Poverty in the Early Modern English Atlantic

Introduction

Poverty in the early modern English Atlantic world was an economic reality that could touch the lives of everyone who lived within the orbit of the Atlantic Ocean and its networks of people, trade, and transport. The poor, however one defines them, were the most numerous and yet the most marginal group to make the crossing from the Old World to the New, either willingly or as indentured servants or slaves. British migrants and African slaves dominated the flow of European transatlantic migration, and the lands that they came to, as colonizers and new masters, or, more commonly, as servants and property, were unforgiving and vast and not at all like homes once known. According to Armitage and Braddick 2009 (cited under Introductory Works), the Lower South, the Chesapeake, and the Caribbean were “charnel houses” for the vast majority of poor Europeans who migrated there. Yet, the rate at which poor whites died was dwarfed by the misery and death of the Middle Passage and of forced black migration to the plantation economies of the English Atlantic. The “lower sort,” whether “deserving” or not, had to get by, or “make shift,” in their new environs as readily as they did in their previous homes and parishes. They often did so through a mélange of casual or temporary employment, menial labor, household economies, and recourse to legal systems of relief. Moreover, researchers examining poverty should read widely beyond a narrow historiography of poor relief alone. Therefore, this bibliography contains sections on related topics, such as migration and law, colonialism in Ireland and Scotland, and survey texts on the social history of the Atlantic world. The historiography of Atlantic poverty is an immense subject, even when divided by empire or by geography. But, despite disparate scholarly interests and changing trends over time, social historians generally share one overriding concern: recovering marginalized experiences once thought lost to posterity. Atlantic social history has never been more vibrant or more relevant than it is in the early 21st century. Within this burgeoning scholarly corpus, which explores the massive and deeply important social implications, convergences, and marginalities of this fluid geography, the study of poverty and economic inequality continues to occupy a central place. The English Atlantic world conceived of by contemporaries between 1500 and 1800 was impossible without the poor—without slaves, indentured servants, and subsistence migrants; and without schemes for relief, colonization, and the easing of need.

Introductory Works

In the absence of a general survey text on poverty in the Atlantic world, readers should consult key chapters in Armitage and Braddick 2009 and Mancke and Shammas 2005. On the subject of class and socioeconomic inequality in the Atlantic world, consult Middleton and Smith 2008.

Armitage, David, and Michael J. Braddick, eds. The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800. 2d ed. Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
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This edited collection on the British Atlantic world provides the broad social and economic contexts necessary for further study. The most pertinent chapter for the historian of poverty is the one on class, written by Keith Wrightson, which should be required reading for any student seeking to begin a study of the poor in a broader Atlantic context.
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Mancke, Elizabeth, and Carole Shammas, eds. The Creation of the British Atlantic World. Anglo-America in the Transatlantic World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
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This collection begins its explanation of the creation of the British Atlantic world with a chapter on servants and slaves, both impoverished and marginalized groups that were crucial to the formation and characterization of this space. Readers concerned with the role of the poor in the early Atlantic should read the first section of this book closely.
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Middleton, Simon, and Billy G. Smith, eds. Class Matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
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Despite two decades of scholarship proclaiming otherwise, the authors in this volume argue that class still matters as a category of historical analysis. Chapters examine inequalities throughout the Atlantic world, and the chapters on infant paupers and class struggles in a plantation society are particularly welcome.
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Primary Sources

The social history of poverty is a field of history deeply dependent on the archive. Local and national record offices and the hard slog of manuscript transcription and scribal paleography dominate the footnotes and references of Atlantic social historians of all stripes. Historians of England and, to some extent, America, are relatively blessed with an impressive and growing range of research databases and online collections of primary documentation in addition to an ongoing and concerted effort to collect, edit, and print primary sources generally. When researching poverty, many of these collections provide electronic access to archival evidence of poverty or to printed materials from the time with poverty as their subject. The rapid advance of online resources owes much to the rich surviving collections and to strong traditions of curation that have protected them for hundreds of years, particularly in England. However, the archive will remain central to the history of poverty for the foreseeable future, as it still provides the only thorough access to the records of lives otherwise forgotten. Databases such as the Old Bailey Proceedings Online and Connected Histories began as Art and Humanities Research Council– and Economic and Social Research Council–funded projects but have since become free, publicly accessible Internet resources that allow users to gain direct access to facsimiles of archival material. Publishing companies such as Gale have also created highly useful databases, such as the Making of the Modern World, although these require a personal or university subscription. Primary sources related to the thirteen colonies and early America can be found in the databases Documenting the American South and Early American Imprints. Two printed sets of evidence stand out among the databases included here: Levene 2006 and Hughes 2007. Levene 2006 offers a five-volume edited set of primary documents written by or directly about the poor in England, and the volume of pauper letters is particularly rich. Hughes 2007 is a critical edition of three important primary texts on slavery and race from the 17th century alongside an excellent anthology and commentary on the wider understandings of race during this period.

