The chapter provides a transnational perspective on how the apprenticeship’s end caused new challenges for the free labor experiment, as British West Indian colonial economies faltered in the 1840s and former slaves asserted their rights as working people. In their pursuit of expanded liberty, black West Indians forced American antislavery to examine the limitations of a strict free labor ideology, and to envision the experiment’s success on other terms, as the issue of slavery moved to the center of national politics.

The chapter provides a study of how the apprenticeship implemented through much of the emancipated British West Indies posed problems for the free labor defense of the experiment, as it sought to maintain the structures of slavery — in deed if not in name. None understood this better than former slaves, who viewed the repression doled out by magistrates and planters as a subversion of both labor and freedom. Through testimonies and acts of resistance, I illustrate how freedpeople forced an end to the apprenticeship even as American abolitionists sought to use their laboring potential as a defense of the experiment.

This chapter provides a thorough revision of the status of boys and youths in the early modern period, attending to the neglected question of physical skill and training. It argues that attending to historically situated forms of physical expectation can shed light on how particular bodily skills are culturally cultivated, placing a more active emphasis on boys' bodies than scholars of early modern culture have typically tended to. The chapter draws on religious writings, conduct books, memoirs, apprenticeship manuals, and educational tracts in order to provide a wide-ranging picture of how boys' physical capacities were understood, improved, and manipulated in this period. Examining the ways in which boys and their bodies are situated in these works – often with an emphasis on physical labour and potential for activity – the chapter argues for a shared culture of expectation around the bodies of early modern boys in which physical movement and productivity is at the forefront. This culture, it moves to suggest, is everywhere discernible in contemporary attitudes to the early modern theatre, which articulated a pervasive fascination with the moving, working bodies of boy performers.

The Foreword by John Borrows, the famous Indigenous legal scholar, presents a perspicuous representation of the guiding spirit of the volume from his Anishinaabe perspective. Mutually sustainable and ecosocially just democracies should be grounded in relationships of self and other co-determination with each other and with all our more-than human-relatives.

One essential activity that organisations must review as they capitalise on digital technologies' potential is their existing business processes. Put simply, they must examine 'how things are done around here' and, in doing so, identify if there is any way of improving these activities. In this chapter, I seek to offer an account of delivering a module on 'Innovation, Creativity and Critical Thinking' to final year students of a BA Honours Degree in Insurance Practice. This programme, which commenced in 2016,is Ireland's first apprenticeship towards awarding a level 8 honours degree. The three-year, work-based training programme combines digital academic learning with on-the-job learning, allowing students to acquire various skills. This chapter will demonstrate how students can practically apply techniques learnt in their online class to industry, bridging the theory-practice gap by adopting a learning-by-doing approach to business process re-engineering (BPR).

This chapter reviews how people learn during apprenticeships, ways of guiding beginners while they engage in authentic situated activity with more experienced people. Apprenticeship practices are found throughout the world both in cultures with formal schooling and in those without. Traditional apprenticeship practices tend to focus on physical and visible activities, but most schooling is directed toward conceptual learning outcomes which are usually not physical and visible – like formulas in mathematics or theories in physics. This chapter extends apprenticeship research to cognitive apprenticeship, and describes apprenticeships that are designed to lead to abstract or conceptual knowledge. These involve scaffolding, metacognitive reflection, problem-based learning, and situated social practices. Effective apprenticeship often involves productive failure, when learners initially develop potential solutions that are wrong but that can be productively guided toward conceptually correct answers.

Among the foundational projects in the study of childhood and culture is the “Six Cultures” survey from the late 1960s. Observational data were collected to map children’s daily activity in six village/small town settings around the world. Only in the single US middle-class community of “Orchard Town” were children not routinely engaged in chores (Whiting and Whiting 1975: 84). Nowhere are the gerontocracy and neontocracy perspectives further apart than on the issue of work.2 Indeed, “the dissociation of childhood from the performance of valued work is considered a yardstick of modernity” (Nieuwenhuys 1996: 237). While we hamstring our children to keep them from working, fearing their loss of innocence and studiousness, the norm elsewhere is to open the pathway to adulthood.

Chapter 4 analyses the banishment and penal transportation of enslaved people in the British Caribbean. The first part of the chapter shows the links between punitive mobility and the management of colonial labour. Magistrates sentenced and resold enslaved runaways, rebels, and lawbreakers to colonies like Puerto Rico, Cuba, and St Thomas. They also instigated mass banishments and transportations following so-called conspiracies and plots, and revolts, including to British settlements and colonies in Honduras, Sierra Leone and Australia. Such sentencing became a key element of the larger question of legal reform, following the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the reform of the ‘Bloody Code’ in England in the 1820s, and the amelioration of enslavement (c. 1823-38). The second part of the chapter constructs a detailed narrative of the penal transportation of a group of over one hundred enslaved rebels following the Barbados Rebellion of 1816, via Honduras to their final destination, Sierra Leone. It views their journey as an allegory for a slave voyage in reverse, analysing the layers of connection between and the multi-directional circulations associated with enslavement, imperial governmentality, penal transportation, and other forms of colonial bondage and repression.

