Indentured Servitude

Since the seventeenth century, indentured servitude is a popular way new immigrants came to different parts of the world. The service developed itself into a global economic system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The concept of indentured servants became a historical significance by creating stronger social stratification in societies, mixing homogeneous societies with new immigrants, and creating power from the nation which supported these services.

Indentured servitude is where an immigrant goes to another country on a contract to work there for a certain amount of years. The system created stronger and much different view in social classes. For instance, Julius Eduard Muller Leiden is a photographer who took photographs that represent an obvious social stratification. In his first photograph, Leiden shows a plantation where the servants are told to stand for a picture. Within this portrayal, it illustrates the overcrowded situations, child labor, and an official in charge. The second picture shows a clearer depiction of an official or an overseer monitoring the labor of the servants. (Doc. 5) Leiden is presenting indentured servitude in a negative way for the misuse of people who are not contracted for slavery and hinting that there is a better way for individual and state’s wealth to be spread and expanded. These immigrants are to be contracted as if the person is a service. The head of the department in Great Britain’s indentured services creates a document where regulations, conditions, and other important details are listed. (Doc. 7) In the contact presented, the regulations and conditions do not seem as bad as the letter from Ramana, an indentured servant in South Africa. He or she claims to be mistreated by the overseer or the plantation owner. (Doc. Already, there is corruption in the system where the indentured servants are the ones who are affected negatively. The reason is the different social classes presented. The indentured servants are right above but not quite better than slaves. When immigration began, the low, middle, and high classes became more definite to societies.

Indentured servitudes made ethnicities move to different regions in the world. The scatter of people is prominent for today’s cultural diffusion and ethnic neighborhoods and towns. In the map, Principal Overseas Indentured Migrations, 1834- 1919, is created by a cartographer in the Americas because the Americas are centered showing ethnocentricity. The map shows the different routes and ways the different ethnicities were scattered among the world. (Doc. 3) The comparison between the centuries can be made more accurately if a map of the Indentured migration during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries was provided. Because there isn’t any information about the sixteenth and the early seventeenth century migrations, comparisons cannot be made between the two time periods, and the influences cannot be observed. David Northup is a professor in Boston College who composed a chart of estimates of where the cultures went during the mid- nineteenth through early twentieth centuries. The major countries who contributed the most to the indentured services are India, China, and Japan respectively. These different ethnic groups are put in the Caribbean, Pacific Islands, and even parts of Africa. (Doc. 4) The chart provided is not an accurate estimation for this is a secondary source from a professor from the late twentieth century. Instead the chart from a government official in 1949 is more accurately showing the slaves and Asian Indians in Mauritius during the mid- to the late- nineteenth century. As the years progress, the numbers of indentured servants rise as the number of slaves decrease slowly. (Doc. 6) Indentured servitude increased spread of cultures and was more preferred than slavery for the contracts and formal way of labor. To finalize the assumption made, the records of the population in territories of specific groups from indentured migration prove the scattering of ethnicities. The chart of percentages are from a government official and looks as if it is a census. The percentages vary from as little as nine percent to seventy-one percent. From the chart previously about Indians in Mauritius, by the mid-twentieth century the population was seventy-one percent Asian Indians. (Doc. 9)  As a result, the significance of the indentured servitude has a global effect on populations and where some cultures develop in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.