This multiyear team has sought to understand the nature of premodern discourses of consumerism by tracking the semantic relationships between consumer culture, trade, labor and ethics.

In 2023-2024, the team focused on the question of sources and availability of labor in the early years of English colonial project. Team members explored demographic and travel records from the first quarter of the 17th century in order to track the location of origins, travel records and New World destination of indentured servants.

The team focused on tracking clusters of London “vagrant” children who, starting in 1618, were forced into indentured servitude by the Virginia Company and the city of London. They also tracked the first Africans listed in the earliest census in the Virginia Colony, the 1624 muster.

The group also tracked the discourse around early 17th century understandings of labor in the colony as well as the lives of the laborers brought to the New World by the Virginia Company.

Team members created a repository of demographic and shipping data as well as code to visualize their historical resources. The visualizations illustrate:

1. The place of origins in England of the 424 indentured servants living in Virginia according to the 1624 muster
2. The chronological distribution of the migration waves from England to the New World
3. The London location of arrests of vagrant children sent to Virginia as indentured servants
4. The locations in the Virginia Colony of the 21 individuals of African descent recorded in the 1624 muster

As part of the archival work for this project, the students traveled to the Newberry Library in Chicago to view the materials housed in the Edward E. Ayer collection of early American and Native American books and manuscripts.

Timing

Summer 2023 – Spring 2024

Team Outputs

Expansion of website showcasing research on the history of discourse around ethical consumerism, trade monopolies and forced labor

Demographic and shipping data repository and visualizations

Ethical Consumption Before Capitalism (Interactive display presented at Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase, April 17, 2024)

See related Data+ summer project, Ethical Consumption Before Capitalism (2023), and related teams, Ethical Consumption Before Capitalism (2024-2025) and Ethical Consumption Before Capitalism (2021-2022).

Image: Medieval Trade Routes, by Ines S., licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0