Legal History Law Monthly List of Titles published under HK and UK Jurisdictions

Captured Consent: Contract Labor in English Charity, Colonization, and War, 1600–1700

By Sonia Tycko
New Arrival Cambridge University Press February 2026

Specifications

ISBN-13
9781009581899
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Publication
February 2026
Format
Hardback
Jurisdiction
U.K. ? Countri(es) for reference only

Details

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 prisoners 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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of illustrations
Abbreviations
Introduction

Part I. Written Consent:
1. Agreement to apprenticeship under indenture
2. Consent in colonial service indentures

Part II. Presumed Consent:
3. Enticement in servitude and sex
4. Indentured servant recruitment disputes in court

Part III. The Edge of Consent:
5. Dishonorable coercion in military impressment
6. 'Willing' prisoners of war at work

Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
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