ABSTRACT
The category of masterlessness helped give shape to an economic problem: how to reorganize the British economy around wage labor. But it also helped articulate a social problem, denoting categories of person who defined the outside of civil society for those inside it. This chapter discusses works by Defoe, Smollett, Wollstonecraft, Blake, William Earle, and others in order to examine the way narratives of masterlessness transformed into narratives of unemployment over the course of the eighteenth century. This chapter looks at dispossessed figures such as the servant, the pirate, the vagrant, the thief, the orphan, and the enslaved person.
