Colonial Labor Systems & Law

The labor discipline systems of British colonial North America, slave and free, set the conditions of social and legal development for half a millennium. We consider how they began, and how the law grew with them.

Readings

Access materials on the Course Readings page.

Assigned

George Lee Haskins, Law and Authority in Early Massachusetts (1968), chapters 3 to 7

Eben Moglen, Settling the Law (1993), The Law of Settlement: Land Law and the Manors

E. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), pp. 108-180

Suggested

Notes and Materials

Projects

Wikipedia Article on Property Law in Colonial New York

Transcript