I received this question this morning, and it deserves a complete answer.
  
"Mr. Drake; .... I have read the servant questions and am confused.  One list member said that servants were brought here by groups of neighbors who sent a friend to England to find some.... You said that boat owners and businessmen sent them from there to here and sold them, and another lady said that the people who wanted to be servants just hired out to come here.  Which is true, please?  Thanks.  Eva" 

Hi, Ms. Eva; the answer is "all of the above", plus still more.  Simply stated: There was a brisk need/market here by those who needed people who would/could work with their hands and as skilled craftsmen, and that demand exceeded the number of folks who lived here and would do physical work.  The solution was to gain folks from the old countries who would come out to these wild, unsettled and primitive colonies.

The greatest source of such workers/artisans was among the poor of Britain (and Germany, etc. also). Those with any measure of security quite usually did not want to leave that security for an unknown place that might as well have been on the moon.  A majority of those folks who would come here simply had NO money for a trans-oceanic voyage.  So, "supply the transport or have no laborers" became the watchwords.  

But, further inducement - profit - for those who would haul those poor people who could not pay their way was needed, otherwise ONLY those who needed labor would pay the fare for anyone new.  Were that state to continue, the colony could advance only very slowly.  

There was land a'plenty here - untold millions of acres - so Parliament, upon the advice of the Colonial officers and the VA Company and its successors, knew that Britain would not be deprived if it granted lands to anyone who would pay the fare of another person.  50 acres was decided upon for most of VA, and as little as 1/4 acre in some of New England and as much as 180 acres in early GA were the grants decided upon for those colonies.

In light of the fact that, as with virtually all property, such rights to 50 acres (or any other land or property) could be sold, traded, or otherwise bargained away or passed by will or intestate succession, and also because those "headrights" were highly desirable to anyone who wanted land yet needed no labor, an active market in headrights very quickly developed.  That all induced entrepreneurs, ship owners, speculators in land, and all manner of businessmen, AND planters of course, to pay for the transport of workers even if the investors never laid eyes upon those "servants".

Thus, if you were poor, or in public disgrace, prison, were a younger son or a daughter and thus had no hope of primogeniture or inheritance, or if you simply had wanderlust, you could make your way to any of many seaports and agree with a "procurer" to sign on for 5 to 7 years of service as a servant (or until age 25 for kids, usually), make the hazardous and LONG trip, and if your servant contract was the means by which you made the fare bargain, you were then sold/traded upon arrival here to whoever needed your labor.

So it was that many were the ships masters, ships owners, and others who earned substantial profits and gained land throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, and equally many were the "planters" who gained the labor they needed to prosper by raising labor-intensive crops such as tobacco, rice, and - soon - cotton.  Then too, the whole scheme was very much encouraged by the King and the Colonial government, since thereby those governors gained increased revenue by taxing the new lands that were broken to the plow or otherwise developed.
  
While there were neighbors who jointly sent a person - "agent" - to pick and choose servants and pay their fare to here, the vast majority were transported by businessmen who saw great opportunities to make a buck based on the need here for people.  As a postscript, it should be noted that an estimated 250,000 "criminals" were sent to the British colonies, and no small number of children and others were kidnapped - "spirited away" - and sent here.  Paul

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