How to Use peonage in a Sentence

peonage

noun
  • Many drivers stick around for the full year to avoid those fees, enduring what amounts to debt peonage.
    — Andrew Kay, WIRED, 17 Jan. 2023
  • 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
  • Sometimes, exile was self-inflicted when people fled their homes before they could be sold off to debt peonage.
    — Kristin Collier, Longreads, 1 Dec. 2021
  • 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
  • All this on-screen peonage feels rather academic given the tyranny of real-life lockdown.
    — Armond White, National Review, 15 Jan. 2021
  • The Wilberforce Act covers physical abuse and peonage, which is forced labor.
    — Judy L. Thomas, Kansas City Star, 6 June 2024
  • If the government doesn’t tread carefully, a future of debt peonage to China beckons.
    — Washington Post, 20 Sep. 2019
  • 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
  • Another reader learned how her white ancestor upheld the peonage system in early 20th century Georgia.
    — Claire Thornton, USA TODAY, 21 Feb. 2020
  • Labor trafficking follows the same definition, except its purpose is subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.
    — Celina Tebor, USA TODAY, 12 Jan. 2022
  • Her empathetic portraits of African-American field hands shine a light on a system of peonage that predated and outlasted the 1930s.
    — Arthur Lubow, New York Times, 13 Feb. 2020
  • 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
  • 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
  • Many Black Americans fled this violent system of peonage and terror in the Great Migration, moving to cities such as Gary and Pittsburgh for a better life.
    — John E. Jackson Sr, Chicago Tribune, 16 June 2026
  • 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
  • Amendment prohibitions against peonage and involuntary servitude.
    — Gabe Lacques, USA TODAY, 14 Apr. 2021
  • 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
  • Redemptionists stymied Black progress toward economic independence through sharecropping and a debt peonage system that encumbered Black farmers with overwhelming financial burdens.
    — Time, 15 Sep. 2022
  • 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

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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