indentured servant

plural indentured servants

1. historicalA debt bondage worker who is under contract of an employer for a specified period of time, in exchange for transportation, food, drink, clothing, lodging, and other necessities.

   Like the others, however, he owed the contractual time to his master, who could sell the indentured servant, along with any debts owed by the servant, to someone else.

   2015, Gwyn Campbell, Alessandro Stanziani, editors, Bonded Labour and Debt in the Indian Ocean World, Routledge, →ISBN

   3 more examples

   He traced back to Alfred Standing, an indentured servant, or slave if you please, who was transported from England to the Virginia plantations in the days that were even old when the youthful Washington went a-surveying in the Pennsylvania wilderness.

   1915, Jack London, chapter 1, in The Star Rover

   Probably the best known of these was John Harrower, whose journal provides a fascinating insight into the life of a schoolmaster and indentured servant in late colonial Virginia.[…]He arrived in London virtually destitute and, unable to find work, soon contracted to work as an indentured servant in Virginia as a means of escaping unemployment and poverty.

   2004, David Dobson, Scottish Emigration to Colonial America, 1607–1785, University of Georgia Press, →ISBN, page 149

   The book detailed how the Irish, who had first come to North America as indentured servants and were reviled by the more settled populations of English and Dutch Americans, became, by the mid-19th century, accepted as white.

   2019 November 12, Sewell Chan, “Noel Ignatiev, scholar who called for abolishing whiteness, dies at 78”, in Los Angeles Times

   Synonyms: nexus