BROKERING SERVITUDE
CULTURE, LABOR, HISTORY SERIES
General Editors: Daniel Bender and Kimberley L. Phillips
Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650–1850
Frederick C. Knight
Class Unknown: Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present
Mark Pittenger
Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago, 1915–1940
Michael D. Innis-Jiménez
Fueling the Gilded Age: Railroads, Miners, and Disorder in Pennsylvania Coal Country
Andrew B. Arnold
A Great Conspiracy against Our Race: Italian Immigrant Newspapers and the Construction of Whiteness in the Early 20th Century
Peter G. Vellon
Reframing Randolph: Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph
Edited by Andrew E. Kersten and Clarence Lang
Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism
Edited by Daniel E. Bender and Jana K. Lipman
Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism during the New Negro Era
Shannon King
Health in the City: Race, Poverty, and the Negotiation of Women’s Health in New York City, 1915–1930
Tanya Hart
Trotskyists on Trial: Free Speech and Political Persecution since the Age of FDR
Donna T. Haverty-Stacke
Forging a Laboring Race: The African American Worker in the Progressive Imagination
Paul Raymond Din Lawrie
Suspect Freedoms: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823–1957
Nancy Raquel Mirabal
Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long Nineteenth Century
Andrew Urban
Brokering Servitude
Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long Nineteenth Century
Andrew Urban
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© 2018 by New York University
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ISBN: 978-0-8147-8584-3
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Also available as an ebook
To the memory of my grandmothers,
Rose Rosenblum and Adelle Urban
CONTENTS
1. Liberating Free Labor: Vere Foster and Assisted Irish Emigration, 1850–1865
2. Humanitarianism’s Markets: Brokering the Domestic Labor of Black Refugees, 1861–1872
4. Controlling and Protecting White Women: The State and Sentimental Forms of Coercion, 1850–1917
5. Bonded Chinese Servants: Domestic Labor and Exclusion, 1882–1924
6. Race and Reform: Domestic Service, the Great Migration, and European Quotas, 1891–1924
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The doctorate program in History at the University of Minnesota nourished me with a vital intellectual and activist community. I am grateful to Anna Clark and Doug Hartmann for all of their support and feedback. Kevin Murphy is a dear friend and role model. His commitment to the public humanities as a basis for critical social engagement continues to inspire me. My advisors Donna Gabaccia and Erika Lee put me on
