debt peonage

a coercive form of labour whereby the labourer is tied to an employer or landholder through indebtedness. It was a common method of ensuring a labour supply in AGRARIAN SOCIETIES until the 20th-century, although in some areas of the THIRD WORLD the practice persists illegally. Various forms of indebtedness were found: landowners sometimes paid taxes for the peasantry, requiring their labour services until payment had been made; sometimes labourers became indebted through transportation costs, such as was the case with Chinese immigrants to the US in the 19th century, when they worked without pay until their transport costs had been deemed to be covered. At its most extreme individuals were never able to work off the initial or subsequent debt which may even have been passed on to descendants. In such cases debt slavery may be the more appropriate term. See PEASANTS, PEASANT SOCIETY, LATIFUNDIUM.

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It's a debt peonage system they are never able to extract themselves from," said James Early, a Brazil expert and former director of cultural heritage policy at the Smithsonian Institution and board member of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Brazil Backtracks on Loosening Slave Labor Rules After International Outcry

According to Fraga, the plight of debt peonage and crop liens characteristic of black sharecroppers in the US South did not entrap former slaves in northeastern Brazil to the same extent.

Crossroads of Freedom: Slaves and Freed People in Bahia, Brazil, 1870-1910

14) With knowledge of the lives of Africans, both enslaved and free, in colonial Costa Rica, would these West Indians have been better prepared for the historically sanctioned legalized hostility that faced them in the forms of debt peonage, abusive labor relations, living segregation, ID carnets and cedulas which, like the Apartheid system of the South, needed to constantly list, contain, number and hold accountable the "potential" of Blackness through policing and divide and conquer?

Carving Caribbean spaces in between: the life of Ruth Gourzong in 20th century Puerto Limon, Costa Rica

Buffeted by outsourcing, unemployment, underemployment, consumer and student debt peonage, underwater mortgages, and the rolling thunder of environmental/climate/resource crisis, the mass of Americans still lead lives of quiet desperation--and it remains mostly quiet because they are diverted from their gnawing anxieties and uncertainties by the toxic glitter of corporate culture, a ceaselessly dripping toxin that mollifies, numbs and stupefies.

Why the far left should support Sanders

Blast Trans-Atlantic slavery, debt peonage, the chain gang, labor exploitation, racial oppression, and land dispossession.

Blast South: Manifestos of southern vorticism

The ultimate expression of one human being's indebtedness to another was debt peonage and slavery, often violently enforced.

Time to rediscover the roots of Islamic finance?

While the influx of women into higher education since the 1980s is a notable feminist achievement, the "feminization" of academia has occurred alongside the gendered labor exploitation of students and faculty, and debt peonage, which is disproportionately high among women of color.

Trouble in the bastion of liberalism: academia can be an awful place

Now is the time to re-think and re-structure, to move toward a future model: one that values instruction, one that honors educational costs without inflating them, one that chooses to protect future student generations from the kind of debt peonage that is everywhere.

Why Cooper Union matters

Drawing on Spivak's access to chain gangs through the Georgia Prison Commission, the novel fictionalizes and exposes the abuses of the institutionalized system of sharecropping, debt peonage, and exorbitant chain gang sentences that trapped many southern blacks in a cycle of labor exploitation.

Hard times on a Southern chain gang

The research uncovered new material that showed that there were substantial frauds in the 1840s during the Irish Famine, that the regulator of these institutions was subject to capture, and that these institutions generated a form of debt peonage via their lending mechanisms.

Thesis abstract

He followed reports of beheadings, forced cannibalism, and gang rape; collected photographic evidence of flogged children and painful confinement in stocks; and gathered affidavits from Barbadian workers held against their will in debt peonage.

A controversial champion for justice: Irishman Roger Casement gained notoriety in his quest to end the mistreatment of indigenous rubber workers in the Putumayo region of Peru during the early 20th century

There was also considerable labour migration across this particular borderland, with slaves fleeing south to Mexico and hacienda servants moving north to escape debt peonage.

Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories

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