By the end of this lesson, make sure you have completed the readings and activities found in the Lesson 3 Course Schedule.
Dominant kinds of economies elevated certain types of labor relations over other types of labor systems in a given time in a given society.
Moral economies stressed labor relations of obligations and customs. All parties involved have rights and reciprocal duties.
Market economies that include the free wage labor system stress relations of exchange values. All parties involved have rights and contractual obligations.
A market economy-dominated society can have labor systems that are not labor markets.
The market economies that emerged as early as the fourteenth century in Western Europe and that evolved into capitalism from late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries profoundly clashed with civilizations rooted in moral economies.
Gender has shaped the world of work and played a significant role in the division of labor.
From a legal point of view, labor systems exist on a spectrum from no freedom to much social, political, and economic freedom.
Most English-speaking North American colonies began as commercial adventures that demanded considerable economic development through various forms of "non-freedom" and "restricted-freedom" labor.
Since the 1970s, the dominant viewpoint among most historians of work in America has been that the history of work in America is about the expansion of freedom.
For millennia, and even now, the vast majority of people worldwide have worked to survive, not to enjoy luxury goods or commodities that have nothing or little to do with survival, like buying frozen strawberries in the northern United States in January. Many men, women, and children around the world lived only one or two steps from frequent bouts with hunger and misery or existing in conditions that twenty-first century Americans now call poverty. People developed their most basic institutions such as marriage, family, and village as mechanisms for material, as well as psychological, survival.
Most of the population in the world lived in a "moral" economy prior to the entrenchment of the Industrial Revolution and wage/salary employment that began in earnest, first in the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century in the Western world, including the United States. The moral economies in the pre-industrial world were characterized by people who bundled their livelihoods, ways of making a living, in a series of obligatory relationships. Historically, the majority of toiling people were economically "unfree" because they could not choose a "career" or an "occupation," but they had rights (of some sort) and duties. Slaves, however, had no legal rights; they remained outside of civic life and human rights. From the ancient world to the modern world, slaves, in the words of historian-sociologist Orlando Patterson, live a "social death."
Across the globe, most people who lived hierarchical societies with moral economies divided into social classes, castes, or other socioeconomic arrangements. They toiled as serfs, indentured servants, peasants, apprentices, or laboring people. They worked for aristocrats, landlords, slaveholders, royal bureaucrats, government officials, merchants, or other social higher-ups. Many were duty-bound to "donate" their labor to the village, manor, fief, government (the state), church, hacienda, or some other institutional entity that they did not own. Most people remained fixed to their work-social relationships. For example, a man or a woman born a peasant stayed a peasant.
People who lived in societies not divided hierarchically into socioeconomic strata were, too, duty-bound to clans, bands, tribes, or villages. They worked not for themselves, but for their particular local social units. For example, in most Native American nations in North America, men and women worked to meet the needs or to satisfy the good of their clans and villages.
Interestingly, for many pre-industrial centuries, people lived in moral economies that shunned the concept of accumulating personal wealth. Those who accumulated wealth did so, not to get rich or comfortable, but to improve one's social status. Often they gained status within their social group. For example, in pre-modern India where people divided along lines of caste, a person of a lower caste could attain much wealth and receive admiration by people within her or his caste, but that person remained a member of that lower caste. A poor individual of an upper caste still harbor feelings of superiority over a very rich lower caste person. In medieval Europe, Christian authorities shunned, at least in theory, the practice of using wealth to generate more wealth, for instance, charging interest on a loan. They allowed Jewish financial dealers to engage in such activities and then blamed all Jews for getting rich. In another example, Native American societies shunned concepts of accumulation of personal wealth and private ownership of productive property. But when Native American and Western European civilizations collided, the Western world "won" in part because of its effective military firepower, efficient social organizations, and values that supported such concepts as the accumulation of personal wealth.
Note: historically speaking, productive property comprised of those assets, tools or whatever, that produced wealth, an income, or sustained a livelihood. For example, if you own an automobile, then you simply own a form of property that eats a hole in your pocketbook or wallet. If you turn your automobile into a taxicab, then you have productive property because your car as a taxicab becomes a way to produce an income or attain wealth.
