Chinese, Mandarin

Spanish

English

Hindi

Arabic

Portuguese

Bengali

Russian

Japanese

Punjabi

German

Javanese

Malay

Telugu

Vietnamese

Korean

French

Marathi

Tamil

Urdu

Turkish

Italian

Chinese, Yue / Cantonese

Thai

Gujarati

Chinese, Jin

Chinese, Min Nan

Persian, Dari

Persian, Western

Polish

Pashto

Kannada

Chinese, Xiang

Malayalam

Sundanese

Hausa

Odia

Burmese

Chinese, Hakka

Ukrainian

Bihari, Bhojpuri

Tagalog

Yoruba

Bihari, Maithili

Uzbek

Sindhi

Amharic

Fula

Romanian

Oromo

Igbo

Azerbaijani

Chinese, Gan

Dutch

Kurdish, Central

Kurdish, Northern

Kurdish, Southern

Malagasy

Lahnda, Saraiki

Nepali

Sinhalese

Chittagonian

Zhuang

Khmer

Turkmen

Assamese

Madurese

Somali

Marwari

Bihari, Magahi

Haryanvi

Hungarian

Chhattisgarhi

Greek, Modern

Chewa

Dakhini

Akan, Twi

Akan, Fante

Kazakh

Chinese, Min Bei

Sylheti

Zulu

Czech

Kinyarwanda

Marwari, Dhundhari

Haitian Creole

Chinese, Min Dong

Ilocano

Quechua

Kirundi

Swedish

Hmong

Shona

Uyghur

Hiligaynon

Mossi

Xhosa

Belarusian

Balochi

World History 2

<OpenstaxParagraph>
	While slavery and <OpenstaxTerm>serfdom</OpenstaxTerm> disappeared from the industrialized world in the nineteenth century, other means remained for securing a long-term or permanent <OpenstaxTerm>labor</OpenstaxTerm> force for both agricultural and industrial production. Two such systems are <OpenstaxTerm>contract labor</OpenstaxTerm> and <OpenstaxTerm>debt bondage</OpenstaxTerm>. Contract labor, a system in which people sign contracts promising to perform work in exchange for a fee, still exists today. Indentured servitude is a form of contract labor in which people pledge to work for an agreed period of time for an agreed form of compensation. Although indentured servants are not enslaved, while their contract is in force, their employers have nearly total control over them, and they are not allowed to leave their service. Debt bondage is a system in which a person who owes money works (or provides someone else to work) for the creditor until the debt has been repaid through labor. Indentured servitude and debt bondage are similar and were common in the later nineteenth century; they differ from slavery in that, theoretically, at a point in time the bondage will end.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	In the <OpenstaxTerm>United States</OpenstaxTerm>, indentured servitude had been common during the colonial period, and it was the means by which many Europeans obtained passage to North America. The practice had largely died out in the United States by the middle of the nineteenth century but still existed in a few places. In Hawaii, plantation owners used contract labor from <OpenstaxTerm>Portugal</OpenstaxTerm>, <OpenstaxTerm>China</OpenstaxTerm>, <OpenstaxTerm>Korea</OpenstaxTerm>, <OpenstaxTerm>Japan</OpenstaxTerm>, and the <OpenstaxTerm>Philippines</OpenstaxTerm> to grow their crops, especially sugarcane. Many Chinese immigrants also came to the United States as contract laborers. They were not working under a contract with their employer. Instead, they had agreed to work for one of their compatriots to pay for their passage to the United States. Many Chinese workers were taken abroad by the Six Companies, a Chinese-owned business formed to transport Chinese immigrants to North America, and they had to repay their debt to the company before they were allowed to return home.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	Other parts of the world also relied on various forms of contract labor once slavery had been abolished. During the nineteenth century, <OpenstaxTerm>Australia</OpenstaxTerm> depended on indentured laborers from the islands of the <OpenstaxTerm>Pacific</OpenstaxTerm>, such as the <OpenstaxTerm>Solomon Islands</OpenstaxTerm>, <OpenstaxTerm>Tuvalu</OpenstaxTerm>, <OpenstaxTerm>Samoa</OpenstaxTerm>, and the <OpenstaxTerm>Gilbert Islands</OpenstaxTerm> (now called <OpenstaxTerm>Kiribati</OpenstaxTerm>). A flourishing trade also provided Chinese and Indian laborers to work in Latin America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and European colonies in Africa. These laborers were underpaid, overworked, brutally disciplined, and given only enough food to allow them to work. Reports about their poor treatment convinced many industrialized countries to end participation in the trade. Britain prohibited its ships from carrying Asian laborers to <OpenstaxTerm>Cuba</OpenstaxTerm> and <OpenstaxTerm>Peru</OpenstaxTerm>, two of the main destinations. In 1874, <OpenstaxTerm>Portugal</OpenstaxTerm>, following Britain’s example, prevented the trade from being carried on in <OpenstaxTerm>Macao</OpenstaxTerm>, a Portuguese colony in Asia through which many Chinese laborers were shipped elsewhere in the world.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	Debt bondage was also a common source of labor in some parts of the world in the late nineteenth century. In the 1880s in <OpenstaxTerm>Japan</OpenstaxTerm>, faced with an economic depression that led many to bankruptcy and starvation, parents “rented” their children, especially daughters, to factories. The girls were provided with food and shelter, and money they earned was sent home to their parents. Daughters might also be hired out to brothels; dutiful ones might make the decision themselves to spare their parents the pain. In the <OpenstaxTerm>United States</OpenstaxTerm>, <OpenstaxTerm>debt bondage</OpenstaxTerm> was a common means by which southern farmers kept a labor force of African American people and poor White people at their disposal. It also trapped many Asian laborers who immigrated to South America, even after their contracts had expired.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	In some places, debt bondage was nearly impossible to escape. Sharecroppers and tenant farmers working other people’s land depended on the harvest for their income. In the time before the harvest, they purchased necessities like food on credit from a local store, which was usually owned by the landlord. They also often needed to purchase seed and use equipment owned by the landlord. When they sold their crops following the harvest, they repaid their debts. Often, the prices of goods and the interest charged by the store owner were so high that income from the harvest was insufficient to satisfy the workers’ debts, and the unpaid portion was added to the amount borrowed against the next harvest. Some employers paid their workers with scrip, a substitute for money that could be exchanged only at the store the employer owned; because they could not shop elsewhere, laborers had no choice but to go into debt. In Japanese brothels, the young women were not paid in scrip, but the cost of everything provided for them, including clothing and food, was recorded, and the women could not go free until they had repaid both the original sum exchanged for them and the total cost of their upkeep.
</OpenstaxParagraph>