Connected Histories.
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A project that provides a search function and personal workspace for more than fifteen massive primary source collections pertaining to British history between 1500 and 1800. The database gives access to British newspapers, images, and specialist databases, including London Lives, another London database of records related to plebeian and poorer inhabitants of the capital.
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Documenting the American South.
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A database of mainly narrative primary sources from the southern region of early colonial and revolutionary America. Notable indexes to search include “Plantation Life before Emancipation” with fairly substantial sets of primary documents available and search terms such as “Poor” will lead to several references, including Poor—Colonization and Poor—Institutional care—North Carolina.
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Early American Imprints, Series 1 and 2.
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An online database devoted exclusively to early American printed primary sources. Particularly useful because it contains a subject index, with headings such as “Poverty,” “Peddling,” “Poor,” and so on, allowing rapid access to thousands of documents. Series 1 and Series 2 are available at subscribing institutions only.
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Hughes, Derek. Versions of Blackness: Key Texts on Slavery from the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511840890Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An amazing edited collection of primary texts about race and slavery from England’s 17th century. This book offers new critical editions of Aphra Behn’s tragic novel Oroonoko (1688), Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1668), and Behn’s Abdelazer (1676). An invaluable resource for historians of early modern slavery, race, or inequality in the Atlantic world.
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Levene, Alysa, ed. Narratives of the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Britain. 5 vols. London and Brookfield, VT: Pickering and Chatto, 2006.
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This is a five-volume collection of surviving pauper letters and literature from the 18th century alongside printed editions of records from the Foundling Hospital, London, and London Refuge for the Destitute. The pauper letters, in particular, are deeply significant, owing to both their rarity and their content.
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Making of the Modern World, Parts 1 and 2.
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This database is probably one of the few online resources that has any surviving printed material from the printing presses of colonial America and the Caribbean. Although not designed specifically for historians of any stripe, users will find thousands of primary resources useful for studying perceptions of poverty and economic disparity across the Atlantic world.
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Old Bailey Proceedings Online.
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A searchable database of almost two hundred thousand court cases before one of London’s busiest early modern courts. Users can find an enormous amount of depositional evidence, and plaintiffs and defendants before the courts were often poor. Crimes of necessity and petty theft figure very highly in the quantified sections of the records.
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Poverty in England

The history of poverty in England remains quite separate from the history of poverty in the Atlantic world. Even today there is no authoritative survey text designed to tackle poverty in the entire early modern Atlantic world. The English system of poor relief was codified in the late 16th century by the Elizabethan Poor Laws and by the Settlement Laws of the late 17th century. The national system of welfare that emerged from these statutes was a parish-based system of local provision that strove to alleviate poverty through small pensions, the provision of work, the “binding out” of pauper children as apprentices, the maintenance of common rights and access to fields, and, occasionally, a form of subsidized housing. The system, most particularly its moral underpinnings, also divided the poor into two main groups. Those who deserved relief, and who had a clear parish of settlement, gained access to the provisions and minimal perquisites provided by the parish overseers and churchwardens. Those who were undeserving of relief were punished: sent to houses of correction, whipped, branded, and sometimes sentenced to transportation overseas. In the English context the most comprehensive scholarly survey of rural poverty (most English people lived in rural communities) is Hindle 2004. Snell 1985 extends our survey of the rural poor into the 19th century and focuses on the difficulties of casual labor and settlement. Slack 1988 is the definitive guide to the moral imperatives and policy outcomes of the early modern English state’s attempt to give poor relief to its subjects; this text is recommended as an introduction to the subject in undergraduate classrooms. Transiency and vagrancy in early modern England are tackled in Beier 1985. Poverty in 18th-century London can best be considered initially by reading Hitchcock 2004. The crucial idea of “life-cycle” poverty and the close relationship between old age and indigence are examined in Botelho 2004. Powerful local histories of poverty, such as Wrightson and Levine 1995, contain the crucial evidence necessary to assess the accuracy of our assessments. Thompson 1980 offers a Marxist assessment of poverty that links the poor of the 18th century to the formation of the English working class, surely relevant for any scholar concerned with the role of historical processes in the formulation of modern identities and assumptions.

