An Image of Transportation

Figure 1.2: Individuals sentenced to transportation heading to a ship that will carry them overseas.

In addition, from the mid-seventeenth-century until the late-twentieth-century, all three groups of laborers could be found throughout the hemispheric Americas. Revel's travels from Britain to Virginia and back again can serve as an entry point into a discussion of the movement of bodies to satisfy the labor needs of colonial plantation economies. In the course section on colonial development educators can focus on comparing the experiences of laborers across the globe. A wide variety of academic works feature essays on particular, local labor situations during the colonial period.

One essay collection edited by Kay Saunders contains chapters describing colonial indentured labor in locations such as Jamaica, British Guiana, Trinidad, Mauritius, Fiji, Malaya, and Queensland. Asking students to compare the lives of the laborers described within these essays to the lives of laborers in colonial North America, including Revel, partially satis es the emphasis on globalization recommended by the College Board.

After introducing Revel's account in the colonial section of the course, it could also be useful to revisit the poem during a discussion of emancipation in the U.S. Although it is an abstract concept the 1660s can be linked to the 1860s through the questioning of the historical nature of freedom. An educator can begin by discussing how transported laborers, indentured servants, and slaves all were granted freedom in right by the conclusion of the U.S. Civil War. Then, foreshadowing the upcoming discussions of sharecropping and African-American debt peonage, educators can explore how emancipation, across the globe, has not always led to what is commonly considered freedom.

Historian Walton Look Lai  nds that post Emancipation in the British West Indies meant that  the phenomenon of labor coercion, far from dying out, assumed new and diverse forms  (Look Lai, xi). In this same vein, educators can ask that students explore the continuation of indentured labor and the problems associated with it throughout the Caribbean during the twentieth century. Maharani's Misery (2002), the story of a young female Indian indentured laborer killed in 1885 on her way to Guyana, is an apt and appropriate work to assign to students at the introductory college level
and upwards. Maharani's experiences are in many ways connected to Revel's account and together they o er an avenue through which students can understand labor patterns across place and time.

Bibliography

Billings, Warren, ed. The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1700. Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Coldham, Peter Wilson. Bonded Passenger to America. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1983. Ekirch, A. Roger. Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
Galenson, David. White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1981.
Look Lai, Walton. Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West
Indies, 1838-1918. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993

McLynn, Frank. Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Shepherd, Verene. Maharani's Misery: Narratives of a Passage from India to the Caribbean.

Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2002.

Saunders, Kay, ed. Indentured Labor in the British Empire, 1834-1920. London: CroomHelm, 1984.