Co-hosted with: The Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS) and the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies (CREMS), under the umbrella of the ‘London Forum for Premodern Studies’.

Speaker: Sonia Tycko (University of Edinburgh)

In this book talk on Captured Consent: Contract Labor in English Charity, Colonization, and War, 1600–1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2026), Sonia Tycko puts the idea of consent in contract labour into a historical perspective. Far from being a modern invention, contractual consent was a live concept in early modern England and its American colonies. Seventeenth-century people formed written contracts with free will clauses and applied legal presumptions of subordinates’ consent to work in highly coercive labour systems first. Children in pauper apprenticeship, transatlantic indentured servants, conscripts into the armies, and prisoners of war were all considered to have freely consented to their positions despite manifest resistance, misinformation, or lack of alternatives. The talk considers how this could have been the case, and draws lessons to be learned from attending to these innovations in labour practices on the margins of the economy.

The book is available with an institutional log-in here. The paperback edition will be published in mid-November. 

This is a hybrid event. For online participation, the MS Teams link will be available on the day of the event after registration. To register, please follow the link below.

Author’s bio:
Sonia Tycko is a Lecturer in the History of Labour at the University of Edinburgh. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2019 and held a junior research fellowship at the University of Oxford. Captured Consent is her first book. She has also published on the history of law and labour coercion in Past & Present and Early American Studies. Tycko has co-convened a network: “Historicizing Consent: What did it mean to agree in late medieval and early modern Europe?” and now co-convenes the Edinburgh – Oxford Early Atlantic History Workshop with Giuseppe Marcocci.