Beier, A. L. Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640. London and New York: Methuen, 1985.
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Beier’s book deals with vagrants in early modern England, those poor individuals considered least deserving of assistance. Masterless Men struck down certain orthodoxies in the scholarship of vagrancy, particularly the notion of an Elizabethan underworld filled with hardened and organized criminals.
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Botelho, L. A. Old Age and the English Poor Law, 1500–1700. Woodbridge, UK, and Suffolk, NY: Boydell, 2004.
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Botelho exhaustively examines two Suffolk parishes, especially the age of their poor dependents and the different methods of relief for paupers at different stages in the life cycle. She describes a makeshift economy far more dependent on charity, piecework, and family obligations than previous scholars have suggested, and her thorough research justifies these conclusions.
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Hindle, Steve. On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 1550–1750. Oxford Studies in Social History. Oxford: Clarendon, 2004.
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Hindle’s monograph on rural poor relief in England stands as the most thorough assessment of the operation and power of the poor laws in rural England. On the Parish? offers a robust, meticulously researched account of the experience of rural paupers. Being a deserving pauper emerges from this book as an experience fraught with tensions and ambiguities.
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Hitchcock, Tim. Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London. London: Hambledon Continuum, 2004.
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Hitchcock’s book on poverty in 18th-century London stands out as a powerful example of “history from below.” The book serves as a point of entry into the larger scholarship on the social history of poverty in the English capital city.
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Slack, Paul. Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England. Themes in British Social History. London and New York: Longman, 1988.
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There remains no better scholarly introduction to the history of the poor in early modern England, despite the years of scholarship since its publication. Slack’s focus on ideas and institutions makes the material interesting and germane for both undergraduate and academic readers.
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Snell, K. D. M. Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900. Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy, and Society in Past Time 2. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511599446Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Snell’s monograph foregrounds the experiences of the “third” group of poor people in England: the laboring poor. The book reconstructs the lives and life cycles of rural paupers who worked and received relief based on the vagaries of their parish settlement, the season, and a host of other personal concerns.
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Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1980.
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Few works of history hold as much resonance for the social historian of England. Thompson’s goal was “to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver . . . from the enormous condescension of posterity” (p. 12). The historiographical importance of Thompson’s work is hard to overestimate.
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Wrightson, Keith, and David Levine. Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995.
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The authors explore poverty in the Essex village of Terling by looking at church attendance, ceremony, ritual, the seasonal calendar, social interaction and differentiation, and much more. The book stands as a powerful case for local history as an explanatory model.
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Migration and Law in the Atlantic Empire

In the early 17th century, England had an “Atlantic moment.” The troubled decade of the 1630s saw as many as eighty thousand English men and women emigrate from the mainland to colonies in New England, Chesapeake, and the Caribbean. Subsequent decades saw tens of thousands more make the difficult ocean journey, in search of new land, wealth, or promise or because they had run out of other options. Games 1999 notes that “migration, not natural increase, was wholly responsible for this tremendous growth in the English population overseas” (pp. 3–4). Britain’s empire in the Atlantic was created and sustained through migration alone, and throughout almost two centuries of travel and turmoil one can find the poor consistently migrating and making shift in a transatlantic context. In the minds of early “projecters,” such as Richard Hakluyt, colonies in the New World would relieve the English poor and enrich merchants and planters simultaneously. In practice the poor emigrated as convicts, indentured servants, or fodder—a willing workforce for colonial schemes that promised them free land in exchange for a fixed term of labor on the “virgin continent.” Of these three emigrant groups, the poor who migrated as indentured servants were by far the largest one. Clark and Souden 1987 offers a valuable synthesis of English domestic migration and imperial out-migration in the 17th and 18th centuries, including an arresting account of indentured servitude as migratory practice by David Souden. Games 1999 offers an insightful look at one massive wave of colonial emigration to New England in 1635, in the middle of the contested Personal Rule of Charles I. Whyte 2000 gives the reader an accessible survey of the social history of migration in Britain, including Scotland and Ireland. Fitzgerald and Lambkin 2008 provides a rigorous assessment of Irish internal and external migration since 1607 and contributes to the assessment of Ireland as a troubled site of empire by looking at who chose to migrate to and from Ireland and what motivated them to do so. Hay and Craven 2004 presents a thorough legal history of British imperial master and servant legislation, from its 1562 origins until its dissolution in the 20th century, and demonstrates how remarkably similar the various colonial versions of master and servant law actually were. Another strand of migration that must be considered in relation to metropolitan and colonial movements is black migration, either forced or chosen. Byrd 2008 considers two compelling examples of transatlantic black migration in the 18th century and their social effects.

