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