Commodification and Unfreedom in Eighteenth-Century England

Contrary to prevailing notions of Britain as a land of liberty, there has been growing scholarly interest in documenting forms of unfreedom in eighteenth-century Britain. While scholarly interest has focused on the enslaved, in practice a broad spectrum of people were priced, commodified, and sold. They experienced incomplete forms of commodification that were temporary, partial, and sometimes voluntary. Britons understood humans to be commodifiable. Though early modern notions of property articulated by John Locke posited that the first and most important kind of property was ownership of one’s own life and liberty, contemporaries also understood that self-alienation was possible. The article explores the lived experience of one form of self-alienation: debt which facilitated the commodification and sale of people’s bodies into different forms of labour. Drawing on a case study of the Royal Navy’s recruitment of thousands of incarcerated debtors into naval service through a system of debt bondage, it argues that debt operated to bypass English legal frameworks that ostensibly prevented the treatment of British people as commodities. Commodification was not practiced in the shadows, but pursued openly and strategically by the British state, impacting the experiences of thousands of incarcerated prisoners and their families.

Commodification · Government (linguistics · Navy · Ridiculous · State (computer science · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History of Emotions Research · Literature: history, themes, analysis