Byrd, Alexander X. Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth Century British Atlantic World. Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.
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Byrd compares two major strands of 18th-century black migration: the forced migration of slaves to Jamaica and the migration of free blacks as settlers to Sierra Leone. Byrd pays particular attention to the social and cultural effects of movement, including the unique economic and social hardships associated with it.
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Clark, Peter, and David Souden, eds. Migration and Society in Early Modern England. London: Hutchinson, 1987.
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This volume remains highly useful as a primer on the broad role of migration in a historical context. Of note are three chapters, on indentured servitude, New World Chesapeake migration, and a survey of migration in England, by Souden, Clark, and J. P. Horn, respectively.
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Fitzgerald, Patrick, and Brian Lambkin. Migration in Irish History, 1607–2007. Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230581920Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This study of Irish migration emphasizes Ireland as a site of diaspora: both in the sense of the emigration of Irish natives, in successive waves, from their homeland and of the immigration of populations of English and Scottish planters in early modernity.
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Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World. Harvard Historical Studies 133. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
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This book follows the unprecedented emigration from England in 1635, approximately seven thousand people traceable from London alone, and charts the manifold stories of their survival in new Atlantic landscapes.
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Hay, Douglas, and Paul Craven, eds. Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955. Studies in Legal History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
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This edited collection discusses the imperial and legal history of a very influential body of legislation from early modern England, called master and servant legislation. The laws on master and servant were replicated and enforced across the empire and were the basis for the rules of indentured servitude, freed-slave “apprenticeship,” and vagrancy legislation.
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Whyte, Ian D. Migration and Society in Britain, 1550–1830. Social History in Perspective. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000.
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A clear and concise account of the social history of British migration, this book acts as an excellent primer on the theories, sources, methods, and import of migration in the long early modern period. The text has chapters on domestic migration and international emigration and on the social import of movement.
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Ireland and Scotland

Ireland was the first Atlantic colony of the first British Empire. Conquered, oppressed, “reduced to civility”—the Irish experience of imperialism and, more important, the experience of the poor in Ireland bear consideration in any larger assessment of poverty in an Atlantic context. Scotland also had a troubling relationship with England and with empire, troubles hardly solved by union in 1707. Irish and Scottish out-migration, especially subsistence migrants on their way to the New World, made up a significant and growing proportion of European migration to the Americas as a whole, even in the two centuries preceding the Great Irish Famine. The Irish and Scottish men and women who made the journey to the plantations of the Caribbean or Virginia, or who sought new opportunities in Chesapeake, had often suffered enormous economic hardship in their home countries. These marginal transatlantic migrants took the opportunities that presented themselves, and with catastrophic rates of disease and early death, places such as Jamaica and Chesapeake needed a large and constant supply of labor. Ireland and Scotland both lacked formal poor laws until the 19th century, but their inhabitants still assuredly experienced wide-scale poverty firsthand, even if reconstructing those experiences is much harder for historians. Patriquin 2006 looks at why both kingdoms had no formal poor relief laws before the 1800s. Dudley 1999 uses the records of Dublin parishes that survive to reconstruct the day-to-day experience of poor relief in that city. Canny 2001 and Brady and Gillespie 1986 examine the colonial process in Ireland—how it was “made British.” Kenny 2004 addresses the deep ambiguities of Irish history in this wider Atlantic and imperial context.

