Dr Sonia Tycko
Lecturer in the History of Labour
![](https://www.ed.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/uoe_profile_picture/public/profile_photo_sonia_tycko_2019-09-14_09.46.08.jpeg?itok=JjsUXzPx)
- Deputy Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Global History
Contact details
- Email: sonia.tycko@ed.ac.uk
- Web: Office hours bookings page
Address
- Street
-
40 George Square
- City
- Post code
Background
I am a historian of early modern England and the Atlantic world, with a focus on social and legal history. I received my B.A. from Columbia University and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Before joining Edinburgh, I was the Kinder Junior Research Fellow in Atlantic History at the Rothermere American Institute, the University of Oxford, in partnership with the Kinder Institute at the University of Missouri.
Undergraduate teaching
Revolutionary Britain (Special Subject)
Slavery and Forced Labour in the British Atlantic World (Honours Elective)
Historical Skills and Methods II: Voices from Below in the Early English Atlantic World
Early Modern History: A Connected World (Pre-honours)
The Global Economy (Pre-honours)
Global Connections (Pre-honours)
Historian's Toolkit (Pre-honours)
Postgraduate teaching
Freedom and Coercion in the Making of the Atlantic World
Economic and Social Theory for Historical Analysis
Professional Skills for Historians
Themes in the Historiography of the Americas
Historical Research
Research summary
Places:
- Britain & Ireland
- Caribbean
- North America
Themes:
- Comparative & Global History
- Labour
- Society
- Urban
- War
Periods:
- Early Modern
Research interests
- historical concepts of consent, persuasion, and free will
- social control and labour coercion
- freedom of contract
- freedom of movement
- documented and undocumented mobility
Current research interests
My first book manuscript, ‘Captured Consent: Contract Labour in English Charity, Colonization, and Warfare, 1600–1700’, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. At the heart of the book are transatlantic indentured servants, who I study in comparison and connection to apprenticed pauper children, conscripted soldiers, and prisoners of war put to work in England. The book argues that exploitative early modern labour practices played a significant role in the development of the concepts of freedom of contract and the sanctity of an individual’s consent. One of my new projects is ‘The Servant of One Master: Controlling Early Modern Labor Mobility through Identity Documentation’, which is funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh Small Research Grant. I am also beginning a project on ‘The Long History of Indenture’.Knowledge exchange
I am currently the deputy director of the Edinburgh Centre for Global History and will return as director in January 2025.
I convene an international research network, "Historicizing Consent: What did it mean to agree in the late medieval and early modern world?" with co-convenor Tamar Herzog. Further details including a collaborative bibliography are available here: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/historicizingconsent.
Affiliated research centres
Publications
Tycko, Sonia. “Consenting to Early Modern Empires: Introduction.” Ler História, no. 84 (March 2024): 9–13. https://doi.org/10.4000/11uqs.
Editor of Ler História dossier on “Consenting to Early Modern Empires,” featuring articles by Tamar Herzog, Caroline Cunill, Paulo Jorge de Sousa Pinto, and Ângela Barreto Xavier.
Tycko, Sonia. “Bound and Filed: A Seventeenth-Century Service Indenture from a Scattered Archive.” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 19, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 166–90. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/780967
Tycko, Sonia. “The Legality of Prisoner of War Labour in England, 1648–1655.” Past & Present 246, no. 1 (February 2020): 35–68. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz031.
Winner of the Sutherland Prize, American Society for Legal History
Project Director, “America and Race: A Bibliography for UK History Undergraduates,” https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/america-and-race-bibliography