Note: In the Western World, religion helped to reshape societal attitudes toward work. With Martin Luther and John Calvin as articulate spokesmen of the Protestant Reformation, Westerners began to see work as a calling by God and as a service to God. Luther argued that a person's vocation, including manual labor, was his calling and that all callings were equal in spiritual dignity. Calvin stated that God judges a person by his daily life and deeds. A person's success in his worldly endeavors was a sign from God and of possible inclusion as one of the Elect to spend eternity with God. People switched from condemning the act of accumulating wealth to condemning the act of accumulating wealth for the sake of wealth. The Protestant Reformation provided great ideological stimulus to the development of an emerging new economic order now known as capitalism. The stimulus is that the achievement of the greatest profit possible is a religious duty.
Luther, Calvin, and others claimed that work was more than an economic activity and that work was more than just fulfilling needs. They saw work as obedience to God, and not working, or unemployment, as a condition that Satan favors. Soon, Christians fashioned two views toward the unemployed. First, they criticized the unemployed for being unemployed because being jobless violates God's calling, and second, they cannot be sympathetic to the unemployed because jobless people tend to engage in a wide array of anti-social behavior, including stealing and begging. By the decades after 1700, the Western world saw that work has intrinsic value for its own sake.
Many colonial Americans, facing the daunting task of recreating England (or Western Europe) out of what they regarded as a wilderness in North America, thought able-bodied persons without jobs are lazy and unproductive.
The historical work alternative to a moral economy that emerged in the Western World was wage labor in an industrializing capitalist market economy. Wage labor has been around for millennia, but only with the rise and maturation of a modern market economy, especially with the modern, industrialized, capitalist market economy, did wage labor become the dominant condition of life for most individuals. People in market economies work because they need the money, but they are free to change their status and occupation or career.
Note: historical anthropologist Karl Polanyi argues that market economies are historical oddities. For millennia, before the transitional phase of the modern era, from 1500s to 1800s, most economies were moral economies, and most people lived in moral economies that stressed community, self-sufficiency, and justice and that encouraged trade, a primary way of attaining wealth, as a form of reciprocal gift-giving, not for profit.
Women in preindustrial Western societies found themselves in a curious position. Generally, they had fewer freedoms in the public sphere than women did in many preindustrial African and Native American societies. Preindustrial Western women had more freedoms than did women in some Asian societies. On average, women everywhere worked, and they worked harder and longer than the men did. Of course, like the men, women in the upper classes or the upper orders expended less physical energy at work than the women in the lower classes or strata did. Women of the upper strata employed servants or slaves to perform the drudgery. In some, mainly non-Western societies, women also engaged in economic production outside the household. For example, in many traditional African and Native American societies, women worked as the primary farmers, involved in planting, cultivating, and harvesting of crops or sold commodities at the local village- or city-square market.
Note: Americans' concept of social class or socioeconomic "class" took hold in public thought by mid-eighteenth century and replaced the concept of social "orders."
Most importantly, much economic production in preindustrial societies, including what became the Western world, occurred within the household, and women played an important, if not a key, role in household production. Women's status underwent a series of convoluted shifts during the rise and entrenchment of the Industrial Revolution that stripped practically all forms of economic production from the household, leaving women with practically no or severely weakened legal control or voice in the production or distribution of commodities and wealth.
Native Americans fashioned hundreds of tribes and nations that operated on some form of collectivity, cooperation, or communalism. Native Americans shared among themselves basic cultural patterns in regards to religious beliefs and land usage, but they divided by languages, customs, cultural expressions, and politics. Their views and practices of work and economic production and consumption diametrically opposed those of the chief colonizers of North America: the Spaniards, French, Dutch, English, and, in Alaska the Russians. (The other major European colonizer, the Portuguese, limited their conquests and colonization in the Americas to what is now Brazil.) Native Americans stressed community over individualism and made economic cooperation a central feature of their cultures and societies. Native Americans made the extended family the major unit of collectivity to conduct social, cultural, and economic forms of cooperation or communalism. Members of the extended family, with a number of related adults in the same household, shared a common store of provisions and tools, worked for the common benefit, and organized into larger cooperative units: clans and bands. These larger units made up the tribe. From the extended family up to the tribe, these collective units of all Native American societies did not develop the concept of ownership of private property in land and natural resources. In addition, these units commonly shared property so that every family, clan, or band owned at least one of every essential tool. For example, every family must own a hoe, bow and arrows, or harpoon.