Brady, Ciaran, and Raymond Gillespie, eds. Natives and Newcomers: Essays on the Making of Irish Colonial Society, 1534–1641. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Academic Press, 1986.
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This edited collection focuses on 16th-century Ireland and the transformations in its social, religious, and political makeup prompted by English colonization. Mary O’Dowd’s chapter on Gaelic economy and society is useful background reading for students of Irish poverty.
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Canny, Nicholas. Making Ireland British, 1580–1650. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198200918.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Canny’s Atlantic history of early modern Ireland provides a thorough account the slow cultural effects of British rule over Ireland in the 17th century. The transplantation of poverty is also assessed, with particular reference to the enduring poverty of Scottish settlers in Ulster, and the endemic effects of plantation economies on the local Irish populations.
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Dudley, Rowena. “The Dublin Parishes and the Poor: 1660–1740.” Archivium Hibernicum 53 (1999): 80–94.
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Despite a general lack of primary sources that touch on early modern Irish poverty, some parochial resources do survive. This article uses the minutes of several parishes in Dublin to reconstruct the experiences of Irish paupers in that city well before the advent of the Irish Poor Laws. Available online by subscription.
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Kenny, Kevin, ed. Ireland and the British Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
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This edited collection argues for Ireland’s unique position as pseudo-colony in the British Empire. The ambiguity of the Irish imperial and Atlantic experience dominates this companion volume, and its contributions to the “Kingdom, colony, or laboratory” debate should not be overlooked.
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Patriquin, Larry. “Why Was There No ‘Old Poor Law’ in Scotland and Ireland?” Journal of Peasant Studies 33.2 (2006): 219–247.
DOI: 10.1080/03066150600819195Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article argues that England’s poor relief system was unique in Europe, and that its formation was possible only because of unique patterns of land and property ownership, patterns that the author considers to be early capitalism. Early modern Scotland and Ireland thus lacked Poor Laws because they lacked a framework capable of sustaining them. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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English North America

The “promised land” of 1609 and 1617, the “virgin continent” upon which an émigré “new Jerusalem” would take root and prosper—the early history (and historiography) of colonial America is rife with mythmaking and Lockean economic determinism. Despite fervent and wishful thinking to the contrary, English colonial America did not ever resemble the egalitarian America of myth, rich in opportunity and “empty” lands. Conceived broadly, poverty and inequality haunted all the inhabitants of English America, although historians were not always willing to acknowledge that fact. If anything, the life cycle of poverty in the colonies was even more pronounced than the variations found in England proper, with extremes of employment and indigence dominating longer periods of ultimately shorter lives. Systems of poor relief in early America often imitated the English parochial model, especially in the Northeast. One historian central to the process of introducing inequality and poverty into the history of pre-revolution America is Gary B. Nash. Nash 1979 is perhaps his most important book; its effect on the historiography of colonial America was immense, foregrounding the role of poverty in northeastern urban centers in the larger story of the century before the revolution. Pestana and Salinger 1999 acts as a signpost for the multiple ways in which Nash’s work has inspired and strengthened historical scholarship on inequality in early America. Greene and Pole 1984 offers one of the earliest and most thorough essay collections that privilege the social, cultural, and economic contours of colonial America within a transatlantic context. Smith 2004 is perhaps the fullest culmination of Nash’s influence; this edited volume leaves no doubt that “the poor are always with us,” perhaps uniquely so in America’s deeply unequal colonial past, which possesses a history that was determined until the late 20th century to elide their very existence. Herndon and Murray 2009 examines the apprenticeship of pauper children in the early American colonies and emphasizes the localism and paternalism of the system, which attempted to alleviate poverty at one crucial point in the life cycle. Lockley 2005 looks at the poor relief system in mid-18th-century South Carolina and describes a racially exclusive system that bound “poor whites to the elite with ties of dependency and patronage” (p. 971). Herndon 2001 extends the study of poverty into colonial New England in the 18th century, supposedly the last bastion of social equality: the vaunted Puritan society of “middle farmers.”

