Sonia Tycko, Lecturer in History in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, has published Captured Consent: Contract Labor in English Charity, Colonization, and War, 1600–1700 (Cambridge University Press). It appears in the series Studies in Legal History, sponsored by the American Society for Legal History:
Consent has been celebrated as a guarantor of liberty and self-determination; however, its history suggests a different meaning. In this book, Sonia Tycko reconstructs the coercive role of contracts in early modern English labor. The long-term, long-distance, and high-risk nature of pauper apprenticeships, transatlantic indentured servitude, military conscription, and prisoner of war labor drove some English people to develop consent into a tool of labor coercion. Coercion could constitute valid consent for people whose social position, age, and gender fit the profile of natural laborers. Many subordinates experienced consenting – or the presumption of their consent – as a form of acceptance of, or even submission to, their position. This book reveals that early modern labor was one of the fields in which ideas of freedom of contract, voluntariness, and enticement developed.
--Dan Ernst
