This chapter examines how the contingently timed and combined onslaught of Pennsylvania petroleum and the Civil War radically reoriented the possibilities and geographies of light in North America. On the eve of war, free-labor western Pennsylvania and industrial-slavery western Virginia were both poised to capture and launch fossil fuel revolutions in power and light. This chapter uses business, court, and military records along with newspapers and trade journals to explore how one of these revolutions—that based on free-labor and ownership of a mineral liquid “distilled by nature free of charge”—came to triumph over the other—that based on industrial slavery and capital-intensive coal oil—and how that triumph was understood then and subsequently as an inevitable stage of “progress.” As military clashes interrupted and destroyed turpentine camps, whaleships, and southern coal mining, the reservoirs of American light shifted their center of gravity markedly northward and westward. A period of widely increased access to illuminants, it was also a time of deepening monopoly control over the means of light. This chapter explores the centrality of political economy and organized violence to any true understanding of the histories of labor, energy, and technology.

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