Captured Consent: Contract Labor in English Charity, Colonization, and War, 1600–1700
Historical Studies Book Talk with Sonia Tycko
Wednesday, March 4, 2026
5:00 p.m. | Reception
5:30 p.m. | Talk
Rubenstein Commons Café

Consent has been celebrated as a guarantor of liberty and self-determination; however, its history suggests a different meaning. This book talk will reconstruct early modern standards of consent to work on the margins of the seventeenth-century English economy. Case studies in transatlantic indentured servitude and prisoner-of-war labor show how contractual practices drove innovations by which consent became a tool of labor coercion. 

Sonia Tycko is Lecturer in the History of Labor at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the history of labor, law, and social relations in early modern England and the Atlantic world. She received her B.A. from Columbia University and Ph.D. from Harvard University, after which she held the Kinder Junior Research Fellow in Atlantic History at the University of Oxford.

Her book is available for sale through Cambridge University Press. The Press is offering discount code TYCKO2026 to receive 20% off the purchase of the book.

Register below to attend.