Editing Debt bondage (section)

===Americas===
{{Further|topic=indentured servitude in the American colonies|Indentured servant}}

During the [[colonial history of the United States]], persons bonded themselves to an owner who paid their passage to the New World. They worked until the debt of passage was paid off, often for years.<ref>Cheesman Herrick, White Servitude in Pennsylvania: Indentured and Redemption Labor in Colony and Commonwealth (New York: Negro University Press, 1969), 26.</ref> Debt peonage was practiced as "an illegal form of contemporary slavery... well into the 1950s" in "Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and other parts of the Deep South." Civil authorities would arrest "colored men off the street and in their homes if they were caught not working," charge them with [[vagrancy]], assess fines equal to several weeks of pickers' pay, and compel them "to pick fruit or cut sugarcane to work off the debt.... Those captured were hauled to remote plantations ..., held by force, and beaten or shot if they tried to escape."<ref>{{Cite book|last=Wilkerson|first=Isabel|title=The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration|publisher=Vintage Books|year=2010|isbn=978-0-679-76388-8|location=New York|pages=152}}</ref>

In [[Peru]], a [[peon]]age system existed from the 16th century until [[land reform]] in the 1950s.  One estate in Peru that existed from the late 16th century until it ended had up to 1,700 people employed and had a prison.  They were expected to work for their landlord a minimum of three days a week and more if necessary to complete assigned work.  Workers were paid a symbolic two cents per year.  Workers were unable to travel outside their assigned lands without permission and were not allowed to organise any independent community activity. In the [[Peruvian Amazonia|Peruvian Amazon]], debt peonage is an important aspect of contemporary [[Urarina]] society.<ref>{{cite book | last=Dean | first=Bartholomew | title=Urarina Society, Cosmology, and History in Peruvian Amazonia | publisher=University Press of Florida | publication-place=Gainesville, Fla | date=2009 | isbn=978-0-8130-3378-5 }}</ref>