Arthur George Kamya

Arthur’s dissertation contends that “sin taxes” (alcohol excise and customs; income from the forced labor of convicts and indigent debtors; revenue from the sale of captives, felons, and thieves into temporary and perpetual servitude, often candidly described as “slavery”) were indispensable to standing up and financing Massachusetts colonial government. In constructing a system of social regulation efficacious enough to alleviate the colony’s fiscal needs, authorities looked to English legal enactments and conventions governing alehouse licensing, poor law relief, enforced apprenticeships of idle youth and so-called vagabonds, as well as the practice of commuting felon death sentences to transportation as models. In the Bay colony, as in England, long before it could rely on personal income and wealth taxes for its function, the nascent state weaponized ordinary peoples’ peccadilloes and misfortunes to garner resources to the same ends.