Dr Sonia Tycko

Lecturer in the History of Labour

Biography

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

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

I can offer supervision to students with a focus on early modern England in the Atlantic world.

Current PhD students supervised

Euan Healey

Past PhD students supervised

Alison Clark

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 in press with Cambridge University Press (forthcoming 2026). Consent has been celebrated as a guarantor of liberty and self-determination, but its history suggests a rather different meaning for this key concept. The coerced labor systems of apprenticeships of pauper children, transatlantic indentured servitude, military conscription, and the employment of war captives in seventeenth-century England all drew on consent for legitimacy. In the context of the long-term, long-distance, and high-risk nature of this work, English people developed consent into a tool of labor coercion. Coercion could constitute valid consent for people whose social position, age, and gender fit the profile of natural laborers. Many subordinates experienced consenting (or the presumption of their consent) as a form of acceptance of or even submission to their position. Those who successfully resisted labor contracts managed to do so through the convincing performance of an ineligibility for coercion, whether that be because they were under a special status like prisoners of war, or because they were dependents of another, and unavailable to serve new masters. By revealing the ways in which people thought with consent in their contract labor practices, this book suggests that early modern labor was one of the fields in which ideas of freedom of contract, voluntariness, and enticement developed. 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 director of the Edinburgh Centre for Global History.

In 2022–2023, I convened 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.

 

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

This article was published on