Captured Consent

‘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

Sonia Tycko is Lecturer in the History of Labor at the University of Edinburgh. She held the Kinder Junior Research Fellowship at St. Peter’s College and the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University. This is her first book.