Masters, Apprentices and the Enslaved: Regimes of Labor and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century France and the French Atlantic, Clare Crowston
Drawing on a co-authored book project on apprenticeship in France from the 17th through the late nineteenth century, this talk will reflect on the role of apprenticeship as a model for forming socially useful and obedient subjects. It will examine the conception and practice of apprenticeship as a form of coerced labor, and explore the interaction (both conceptual and practical) between contracted apprenticeship and bondage. With "apprenticeship" as the only officially legitimate purpose for bringing enslaved individuals to France in the eighteenth century and projects for gradual emancipation through the British model of an "apprenticeship system", the model of apprenticeship was surprisingly useful for thinking and practicing varieties of coerced labor in the French world.
Organized by Timothy Campbell, University of Chicago; Lisa A. Freeman, University of Illinois at Chicago; Richard Squibbs, DePaul University; and Helen Thompson, Northwestern University.
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