North American Native American societies had diverse economies that shared some form of cooperation or communalism, whether pastoral or sedentary. Native American societies pursued two major forms of economic production and subsistence: hunting and gathering or horticulture (or agriculture). Some societies mixed the two forms of production, but all societies stress mutual aid and cooperation. Obviously, various societies have distinctive patterns. For example, the Lakota Sioux hunted the American bison (buffalo), the Chinook fished (gathered fish), and the Cherokee tilled the soil. The hunting and gathering tribes followed their food sources according to the seasons. Depending on the season or the food source, scattered families and bands joined into larger groups for cooperative production, using methods not possible in smaller units. Hunting and gathering Native Americans conducted their economic cooperation on a large scale with the introduction of two new technologies: the horse and the gun. The horse enabled hunters to chase larger and faster animals, for instance, the buffalo. The gun allowed hunters to kill with greater accuracy, frequency, and effectiveness. With the exception of several societies, like the Cahokia in what is now western Illinois, Native American nations had rudimentary specialization of labor. All adults, and children above a certain age, worked. Native Americans worked to sustain themselves; they had a subsistence economy. Whether the tribe hunted, gathered, trapped, or tilled, the elders made sure that no one went without food, clothing, and other things basic for survival. Rarely did they produce the type of economic surplus to invest for greater production and to attain wealth.
Native American societies did not substantively change their social and economic patterns of cooperation or communalism when they incorporated the horse and/or the gun into their lives. For many Native Americans, the men generally saw their status increased over women's status because the horse and the gun enhanced traditional male roles in economic production. The men also enhanced their standing if their tribe engaged in extensive trade with Europeans and European Americans largely because in trade transactions European and European American men preferred to deal with Native American men who often had direct responsibility for hunting and trapping. For example, in some Native American tribes in northeastern North America, the men trapped beavers and turned beaver skins into pelts that Europeans highly prized in exchange for European manufactured goods like pots and metal axes. Native Americans, however, retained their basic patterns despite changes in status that came with economic interactions with Europeans and European Americans.
Note: Native Americans faced a staggering loss of population, land, and a way of life as Europeans entrenched themselves in the Americas. Nonetheless, Native Americans, particularly those tribes that still owned their land, continued to shape their collectivity, cooperation, or communalism that had been central to their cultures, religions, and life.
European colonists introduced more diversity in terms of ethnicity, race, and labor systems to North America. French, Dutch, and Spanish colonial possessions in North America were diverse in ethnic and racial groups, but the governments of France, the Netherlands, and Spain did little to stimulate massive European migration. French, Dutch, and Spanish authorities encouraged landownership to rest largely in the hands of the state, the church, other institutions, and large landowners. The English government, however, offered incentives to private groups to engage in large-scale migration of English people to the Americas, mainly the Atlantic coast of North America. For all early European settlers, particularly those of limited means, close community-survival cooperation permeated the entire way of life in the colonies. "Settlers raised houses and barns, plowed fields, and built fences cooperatively and collectively. Mutual-aid events like corn-husking bees, log-rolling bees (to clear land), sewing and quilting bees, apple-paring bees, grain ring (threshing), bull rings (slaughtering), and ship launchings also served as social structures and gatherings that welded together the fabric of the working community of settlers in the same way that similar gatherings did among the Native peoples." Colonists everywhere widely practiced "barter and labor exchanges. . . . Money was scarce and in many areas used only sporadically, making early country stores mostly barter centers. . . . Cooperation, not competition, resounded as the dominant chord across" North America."
In terms of history of work in America, among the colonial powers, the Spaniards and the English made the greatest changes in social relations between Native Americans and the colonists. The Spaniards enacted laws to coerce Native Americans to work for colonial governments, landowners, and the church. Spain issued community land grants to groups of ten or more married settlers to maintain large sections of common lands, ejidos, set aside for the use of the entire community. These ejidos were for communal use for pasturing, watering, wood gathering, and/or hunting. The authorities also issued grants to found new towns with common lands for use by all townspeople. They made land grants to Indian pueblos as a way to confirm such Native Americans' ancient rights to their lands after the Indians recognized the sovereignty of the Spanish Crown.
