Search Results: Child Labour

Children were widely used as labour in factories, mines, and agriculture during the British Industrial Revolution (1760-1840). Very often working the same 12-hour shifts that adults did, children as young as five years old were paid a pittance...

The repartimiento system was a distribution of rights to Spanish colonialists and municipalities, which allowed them to extract forced but low-paid labour from local communities in conquered territories. Designed to replace the inefficient...

The encomienda was a system where Spanish adventurers and settlers were granted the legal right to extract forced labour from indigenous tribal chiefs in the Americas colonies of the Spanish Empire. In return, the Europeans were expected...

Medieval European Manorialism (Manorial System) was the system where rural society was arranged around a manor house or castle on an estate. The smallest units of these estates were called manors. Free and unfree labourers here worked the...

The Industrial Revolution saw a wave of technological and social changes in many countries of the world in the 18th and 19th centuries, but it began in Britain for a number of specific reasons. Britain had cheap energy with its abundant supply...

An early-20th-century photograph by Frank Meadow Sutcliffe of a child working in a factory alongside adults. Child labour was used extensively during the Industrial Revolution and after. (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

An illustration of a child pulling a tub of coal from the mine face to the surface. Child labour was common in mines in Britain and not restricted until the 1842 Mines Act.

Medieval serfs (aka villeins) were unfree labourers who worked the land of a landowner (or tenant) in return for physical and legal protection and the right to work a separate piece of land for their own basic needs. Serfs made up 75% of...

A child worker in a cotton mill, Georgia, USA. Photograph taken in 1909. (Library of Congress, USA)

An 1877 photograph by John Thomson of a child shoe black, usually a job for a pauper boy who did this to avoid the workhouse.