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.

‘The parish poor, teens kidnapped to Barbados, impressed soldiers and prisoners of war: all gave their ‘free consent' to work for others. By searching the social realities lying underneath those words, Sonia Tycko rewrites the history of labor and contracting. ‘Free consent' was never free; status was contract.'

Paul Halliday - University of Virginia

‘Sonia Tycko offers a sophisticated and deeply researched examination of ‘consent' in coerced labour regimes of the seventeenth century, valuably historicizing a concept at the heart of modern liberalism.'

Krista Kesselring - Dalhousie University

‘Sonia Tycko's insightful and immaculately researched account of early modern labor contracts compels us to revise our fundamental assumptions about the relationship between consent and coercion, both then and now. A must-read for British, Atlantic, and imperial historians, but also lawyers, activists, or anyone who has ever heedlessly clicked through a terms-of-service ‘agreement.''

Philip J. Stern - Duke University