The English migrated in substantial numbers to their North American colonies largely because of major shifts that occurred in landownership, land use patterns, and labor demands in England. Between 1500 and 1750, England evolved haphazardly from a feudal to a mercantilist and later to a capitalist and industrializing society. England transformed from a moral economy to a market economy of both rural (agricultural) and urban (industrial) capitalism. From the fifteenth century into the eighteenth century in England (as opposed to Great Britain, the union of England, Scotland, and Wales, which was accomplished officially in the early-seventeenth century), many aristocrats, the chief landowners after the royal family, decided to convert their lands from agriculture to the much more lucrative animal husbandry, particularly raising sheep for wool. They transformed much of rural England from a land of yeomen (an old term for freeholders or independent farmers) and peasants to landless rural proletarians. (Another name for wageworkers, proletarians are working people who do not own productive property from which to make a livelihood.) The process of land conversion, the enclosures, deprived many yeomen and peasants of a livelihood. The process did not happen peacefully. Occasionally, rebellions flared in various regions of the nation where the soon to be or already landless men and women destroyed fences, killed livestock, or fought the local militia. The aristocratic landowners, however, held the upper hand. They allowed some rural proletarians to remain on the land as agricultural laborers and forced many others to migrate to cities like London where they scrambled for paid employment, or if they were fortunate, to become apprentices or even self-employed artisans. The authorities showed much displeasure, if not hostility, toward an expanding population of urban, wage-earning working people because the landless lived outside of a moral economy, unbound by traditions and reciprocity of duties and responsibilities. The authorities passed numerous laws regulating wages and mobility of the landless and meted out severe punishment for crimes that most twentieth- and twenty-first-century Americans would regard, at best, as misdemeanors. Many landless laborers willingly took the dangerous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to work even as indentured servants in the colonies. They left behind the England of hunger, high food prices, crime, chronic underemployment and unemployment, subsistence wages, harsh labor laws that regulated wages and that forbid leaving jobs without the employer's permission, and compulsory labor for all able-bodied men, women, youth, and even children. The landless who left England (and other European nations) hoped to find opportunities in the North American colonies.
The English migrated in substantial numbers to their North American colonies also because England's expanding market economy needed colonies. Rulers, aristocrats, land speculators, investors, and bankers planned on England extracting natural resources from and selling its manufactured goods to its colonies. Protestant-dominated England first targeted Catholic Ireland as its first colony. From the sixteenth century into the nineteenth century, Ireland's Catholics, especially those who were peasants, paid a heavy price as colonial subjects living under English rule. Interestingly, most colonists came from Protestant Scotland rather than from England. They settled mainly in Ulster (Northern Ireland) where they treated the Catholic Irish as outsiders in their own country. The English, however, saw more opportunities for colonization projects in North America than in Ireland. They noticed that North America was less populated per square mile than Ireland was and that North America's indigenous population was more vulnerable to military and diplomatic pressures than were the Catholic Irish who entertained the possibility of receiving assistance from England's two largest enemies, Catholic Spain and Catholic France. More importantly, the authorities and others who hoped to get rich quickly saw colonization of North America as a convenient dumping ground for the nation's many tens of thousands of landless, urbanizing proletarians. Many of these landless working people went to North America, especially to the Mid-Atlantic and Chesapeake colonies, where they labored as indentured servants or as prison laborers.
While the Spaniards conquered Native American societies that had large populations and organized central governments, the English conquered Native American societies that had small population densities and that lacked centralized governments. The English wanted to control Native American labor power, but they failed to do what the Spaniards did largely because eastern North American Native Americans had no social and ideological organization to exploit nature beyond subsistence economic activities. So in some cases the English stopped trying to harnass Native American labor power, and in other cases the English worked to develop amiable, working relationships, especially centered on trade, with Native Americans. William Penn and the Quakers who founded Pennsylvania were among the few groups of colonists who cultivated amicable relations with Native American tribes and nations in what is now the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The English authorities also "invited" Europeans of other ethnicities and nationalities to immigrate to the colonies in order to develop North America as rapidly as possible. The English also absorbed the Dutch colony of New York and a Swedish colony in Delaware. The English needed a large supply of cheap labor from a source other than from North America and Europe. They realized the difficulties of enslaving or coercing Native Americans on their own lands and of pushing too many low-income English men and women to the colonies when the authorities needed many of them to serve in the military, labor in workhouses, or to bear the next generation of English people.