Greene, Jack P., and J. R. Pole, eds. Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era. Papers presented at a conference at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, 1–7 August 1981. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
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This volume concentrates on transatlantic legal and imperial history but does not neglect social development, and poverty figures into the larger imperial picture in two key chapters, on servants and slaves and the domestic economy, by Richard S. Dunn and Richard B. Sheridan, respectively.
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Herndon, Ruth Wallis. Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
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This book examines the “warning out” system of 18th-century Rhode Island, modeled on the 1662 Settlement Act. The poor make up the overwhelming majority of those forced out of towns and settlements by this system, and the book demonstrates just how significant, and how local, poverty and inequality were in early New England.
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Herndon, Ruth Wallis, and John E. Murray, eds. Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.
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This edited collection discusses the many local examples of pauper apprenticeship, which made up one important part of the early American poor relief system, a part suffused with enormous moral and didactic undertones. Apprenticeship was the single most common way to care for pauper children and to ease the burden of local rate payers, both in England and in early America, and this volume presents some interesting commonalities and differences between the two systems of life-cycle relief.
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Lockley, Tim. “Rural Poor Relief in Colonial South Carolina.” Historical Journal 48.4 (2005): 955–976.
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This article explicitly deals with the racial and social dimensions of one system of poor relief in South Carolina. Lockley describes plantation elite afraid of a class alliance between slaves and poor whites and a generous system of poor relief designed to prevent exactly that possibility. Available online by subscription.
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Nash, Gary B. The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.
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One of Nash’s most historiographically significant works, The Urban Crucible traces the origins of revolutionary radicalism in three North American seaports—Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—and links it, for the first time, to broader socioeconomic inequalities and poverty. Nash charts the increasing disparity of wealth and influence in these cities.
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Pestana, Carla Gardina, and Sharon V. Salinger, eds. Inequality in Early America. Reencounters with Colonialism—New Perspectives on the Americas. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999.
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This edited collection honors the work of Nash, and the authors of each of its chapters reflect on the broader remit of his historical influence in varying ways. The volume focuses on the broad implications of reintroducing inequality into early American history, largely as an antidote to the deeply Whig histories that dominated the scholarship until the late 1970s.
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Smith, Billy G., ed. Down and Out in Early America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.
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This volume has a bone to pick with the historiography of poverty in early America. In the introduction, Smith forcefully argues that the mere presence of poverty in American history has been elided or simply ignored by historians. Bernard Bailyn’s perspective that revolutionary Americans “did not confront the ‘predicament of poverty’” (“The Central Themes of the American Revolution: An Interpretation,” in Essays on the American Revolution, edited by Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973], p. 12) is challenged by every chapter in this edited collection.
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The English Caribbean

The early modern history of the British Caribbean islands presents a unique nexus point for social historians and a historiographical tension that has yet to be resolved. These profoundly unequal societies, based as they were upon the enslavement and enforced poverty of large black populations, and situated at a unique crossroads between the subjects of empire, race, trade history, and so on, have rightly attracted a great deal of historical attention. Entirely separate Atlantic history bibliographies are necessary to understanding this nexus more fully, particularly the Oxford Bibliographies articles on Atlantic Slavery, the Caribbean, Rum, Plantations, and Indentured Servitude. But, the poverty of slavery and the social history of these societies more holistically demand our attention here. This section focuses on the circumstances prompting migration to the Caribbean and on the nature of the societies formed there. As a starting point for the immense and deeply important historiography of slavery, and its wider social history, see Morgan 2007. For European migration to Jamaica, consult Burnard 1996. Block and Shaw 2011 examines Irish Caribbean migration and indenture, and Sheridan 1998 provides an overview of the Caribbean plantation complex and a strong list of further readings.

Block, Kristen, and Jenny Shaw. “Subjects without Empire: The Irish in the Early Modern Caribbean.” Past and Present 210.1 (2011): 33–60.
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Unwilling Irish migration to Barbados and the Caribbean was one of the outcomes of the Irish rebellion of 1641, and the practice continued throughout the 17th century. The article looks at both successful and unsuccessful Irish laborers in Barbados and the growth of slavery and slow replacement of convicted and indentured labor in plantation economies. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Burnard, Trevor. “European Migration to Jamaica, 1655–1780.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 53.4 (1996): 769–796.
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Burnard finds that white migrants to Jamaica were often from the metropole and that there were simply more of them than previously suspected. Mortality levels remained catastrophic, particularly among white indentured servants, who still composed about 50 percent of the white population of the island in 1730. Available online by subscription.
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Morgan, Kenneth. Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
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This book serves as a rigorous yet readable overview of a vast topic: slavery and Britain between 1600 and abolition. Morgan’s focus is undeniably the social history of slavery, which recommends it as an introductory text for readers otherwise concerned with poverty and economic inequality in broader terms.
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Sheridan, Richard B. “The Formation of Caribbean Plantation Society, 1689–1748.” In The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century. Edited by P. J. Marshall, 394–414. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
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Sheridan provides the reader with a solid survey of British holdings in the Lesser Antilles and Jamaica. Indentured white labor played a significant role, with planters farming ten to thirty acres for both profit and subsistence with the assistance of unfree and frequently impoverished laborers, who were promised land when their contracts expired.
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Class and Race

