Sonia Tycko

I am a historian of early modern England and the Atlantic world, with a focus on social and legal history. I am currently completing my first book manuscript, ‘Captured Consent: Contract Labor in English Charity, Colonization, and Warfare, 1600–1700’. At the heart of the book are transatlantic indentured servants, who I study in comparison and connection to apprenticed pauper children, conscripted soldiers, and prisoners of war put to work in England. The book argues that exploitative early modern labor practices played a significant role in the development of the concepts of freedom of contract and the sanctity of an individual’s consent.