How to Use peonage in a Sentence
peonage
noun-
By now, so much online territory has been seized by our e-overlords that the rest of us have been reduced to e-peonage.
—Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, 8 Mar. 2021
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They can not be extricated from the theory that a class of people carry peonage in their blood.
—Michael Harriot, The Root, 2 Oct. 2017
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All this on-screen peonage feels rather academic given the tyranny of real-life lockdown.
—Armond White, National Review, 15 Jan. 2021
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This is where the system of debt peonage really emerges in the South, as a way of controlling African Americans from Reconstruction and until the 1950s.
—Gaby Del Valle, Vox, 19 Oct. 2018
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If the government doesn’t tread carefully, a future of debt peonage to China beckons.
—Washington Post, 20 Sep. 2019
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Her empathetic portraits of African-American field hands shine a light on a system of peonage that predated and outlasted the 1930s.
—New York Times, 12 Mar. 2020
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The percentage of sharecroppers and tenant farmers tripled, until nearly one family in three was reduced to peonage, working for someone else—working just to live.
—Kevin Baker, Harper's magazine, 10 May 2019
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During the next two centuries, New England Indians also suffered indentured servitude, convict labor, and debt peonage, which often resulted in the enslavement of the debtor’s children.
—Philip Deloria, The New Yorker, 18 Nov. 2019
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That requires power projection, so China has turned a dozen countries around the world into client states through debt peonage, collateralizing abusive loans with concessions for military bases and deep-water ports.
—Nicholas Phillips, National Review, 5 Sep. 2019
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Another reader learned how her white ancestor upheld the peonage system in early 20th century Georgia.
—Claire Thornton, USA TODAY, 21 Feb. 2020
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In parts of southern Mexico, such as Yucatán and Chiapas, debt peonage tied laborers to plantations as effectively as violence.
—Alice Baumgartner, The New Yorker, 19 Nov. 2020
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Among these players are the approximately 96% who will not go pro, and for whom a college athletic scholarship, where they are expected to subordinate education to athletic performance, is more akin to peonage.
—Time, 30 Mar. 2021
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Eight states passed laws disenfranchising the urban poor, and the new state of California prohibited slavery but established the practice of peonage on Native Americans that denied them political rights.
—Time Staff, Time, 26 Sep. 2017
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Amendment prohibitions against peonage and involuntary servitude.
—Gabe Lacques, USA TODAY, 14 Apr. 2021
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'peonage.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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