Perhaps the most striking characteristic of colonial labor markets was the extensive use of bound labor. Economic historians have studied markets for slaves and immigrant indentured servants closely, and effectively delineated relationships between productivity and the price of bound labor. A related set of markets that appears to have affected a large number of colonists stemmed from the practice of taking children from households of poor, unmarried, or deceased parents and binding them to families who promised to raise them and keep them off local poor rolls. The exchange of money or payments in kind for labor suggests that indentures of these children were cast in a market like setting, and that here, too, existed a relationship between productivity and the price of labor. This paper considers several thousand indentures of children in New England and Maryland between 1730 to 1810, focusing on the indentures that specified an amount of money to be paid by the town to the master or that specified freedom dues in cash to be paid by the master to the servant.
Preliminary analysis indicates that the value of each type of payment varied by age and sex.
Still to be considered are variations that occurred by educational provisions, such as formal or informal promises of schooling or training in a specific craft, which would help estimate the value of such human capital at the time.