Although no unified historiography has emerged from Atlantic history, unifying concepts surely have. Historians of poverty in the Atlantic world will be especially attuned to the implications of class and the questions surrounding its existence or formation. However, race is arguably the most powerful and pervasive concept to haunt these histories; its legacies and echoes still shape societies in profound ways. The texts mentioned here thus describe an Atlantic world of several colors: a “black” Atlantic (Gilroy 1993) that foregrounds enslavement, marginality, dislocation, and “cultural poverty” and a “red” Atlantic (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000) that emphasizes the class commonalities of many different marginalized groups. Race in the early modern Atlantic is surveyed in Chaplin 2009, and Nash 1992 serves as a potent introduction to the implications and effects of race in early America. Daunton and Halpern 1999 showcases the work on Native peoples and their own uniquely marginalized social histories. Conceptually, class is covered more broadly in the introductory text Middleton and Smith 2008 (cited under Introductory Works). Works here are more specific: Thompson 1971 endeavors to explain rioting through discussion of how the poor understood the economy and society that both marginalized and sustained them and in doing so offers a potent theoretical tool, the “moral economy,” which has been taken up and deployed by scholars in many disciplines since. Recent developments in conventional historiographies are also highlighted here, including McEwan and Sharpe 2011, which showcases early-21st-century concerns and techniques of historians of poverty in England. Pestana 2004 illuminates the revolutionary echoes of the mid-17th-century Atlantic and the implications of class in the mid-century processes of change that were underway.

Chaplin, Joyce E. “Race.” In The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800. 2d ed. Edited by David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, 173–190. Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
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Chaplin asserts that the British Atlantic adopted Iberian attitudes toward blacks but innovated when constructing their own unique racial attitudes toward Native Americans. British ideas of race had profound exclusionary and judgmental implications, particularly for Native American and mixed communities living in settled areas of the American mainland and for slaves everywhere across the Atlantic world.
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Daunton, Martin, and Rick Halpern, eds. Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850. Critical Histories. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
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Native Americans emerge from this text as impoverished and marginalized in many respects but empowered in others. Ruth Wallis Herndon’s chapter on Indian women as objects of charity and disdain in Rhode Island is of particular interest.
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Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London and New York: Verso, 1993.
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Gilroy’s contribution to Atlantic studies here is twofold: first, he makes a persuasive case for the absolute deconstruction of cultural nationalism, and second, he weaves a black narrative structure, or story about black culture, directly back into the larger cultural history of the Atlantic. For historians of poverty, the compelling question becomes, shouldn’t we study black slaves not just as slaves, but also as economically impoverished people?
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Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon, 2000.
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Linebaugh and Rediker offer a radical reassessment of class and commonality in the early modern Atlantic. The book aims to reconnect people and identities that historians have not necessarily ever viewed in tandem before and to assess the commonality of their Atlantic experience, an experience that poverty and indigence were often a part of.
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McEwan, Joanne, and Pamela Sharpe, eds. Accommodating Poverty: The Housing and Living Arrangements of the English Poor, c. 1600–1850. Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
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Conceived as a successor to the edited collection Chronicling Poverty, edited by Tim Hitchcock, Peter King, and Pamela Sharpe (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1997), this volume on the housing arrangements (or the lack thereof) of the poor in England showcases a range of recent approaches to the history of early modern English poverty. Successive chapters on vagrancy and on servant housing and provision by Hitchcock and Steve Hindle, respectively, prove illuminating.
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Nash, Gary B. Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America. 3d. ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992.
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This study foregrounds participation and intercultural interaction among blacks, whites, and Indians in early America. Native peoples emerge as more than simple victims of the colonial process, and Africans emerge as active participants and historical agents. The origins of racism, and its effects, are also examined.
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Pestana, Carla Gardina. The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
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A hidden history of a revolutionary Atlantic tied more tightly than one might expect to the turmoil of metropolitan civil war emerges from this book. In a chapter on laborers and lost liberty, Pestana examines the marked increase in unfree labor that resulted from civil war, particularly in Scotland and Ireland.
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Thompson, E. P. “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century.” Past and Present 50.1 (1971): 76–136.
DOI: 10.1093/past/50.1.76Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In one of the most widely cited history articles of all time, E. P. Thompson argues against the “spasmodic” view of riots, particularly with reference to 18th-century food riots. Thompson provides an explanation of popular class perceptions of the economic world, all “grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, . . . which, taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor” (p. 79). Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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