UC Irvine

The conception of children as historical subjects has been a long time coming in the field of history, starting with authors like Philip Greven arguing that children must be considered as more than just extensions of family units. Despite acknowledgement of the importance of children in colonial history, there has been little work done on the ways that attempts to maneuver children through economic and social life reflected parental attitudes about childhood. Little work has been done to address the frequent dearth of research into how children's identities were purposefully constructed by indenture in the colonial period. My paper addresses these issues by taking a close look at the historical archive of New York's indenture records at the turn of the 18th century. In particular, this paper looks for narrative threads as well as changing attitudes towards indenture across time. I argue that adults, both parents and indenturers, used indenture as a means to shape and control the next generation of New York by strengthening class dynamics and ensuring citizen status for children engaged in indenture contracts. This project sheds light on the use of indenture to construct childhood and accomplish a wide range of social normalizations from reinforcing contemporary gender rolls to creating a pseudo-parenthood through the master-servant relationship.