10.3.2 Contract Labor and Debt Bondage

1 Understanding the Past

1.1 Developing a Global Perspective

1.1.1 World History as Preparation for Life After College

1.1.2 World History and Global Citizenship

1.1.3 Features of This Textbook

1.2 Primary Sources

1.2.1 Learning to Evaluate Documents and Images

1.2.2 Documentary Sources: Competing Narratives

1.2.3 Textual Sources: The Importance of Language

1.2.4 Hidden in History

1.3 Causation and Interpretation in History

1.3.1 Levels of Causation

1.3.2 Interpretation in History

2 Exchange in East Asia and the Indian Ocean

2.1 India and International Connections

2.1.1 The Mughal Empire

2.1.2 The Sultanate of Gujarat

2.1.3 The Rise of the Maratha Empire

2.1.4 European Colonialism

2.2 The Malacca Sultanate

2.2.1 The Rise of the Malacca Sultanate

2.2.2 European Malacca

2.3 Exchange in East Asia

2.3.1 Japan

2.3.2 China’s Dynastic Exchanges

2.3.3 Korea and Its Neighbors

3 Early Modern Africa and the Wider World

3.1 The Roots of African Trade

3.1.1 Saharan Trade Routes

3.1.2 The Spread of Islam

3.1.3 The Mali Empire

3.2 The Songhai Empire

3.2.1 The Rise of Imperial Songhai

3.2.2 The Reign of Askia the Great

3.2.3 The Decline of Songhai

3.3 The Swahili Coast

3.3.1 The Rise of the Swahili City-States

3.3.2 Slavery on the Swahili Coast

3.3.3 The Contest for the Swahili Coast

3.4 The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade

3.4.1 The Role of Kanem-Bornu

3.4.2 The Arrival of Europeans

3.4.3 The Later Trans-Saharan Slave Trade

4 The Islamic World

4.1 A Connected Islamic World

4.1.1 Politics and Religion in the Ummah

4.1.2 Islamic Trade Networks

4.1.3 Technology in the Islamic World

4.2 The Ottoman Empire

4.2.1 Culture and Society

4.2.2 Expansion, Revolutions, and Reform

4.2.3 Science and Technology

4.3 The Safavid Empire

4.3.1 The Rise of the Safavid Empire

4.3.2 Establishing Shi‘ism as the State Religion

4.3.3 Safavid Government and Culture

5 Foundations of the Atlantic World

5.1 The Protestant Reformation

5.1.1 The Origins of the Protestant Reformation

5.1.2 Calvinists, Anabaptists, and Anglicans

5.1.3 The Catholic Reformation and the Wars of Religion

5.2 Crossing the Atlantic

5.2.1 The Rise of Maritime Nations

5.2.2 The Columbian Exchange

5.3 The Mercantilist Economy

5.3.1 The Rise of Mercantilism

5.3.2 Mercantilism and the Expansion of Empire

5.3.3 Mercantilism and Its Critics

5.4 The Atlantic Slave Trade

5.4.1 Slavery and the Triangular Trade

5.4.2 African and North American Slavery

5.4.3 The Economics of Slavery

6 Colonization and Economic Expansion

6.1 European Colonization in the Americas

6.1.1 Spain’s Encomienda System

6.1.2 English Settlements in North America

6.1.3 French and Dutch Settlements

6.2 The Rise of a Global Economy

6.2.1 The Seven Years’ War

6.2.2 British Influence in India

6.2.3 China’s Dominance in Trade

6.2.4 Colonial Resistance and Revolution

6.3 Capitalism and the First Industrial Revolution

6.3.1 From Mercantilism to Capitalism

6.3.2 Mechanization

6.3.3 Marxism

7 Revolutions in Europe and North America

7.1 The Enlightenment

7.1.1 The Authority of Reason

7.1.2 Natural Rights

7.1.3 Social Contract Theory

7.2 The Exchange of Ideas in the Public Sphere

7.2.1 Public Debate and Dissent

7.2.2 The Republic of Letters

7.2.3 Academies, Universities, and Intellectuals

7.3 Revolutions: America, France, and Haiti

7.3.1 The American Revolution

7.3.2 The French Revolution

7.3.3 The Haitian Revolution

Question	Answer
a system in which people sign contracts promising to perform work in exchange for a fee	contract labor
a system in which a person who owes money works (or provides someone else to work) for the creditor until the debt has been repaid	debt bondage