A carefully adapted indenture, made for a boy and rewritten for a girl, shows the ambivalence with which young women were bound into London’s Livery Companies, or guilds. Chapter 2 uses new data to estimate for the first time the numbers of London’s female apprentices, which were considerably higher than they appear from the formal record. The complex relationship between women, work and guilds across early-modern Europe often excluded and marginalised women, whilst in some places providing a parallel route to recognition. London’s distinctive customs presented particular opportunities as well as constraints for women. Within the companies, both officially and unofficially, and alongside them, the female apprenticeship sector was growing, prompted in part by economic and social dislocations and by family ambitions. Apprenticeship for girls was coming to be a significant and familiar option through the social spectrum.

In the Gorgias, Socrates famously declares that he is alone among contemporary Athenians in taking up the “true craft of politics.” But the claim is extremely puzzling, since Socrates also claims to be ignorant and lacking in any significant wisdom of any kind. Crafts, for Socrates, involve cognitive achievement. But Socrates declares that he has accomplished little of such achievement. Shows how the model of craft-knowledge can resolve this paradox by allowing Socrates to regard taking up the craft of politics as an attempt to improve his ability in achieving the goals of that craft: benefiting others. Shows how Plato’s early dialogues give abundant evidence of Socrates’ activities in both of what he characterizes as the branches of politics: legislation and correction.

This chapter examines the networks and connections within the early modern legal community of Aberdeen, Scotland. It reconstructs a particular master-apprentice network of the early-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, showing the importance of this educational mechanism both for entrance into the local legal profession and for establishing professional contacts. This chapter also reconstructs the networks which were focused on two of Aberdeen’s most important courts of the period—the sheriff and commissary courts. It shows the extent to which the men who held offices in these courts were interconnected, both personally and professionally, and reflects on what this discovery reveals about contemporaneous local court practice. Finally, this chapter concludes by reflecting on how men of law may have regarded their own networks, through an examination of their children’s god-parentage records.

Can you teach someone to be an actor? Paradoxically, the French cultural context while constraining the remit of the actor allowed acting to emerge as an autonomous science. The conservatoire training model that flourished in France in the nineteenth century was vigorously resisted by the nineteenth-century English actor-manager. Training or talent: the classical debate: Cicero and Quintilian resisted Aristotle’s claim that acting was merely ‘natural’. Early modern apprenticeship in the science of acting: our best evidence comes from Paris in the Shakespearean era, where Hardy’s classical dramaturgy demanded new skills. Multiple skills served the craft of acting. Early modern schooling: the example of Marston’s boy actors: how boys with a rhetorical education challenged the older generation of professionals. Hamlet: fencing as a foundation for acting: Hamlet learns to ‘act’ by learning to fence, and I trace the enduring place of fencing in actor training, distinguishing Italian and English methods. The pedagogy of Charles Macklin: a case study in how eighteenth-century acting was taught. The birth of the conservatoire: first championed by Lekain and his contemporaries.

Apprenticeship in eighteenth-century Turin was a large ‘umbrella’ that covered a range of practices. These could be adapted and used by masters, by prospective apprentices and by their families, according to their needs. While many apprenticeships were contracted, others happened under the aegis of family networks. Guilds were formally involved in apprenticeship but were easily overruled by the state, which increasingly developed economic policies of its own. Guilds did provide a general framework, but the details were hammered out in private contracts between masters and the apprentices and their guardians. Disputes over apprenticeship were settled by the courts, not the guilds. In order to examine the three main educational options available in the city for the middle and low classes – apprenticeship under a master, training by a local charitable institution and training within the family – I use the records of the guilds, the Consolato di Commercio, Turin’s notaries, the main charity institutions and several series of population censuses and lists of workshops. The chapter pays special attention to the quality of the social relationships between the actors and to the different educational models proposed for boys and girls.

Apprenticeship has been discussed from two angles. The first sees apprenticeship as a response to the challenges of adolescence: how can unruly youths, primarily males, be tamed and prepared for adulthood? The second angle looks at apprenticeship as an economic phenomenon: how can youngsters be prepared for skilled jobs? Training usually happens on the job. But how it was organised, under what conditions and with what consequences for the youths and masters involved varied significantly in the past. A range of institutions such as guilds, private notarial contracts and public courts all influenced the structure of apprenticeship before the twentieth century. This book examines their roles, and the characteristics of the system they shaped: what were the social profile and the future prospects of apprentices? Despite the centrality of apprenticeship to the life cycle of Europe’s artisans and economic activity across the continent, there are remarkably few systematic comparisons or surveys of the topic. New quantitative and qualitative evidence helps the contributors to this volume to investigate apprenticeship in novel ways for a wide range of settings across Europe, and in this chapter we set out the main issues in understanding the social and economic history of apprenticeship.

Apprenticeship had economic objectives, but was equally important for the acquisition of social status. The rules and their application concerning masterpieces make little sense from an economic perspective, but a lot when seen as markers of status, in this case separating the master from his journeymen and apprentices. Guilds in the Habsburg Low Countries designed their apprenticeships in terms that made them exclusive but also allowed migrant apprentices to be easily incorporated. In the towns of the Southern Low Countries, apprenticeship fees varied according to the duration of the apprenticeship: long apprenticeships meant low fees; short apprenticehips, high fees. In the seventeenth century and especially the eighteenth century the opportunities for apprenticeships outside the guild structures increased. In the eighteenth century, moreover, some craft workshops started to attract numerous apprentices while many masters had none. Apprenticeship thus became less of a personal contract between two individuals.