1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910826092703321

Titolo

Masters, servants, and magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955  / / edited by Douglas Hay and Paul Craven

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chapel Hill, : University of North Carolina Press, c2004

ISBN

979-88-908776-7-3

0-8078-7586-4

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (607 p.)

Collana

Studies in legal history

Altri autori (Persone)

HayDouglas

CravenPaul <1950->

Disciplina

346.4102/4

Soggetti

Master and servant - Great Britain - History

Labor contract - Great Britain - History

Master and servant - Great Britain - Colonies - History

Labor contract - Great Britain - Colonies - History

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 529-559) and indexes.

Nota di contenuto

Contents; Acknowledgments; Note on Citations; 1. Introduction; 2. England, 1562-1875: The Law and Its Uses; 3. Early British America, 1585-1830: Freedom Bound; 4. Law and Labor in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland; 5. Canada, 1670-1935: Symbolic and Instrumental Enforcement in Loyalist North America; 6. Australia, 1788-1902: A Workingman's Paradise?; 7. The Colonial Office, 1820-1955: Constantly the Subject of Small Struggles; 8. The British Caribbean, 1823-1838: The Transition from Slave to Free Legal Status; 9. Urban British Guiana, 1838-1924: Wharf Rats, Centipedes, and Pork Knockers

10. South Africa, 1841-1924: Race, Contract, and Coercion11. Hong Kong, 1841-1870: All the Servants in Prison and Nobody to Take Care of the House; 12. Britain: The Defeat of the 1844 Master and Servants Bill; 13. India, 1858-1930: The Illusion of Free Labor; 14. Assam and the West Indies, 1860-1920: Immobilizing Plantation Labor; 15. West Africa, 1874-1948: Employment Legislation in a Nonsettler Peasant Economy; 16. Kenya, 1895-1939: Registration and Rough Justice; Bibliography of Secondary Works Cited; Contributors; Index of Statutes; General Index



Sommario/riassunto

Master and servant acts, the cornerstone of English employment law for more than four hundred years, gave largely unsupervised, inferior magistrates wide discretion over employment relations, including the power to whip, fine, and imprison men, women, and children for breach of private contracts with their employers. The English model was adopted, modified, and reinvented in more than a thousand colonial statutes and ordinances regulating the recruitment, retention, and discipline of workers in shops, mines, and factories; on farms, in forests, and on plantations; and at sea. This collection p