Profit and Loss: Forced Labor at the Northampton Iron Furnace

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Materialities of (Un)Freedom: Examining the Material Consequences of Inequality within Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

From the 1760s to the 1820s, convicts, indentured servants, and enslaved peoples worked and died producing and forging iron near Baltimore, Maryland. The iron was crucial to the growth of the British Empire, the American Revolution, and the building of the town of Baltimore. By using and controlling people who were marginalized in society, the Ridgely family was able to exploit their labor and lives to generate considerable wealth and political power. This paper examines the structure of labor relations and the experience of workers at the furnace as well as the continuation of similar patterns of exploitative and forced labor in the present.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Materialities of (Un)Freedom: Examining the Material Consequences of Inequality within Historical Archaeology

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow