Daily Inspiration Quote by Albert Bushnell Hart

“In appearance” does the heavy lifting here, a small phrase that quietly detonates the comforting idea that colonial labor was a single, uniform arrangement. Hart, writing as an early professional historian in an era that loved tidy typologies, signals both a method and a warning: if you skim the surface of the British colonies, you can mistake a shared vocabulary of work for a shared reality of power.

The intent is classificatory but not neutral. Hart is pointing at the administrative and legal similarities colonists could recognize across regions: fields tended, households staffed, bodies contracted or owned, hierarchies enforced. On the ledger, “labor system” can look standardized, especially when viewed from the perspective of governors, merchants, and imperial policy. The subtext is that the resemblance is partly an artifact of the archive itself. Records preserve what authorities bothered to name and regulate, not the full spectrum of coercion and negotiation on the ground.

Context matters: Hart’s career sits in the late-19th and early-20th century moment when U.S. historians were building national narratives and professionalizing “scientific” history. That often meant privileging institutions over lived experience. His phrasing hints at an awareness that institutions can mislead: the Chesapeake’s plantation slavery, New England’s household servitude, the Caribbean’s sugar regimes, indentures and apprenticeships may share outward forms (contracts, discipline, dependency) while diverging radically in permanence, racialization, and brutality.

It works because it’s a historian’s side-eye. Hart invites the reader to distrust the neat overview and to go looking for the mechanisms underneath: who can leave, who can testify, who can be sold, and whose labor is treated as a temporary condition versus a hereditary fate.