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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

F. W. Grubb
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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).

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Social Science History , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , Spring 1994 , pp. 1 - 30
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Copyright © Social Science History Association 1994 

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