Title: Pawnship in Africa
Subtitle: Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective (African Modernization and Development Series)
First published: September 1994
Description: Pawnship, a legal category of social and economic dependency, has been largely neglected in the historiography of Africa. Yet the labor of pawns - freeborn women, men and children indentured in payment of interest on a debt - was an important supplement to that of slaves in the precolonial and colonial eras and a substitute for slave labor in the twentieth century.

This book examines the origins of pawnship; the economic factors that contributed to its spread; the ideological and institutional framework that supported pawnship; its organization; the experience of pawns; the role of class, gender, and age; changes under colonial rule; and the decline and extinction of pawnship.
Subjects: Peonage, History, Slavery, africa, Africa, social conditions, Africa, economic conditions, Peonage--history, Peonage--africa--history, Hd4875.a79 p38 1994, 305.5/6
Places: Africa