ABSTRACT
Fellow historian John Wareing concurs with Galenson's assessment, adding that indentured servitude became the 'backbone of the whole migratory movement in colonial times'. Indentured servitude is significant not only for its centrality to labor history in colonial America but also because it raises important theoretical questions about slavery and freedom. As John Donoghue notes, 'almost all scholars of the English Atlantic' still 'limit their conceptualization of colonial slavery to the perpetual bondage endured by Native Americans and Africans'. This approach largely ignores indentured servitude, either dismissing it as an anomaly or accounting for it as merely another version of contractual labor imported from England. The combination of the inadequacy of eighteenth-century literary depictions of indentured servitude and the insight to be gained by viewing indentured servitude through the lens of Patterson's contemporary theoretical framework leads author to examine in this chapter a highly realistic contemporary literary depiction of eighteenth-century indentured servitude: Sally Gunning's recent historical novel Bound.
