100 years of servitude.

Beyond Metaphor: Battered Women, Involuntary Servitude and the Thirteenth Amendment

The health care professional as a modern abolitionist.

Health care professionals are in a unique position to identify and to assist victims of human trafficking. Human trafficking today occurs both domestically and globally. It manifests in many forms, including adult and child forced labor, involuntary domestic servitude, adult and child sexual slavery, involuntary servitude, debt bondage, and child soldiers. This article offers insight into moder...

On Voluntary Servitude and the Theory of Ideology

In 1996 I published On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology, a book on which I had been working for a number of years. The theory of ideology, as I understood it, seemed to me to be – or, at least, to have been until recently – the dominant response to what is a puzzling but frequently observed feature of political life: namely, that those who are maltreated – opp...

Bonded Labor and Serfdom A Paradox of Voluntary Choice

Among the oldest and most pervasive economic institutions are bonded labor and serfdom. While seemingly exploitative, both bonded labor and serfdom are often not imposed on the laborers but voluntarily chosen. It is generally the lack of suitable alternatives which makes workers opt for a life in servitude. This paper shows that the existence of these voluntary forms of servitude itself may res...

Migration and Human Capital: Self-Selection of Indentured Servants to the Americas

When contracting, European merchants could at least partially observe characteristics such as the health, physical strength, and education of indentured servants. These characteristics, unobservable to us, were likely to influence servitude duration, which is observable to us. We employ a switching regression model to analyze 2,066 servitude contracts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuri...