I spent this week at the library of Virginia, collecting data for a project I'm working on focusing on the indentured servant in court in 17th century colonial Virginia. In general I wished to get an idea of what kinds of legal disputes an indentured servant was most likely to end up in court over, either as plaintiff or defendant. With only 4 days to spend at the library, rooting through the microfilm rolls (which were not only quite dark and grainy, but also written in illegible 17th century chickenscratch) unfortunately showed itself to be unfruitful, so I ended up reading through many volumes of court abstracts compiled in the mid-20th century mostly by Episcopalian men of the cloth to whom I now owe a great deal. In 4 days of intensive reading and note-taking, I barely made it through three decades of records in York County. Would that I had a month and a half down there!

Without a doubt, the most common reason for an indentured servant to end up as an actor in a legal dispute was if the servant ran away. This is not surprising; I knew as much going in. With most arrivals in Virginia surviving for less than 10 years, and most indentures lasting a good portion of that time, serving out one's full term laboring in a field was probably an unappealing option to many. Runaways were typically assigned to serve their masters double the time they had run away, with more time added if their master had to spend tobacco in the process of recovering them (many goods and services in 17th century virginia were paid for in tobacco). Ocassionally they'd be beaten, and occasionally they would receive seemingly arbitrary sentences (like one servant who fled for 2 days and was assigned to serve for 151 extra days), but it's hard to assess these outlying cases because the abstracts only go into so much detail.

The cases that interested me the most were freedom suits. Yes, in the 17th century indentured servants could petition the court for their freedom, if the terms of their indentures were being violated. Most often, this occurred when a servant's master sought to keep them longer than the terms of their indenture. Courts were amazingly reliable at granting freedom to servants who could present sufficient evidence of their terms, either by producing the indenture itself, or through multiple reliable witnesses. Sometimes the courts would free a servant, only for their master to sail back to England, get the indenture, and return months later, forcing the servant back into bondage. Loosely related to this category were suits for freedom dues. In most indentures, at the end of a servant's term their master was to give them a suit of clothes and some corn, to help them get started as an independent person. Many masters were stingy about this, and once again courts were pretty reliable about awarding these to servants who could prove they were owed.

Those last two sets of cases are very interesting to me, because the indentured servitude system was so brutally exploitative and frequently corrupt. For example, in my research I came upon several cases of servants being beaten to death (and in one particularly grisly case, an abused servant woman's infant child had died, showing signs of being battered by her master) and masters walking away scott free. This is not exactly surprising, as courts were composed for the most part of wealthy landowners, who would be reluctant to punish other landowners for disciplining their servants. What is somewhat surprising is how willing they were to rule in favor of servants in the event of a contract violation. William E. Nelson, in The Common Law in Colonial America, spends a teensy bit of time on this topic. He argues that the Virginian elite figured no one would willingly sign an indenture if they didn't think their contracts would be honored, so they were all but forced to honor them in these court cases. I don't think I agree with this interpretation of reluctant landowners trying to cover their asses to ensure a steady flow of labor. I think there is a little more to be said about the English common law heritage and their understanding of contracts and their sanctity. But these thoughts are still forming and I need to do some more reading on English Common Law before I can make anything substantive out of them.

Another reason a servant might be brought to court (almost always a female servant) was the sin of fornication. Female servants who gave birth to bastard children were almost always sentenced to two extra years of service and 20 lashes with a whip. Frequently, we see their masters pay a fine of 500 pounds of tobacco to spare their servant the whipping, but in return she must serve another year in addition to the 2 she was already assigned. I can't peer into the soul of a 17th century Virginian landowner, but something tells me there was a little more than altruism at play when masters paid away a whipping. Also interesting is that as time goes on, we see more and more cases of servant women charged with "fornication with a negro," a sin that apparently did not require a pregnancy or bastard child to take someone to court for.

I'm by no means an expert on this topic, this is an undergraduate project after all, but this has definitely been a really interesting and rewarding research experience!

I'm preparing for my doctoral exams (first written is on Friday!) and wrapping up my reading. This morning I sat down to read a few essays in Natalie Davis's Society and Culture in Early Modern France, and "Rites of Violence" struck me in a far more personal way than I usually experience with academic history. Partly it's because Natalie Davis is fantastic, and all of her essays in this book are both evocative and provocative. But I was particularly struck by her observations that people act out religious violence (whether physical or verbal) according to the methods and roles their society prescribes. And often, religious violence is an appropriation of authority from officials the rioters think aren't fulfilling their duty. So in the years leading up to the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, Davis notes that religious rioters "can be seen as sometimes acting out clerical roles -- defending true doctrine or ridding the community of defilement in a violent version of priest or prophet -- and sometimes acting out magisterial roles." (164) And she notes that rioters generally had very little remorse as long as they maintained their religious convictions, in part because adhering to established rites of violence (those prescribed by church, state, and popular culture), they were able to both legitimize their actions and dehumanize their victims. It's food for thought - not least to consider the potential and the limits for transferring conclusions across chronological and cultural boundaries.

Does anyone know any good books on the Lebanese civil war?

If you listen closely, you can hear me weeping on account of having found a free PDF of An Introduction to Literary Chinese during my busiest possible week.

I have been researching the Irish Civil war for a week now and I am having a hard time finding primary sources, any suggestions? Also, what is your favorite book on the subject?

Starting Wilentz's Rise of American Democracy today. Wish me luck.

I am in search of newer monographs on Scandinavian culture - any time period and individual areas (as opposed to the "whole") are welcomed. Let me know if you've read anything outstanding. Thanks in advance.

I have recently been reading Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, the first of a critically-acclaimed science-fiction trilogy that has been compared with the works of Iain Banks (one of my favorite sci-fi writers). The comparison is an apt one; the themes she is interested in, and even her style of writing and emplotment, reminds me much of Banks (in a good way).

Without spoiling things, much of its plot (at least that I have read so far) revolves around how a (space-faring) colonial empire annexes new territories and assimilates them into the imperial system. It has made me think that it would be interesting to make a video game of sorts that was something along the lines of "Sim Colonial Administrator." There are so many games that are about expanding (through military action) a colonial empire. Very few that focus on running the local municipalities and dealing with the tensions that crop up there. In Civilization this generally involves just building a bunch of gardens and stadiums and occasionally imposing martial law, but the role is always that of the Emperor who sees cities primarily as just means of resource production and further expansion. In other games, one assumes the role of the oppressed, and fights some kind of revolution against the controlling power (e.g. Half-Life 2). But I'm not really aware of anything where you are the middle-man, the person whose job it is is to try and sort out an unpleasant situation, ideally for the best (but making morally compromised choices along the way).

I wonder if such a thing, carefully and sympathetically done by someone who knows a lot about colonial experiences (not myself at the moment), would be a useful teaching tool (either formal or informal) with regards to helping people (including myself) understand the tricky dynamics of such a thing, and the tricky position even a sympathetic administrator (much less the colonized people) would be put into.