With the exception of the Russians, European colonizers brought enslaved Africans of many nationalities to the Americas to perform the arduous labor that created and expanded the economic wealth of the colonies for the colonial powers. In fact, before 1800, more Africans than Europeans came to the Americas. European colonial rulers used the labor of enslaved Africans to open the Americas to economic exploitation and development. Persons financing or taking part in colonial adventures, with few exceptions, exhibited most interest in extracting wealth from natural resources and from the labor of enslaved Africans, coerced or enslaved Native Americans, and indentured Europeans. In the thirteen English-speaking colonies along the Atlantic littoral of North America, rulers, aristocrats, merchants, and other affluent persons used various labor systems to gain wealth. They had no idea that these work relations made possible the development of a structural foundation and ideological framework of labor that in time defined much of what is now the United States.
Note: Most slaves happened to be Africans or descendants of Africans. Some Native Americans became slaves, but colonists quickly shipped most enslaved Native Americans to the West Indies. Some upper class Englishmen talked about enslaving poor Europeans. In fact, in the 1640s, Oliver Cromwell, who led the armies of the Parliament of England to victory in a civil war against the King, sent at least thirty thousand Catholic Irish peasants into slavery in the Caribbean. English and other European rulers and opinion-makers, however, decided for a variety of reasons, including fears of destabilizing their own and powerful neighboring nations, not to enslave poor Europeans. They found ways to turn the poor and the unfortunate into indentured servants.
Note: Historian Philip Curtin performed statistical research of data compiled between 1450 and 1870. He published the results of his research in 1969, stating that the absolute minimum number of enslaved Africans who reached the Americas was 9,566,000. Curtin admitted that his estimates could be off by as much as 50 percent, meaning that perhaps 14,200,000 enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas. Only 4.2 percent, or at least 400,000, of the 9,566,000 went to North America. Of the rest, at least 40 percent of enslaved Africans went to the West Indies, at least 37 percent landed in Brazil, and the remainder ended their forced immigration in Mexico, Central America, and Spanish-speaking South America.
Note: As Howard Lamar, Richard S. Dunn, and a host of other historians have shown, enslaved Africans took their place working alongside of European indentured servants and Native Americans who were either bonded or enslaved. The vast majority of enslaved Africans worked as producers of cash crops, especially the very valuable but extremely labor-intensive sugar cane, which was the chief crop in the West Indies and Brazil and which demanded the labor of 70 percent of enslaved Africans.
The thirteen North American English colonies came into existence to enrich European royalty, high-level government bureaucrats, merchants, entrepreneurs, and bankers. With the major exception of the Puritan settlements in New England, the English colonies were primarily business enterprises known as plantations. (For instance, the official name of the state of Rhode Island is "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.") Although common people formed collective, cooperative, communal, or community work relations in the thirteen colonies, such colonial endeavors were most extensive and developed in New England. The colonies also served as a beacon for Europeans of middling, laboring, and peasant backgrounds who hoped for material and social advancement and freedom from feudal or other moral economic obligations that they regarded as onerous. Colonial investors and authorities conceived and structured the colonies in such a way that obliterated Native American patterns of labor, that slowly embedded the slave trade and slavery as crucial components of colonial economies, and that took little notice of the aspirations of European yeomen (independent or free small farming people) and indentured servants.
The English-speaking Atlantic North American colonies evolved into a cluster of established, if not always stable, societies. They varied enormously in regional diversity, including demography, topography, economy, social hierarchy, political structures, and settlers' motivations, expectations, and experiences. The English established a variety of labor systems and had much specialization of labor. The English Atlantic North American colonies divided into southern and northern colonies. The southern colonies, first the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Virginia and Maryland, than later South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia, began as commercial ventures. They had highly pronounced social hierarchies encompassing Europeans, Africans, and, for a few decades, Native Americans. These colonies had labor systems built upon cultivation of cash crops and the distribution of much of the wealth and power to the upper social strata, especially to the planter elite. (A planter is another name for a plantation owner.) The northern colonies consisted of the New England colonies of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and the Middle Atlantic colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. These northern colonies had economies not centered on cash crops. They evolved into societies with some slaves and many free laborers, yeomen, and indentured servants. New England had a pronounced labor system based on family units. All colonies had labor systems characterized by harsh conditions and coercion.
