ABSTRACT
The New World held out the prospects of a better life to many Europeans. However, even by the eighteenth century the cost of transatlantic migration was still quite substantial. The price of ocean passage alone might easily have exceeded the value of half a year’s income for the typical British emigrant and the value of a year’s income for the typical German immigrant. 1 It should not be surprising then to find that many prospective emigrants could not meet the cost of passage from their accumulated savings. Throughout the colonial period many of these emigrants purchased passage to America by voluntarily selling some of their future labor, this being the only other asset at their disposal. Some emigrants became indentured servants by signing fixed-term future labor agreements before embarkation, exchanging this contract for transportation. Others borrowed the passage fare from their respective shippers pledging to sell themselves as servants in America, if necessary, to repay the loan. This process was known as redemptioner servitude. These institutions of immigrant servitude were the private market’s solution to financing the voyage of those who could not pay in advance. It gave the poorer part of the population the ability to finance moving from low-productivity areas to high-productivity areas, thereby improving their own welfare as well as the overall welfare of society. Without these labor markets it is unlikely that pre-nineteenth-century America would have been populated as fast or grown as rapidly as it did.
