Masters, Servants, and
Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955
by Douglas Hay (Editor),
Paul Craven (Editor)
Master and servant acts,
the cornerstone of English employment law for more than four hundred years,
gave largely unsupervised, inferior magistrates wide discretion over employment
relations, including the power to whip, fine, and imprison men, women, and
children for breach of private contracts with their employers. The English
model was adopted, modified, and reinvented in more than a thousand colonial
statutes and ordinances regulating the recruitment, retention, and discipline
of workers in shops, mines, and factories; on farms, in forests, and on
plantations; and at sea. This collection presents the first integrated
comparative account of employment law, its enforcement, and its importance
throughout the British Empire.
Sweeping in its geographic
and temporal scope, this volume tests the relationship between enacted law and
enforced law in varied settings, with different social and racial structures,
different economies, and different constitutional relationships to Britain.
Investigations of the enforcement of master and servant law in England, the
British Caribbean, India, Africa, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, and colonial
America shed new light on the nature of law and legal institutions, the role of
inferior courts in compelling performance, and the definition of "free
labor" within a multiracial empire.