Artisan and free wage labor, indentured servitude, and slavery coexisted in the southern colonies. In the seventeenth century, indentured servants and landless common laborers comprised the large majority of people, including a significant number of Africans and their descendants. Much to the dismay of planters, merchants, government officials, and other members of the English southern colonial elites, white and black laboring people shared many things and engaged in much camaraderie. A series of events in the latter half of the seventeenth century, like the Bacon Rebellion in 1676 in Virginia that challenged the planter elites, convinced the authorities to change relations between white and black working people of the lower orders or classes. The authorities structured a racial hierarchy overlaying a social hierarchy and turned white laboring people into a buffer group between the elites who were overwhelmingly English planters and merchants and black laboring people who were mainly slaves. Hence, the elites continued to exploit the labor power of black and white working people. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, while some white colonists were planters, merchants, yeomen, artisans, many white colonists lived as indentured servants or free, propertyless common laborers, but nearly all black colonists were slaves.
Note: Edmund Morgan, Theodore Allen, and other historians of colonial Virginia see the Bacon Rebellion of 1676 as a turning point when the planter elites began to rely more on slavery, not indentured servitude, as the key labor system to generate wealth. The elites "racialized" the labor system. Morgan sees the beginnings of a major paradox: racism and slavery existing in what later became a nation that proclaimed liberty while a certain segment of the population remained enslaved. Allen sees the elites using white laboring people as a weapon of social control that worked to bind white people of all social classes into a "white race," that forced white working people to identify with the interests of the white elites and to assist the elites in preventing enslaved workers from rebelling against their masters.
The northern colonies also had artisan and free wage labor, indentured servitude, and slavery. The northern colonies had a diverse social system consisting of large landowners, merchants, yeomen, artisans, apprentices, common wage laborers, landless tenant farmers, indentured servants, and slaves. Their economic systems featured family-based farming, small-scale craft production, and commercial and maritime ventures mainly in urban and small-town seaports. The New England colonies developed a high level of homogeneity based on common Puritan origins, family-based farms, craft production, and small town democracy limited to property-owning men. New York (the conquered Dutch colony of New Amsterdam) retained a system of large manorial estates with their feudal-like landlord-tenant relations dominating rural life. Pennsylvania owed its origins to Quaker toleration of cultural and religious diversity that encouraged widespread distribution of landownership and power to farmers and artisans.
By 1750, colonial English-speaking America was a stratified world not overly burdened by recurring famines or incessant class warfare. The rhythms of work were not measured by the clock or labor discipline, but by traditions rooted in pre-modern and preindustrial practices. Slaves and indentured servants, however, were governed by labor discipline and regimentation. The colonies possessed artisans, journeymen, apprentices, free wage laborers, indentured servants, and slaves; all worked in a wide range of occupations. Many worked, for instance, as agriculturalists: agricultural laborers, tenant farmers, or farmers. Many engaged in, for example, shipbuilding, brewing, flour milling, cooperage (barrel making), tanning, saddler, brickmaking, weaving, sawing, tailoring, staymaking (making strips to stiffen garments like corsets), baking, iron manufacturing, butchering, chairmaking, candlemaking, fishing, merchant shipping, carpentry, masonry, shoemaking, and ropemaking. In fact, shipbuilding was a major industry, employing numerous craftsmen, including caulkers, shipwrights, smiths, joiners, and sailmakers. Artisans were masters over apprentices and sometimes journeymen. Artisans, apprentices, and journeymen shared a value system and most likely shared civic duties and recreational activities. Women worked alongside their husbands or male relatives in many of the above-mentioned occupations in workshops or other worksites or performed many of such tasks in their homes.
Laboring people did not have an easy work life in English-speaking North America. Most working people were free farming people, artisans, apprentices, indentured servants, slaves, and others who worked outside of a wage system. Free wage laborers remained a fraction of the total population of colonial working people, and many of them were temporary (a few months or a few years) rather than permanent wage earners. Of course, slaves and indentured servants had little, if any, respite. Most free wage working people had to contend with employers who sought wage regulations over price regulations. They faced employers and others who argued that high wages were temptation to insolence, laziness, violence, and vice. Still, free wage laborers received higher wages in colonial America than workers did in Europe. The authorities and members of the upper classes wanted laboring people to dress in clothing and to act in ways appropriate for lower-class status. In seventeenth-century colonial America, authorities often punished anyone, age twelve or older, accused of vagrancy or idleness by whipping. In the eighteenth century, authorities frequently forced or sentenced vagrants, unwed mothers, the unemployed, and orphans to serve a time at labor in workhouses. Comparatively speaking, laboring people in colonial America, however, remained better off than their counterparts did in Europe.
Native American and European societies functioned through the labor of men and women working in order to survive. Native Americans often worked for the good of the community. Some European colonists worked for themselves and their families in some form of collective, cooperative, or communal relationships and just as many, if not more, labored for the elites. In the colonies, the elites and successful artisans and yeomen experienced some comfort and economic independence. The vast majority of colonists, however, endured hardships and economic insecurity or even economic dependency. In addition, by the middle of the eighteenth century, people witnessed widening economic disparities as some became richer while many became poorer. Social tensions mounted within and among the colonies and between the colonies and Great Britain. Many colonists sought various ways to resolve their problems in the ten years preceding the Battles of Lexington and Concord (1775).
In general, pre-industrial people worked hard, long hours, usually in very dangerous conditions, often without anything approaching what twenty-first century Americans consider large machinery and laborsaving devices. Their tools and machinery were handheld or small items that fit in a room of a house. People who owned their own tools and machinery, especially if such implements were small, had greater opportunity to control, if not own, their own means of producing and making a living. The large tools were machines like windmills, furnaces, forges, watermills, handlooms, printing presses, sailing ships, and so forth. Individuals who owned large tools and machinery are more likely to have others working for them.
Preindustrial people lacked concepts such as the workweek and fixed daily or weekly working hours. With the exception of slaves, prisoners, and other coerced individuals, most people worked when they had to work. Paradoxically, many working people in many preindustrial societies with moral economies worked fewer days than working people do in modern industrial societies, including most Americans in twenty-first-century "postindustrial" United States. For example, if inhabitants in today's hunting and gathering societies express disbelief to learn that people in modern societies work far beyond an average of twenty hours a week, then one can imagine what hunting and gathering people of yesteryear might think of modern people laboring for forty or sixty or more hours a week.
One of the most significant underlying issues in this lesson essay is the meaning of freedom in the world of work. To what extent do most twenty-first century Americans have control over their work or final decision-making authority on their jobs. In other words, how many people call their jobs their own jobs? How many Americans are CEOs, owners, or bosses of their own careers or jobs? The bottom line is that (most) people have to work in order to survive. Yet, how free are they when they own their own jobs or when they work for someone else?
Anderson, Virginia deJohn. New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century.
Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America.
Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800.
Bolster, W. Jeffrey. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail.
Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia.
Countryman, Edward. Americans: A Collision of Histories.
Davidson, Basil. West Africa before the Colonial Era: A History to 1850.
Fischer, David Hackett. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America.
Gallay, Alan, Indian Slavery in Colonial America.
Herndon, Ruth Wallis, Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America.
Horn, James. Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth Century Chesapeake.
Innes, Stephen, ed. Work and Labor in Early America.
----------. Labor in a New Land: Economy and Society in Seventeenth Century Springfield.
Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England.
Knight, Frederick C., Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850.
Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origin of American Identity.
Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia.
Morgan, Kenneth, Slavery and Servitude in Colonial North America: A Short History.
Nash, Gary B. The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution.
Norton, Mary Beth. Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society.
Rediker, Marcus. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750.
Reis, Elizabeth. Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England.
Richter, Daniel K. The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization.
Sundue, Sharon Braslaw, Industrious in Their Stations: Young People at Work in Urban America, 1720-1810.
Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870.
Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680.
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750.
Underdown, David. A Freedborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-Century England.
Vickers, Daniel. Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1830.
Weatherford, Jack. Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World.
Wood, Peter H., et al., eds. Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast.
Wrightson, Keith. English Society, 1580-1680.