Introduction

• The making of the European systems of colonial slavery in the Americas became intensely commercial, based on money and a new world of consumption

• The Atlantic slave trade used businesslike methods

• Slaves would die, be overworked, malnourished, and affected by diseases

• African slaves were brought to America to strengthen the colonial apparatus and perform both menial and supervisory tasks

• New World slavery was a curse that even the grandchildren of the grandchildren of the original African captive found it exceedingly difficult to escape

• The slavery development was associated with several of the processes which have been held to define modernity

• Rapid, uneven but combined development

• New webs of social trust and new social identities

• Slavery is a great facilitator of social mobility and adjustment or transition

• Both institution and individual were disembedded as they were inserted into a new set of social relations

• The control of the commodities produced by slaves conferred great economic power

Civil Slavery and the Colonial State

• Modern social powers can conduce to highly destructive and inhuman ends

• The history of New World slavery shows that civil society can itself powerfully contribute to highly destructive patterns of human conduct

• Totalitarian violence and colonial war can be caused by the alienation of the state from civil society, a fatal conjunction of bureaucratic rationality, and fantasies of total power

• The slave systems of the Americas show the perils of state alienation from civil society

• The conjunction of slavery, colonialism, and maritime power permitted the more advanced European states to skew the world market to their own advantage

  • Profits of slavery → furnish some of the conditions for a global industrial monopoly and are backed up by a host of independent merchants and planters, displaying entrepreneurial qualities

• State sponsorship of slavery was closely linked to the dynamic of civil society, and as slavery flourished, so the state was confined to a more restricted role

• Licenses for the sale of African captives

• The inability of the European states to come to terms with these crucial African areas meant that they remained a battleground

• The various powers constantly sought to imitate one another’s success and learn from their mistakes

  • African slaves could be introduced to boost each and every one of these colonial projects, but the most rewarding was the use of slaves in plantation agriculture

• The Atlantic slave trade was not statist or mercantilist

• Even the large slave trading companies found that they had to respect market principles and learn the precise wants and needs of many suppliers on the African coast and purchasers in the American colonies

Shifting Identity and Racial Slavery

• Oceanic migration created the need to work out new systems of ascribed identity

• Skin colour came to serve as an excellent and readily identifiable maker which everyone carried around, ruling out any hope of imposture or dissimulation

• The baseline of this system of racial classification was pigmentation (darker)

• Every black could be treated like a slave unless they could prove free status

• The abstracted physiological characteristics of skin colour and phenotype come to be seen as the decisive criteria of race

• Slaves were acquired as a means to the production of other commodities

• Native Americans or Africans believed them to be living outside culture and morality in some “wild” and “natural” state

• The identity of the slave had to be domesticated, normalized or naturalized

• The emergent capitalist societies could only recognize humanity of those who had something to sell but not the African captive

• The decision of a consumer to buy sugar refers to the global relations which made it possible

• The dynamics of civil society were shot through with class and racial hierarchies

• One way of securing social inclusion and fixing identity in early modern Europe was national allegiance

• The new racisms furnished critical principles of domestic subordination within the civil society of the colonies

  • African captives were deemed stateless and acquired as chattels. They then became part of the slaveholding household and acquired their owner’s national belonging

• Rise of nations

• Condition of the slave was one in which they were stripped bare of all customary rights and independent means of existence, thus subordinated to the naked, perpetual and comprehensive domination of the master

• The African captives brought with them skills and expectations that helped them to survive, adapt, and ultimately challenge or undermine the modern European notion of enslavement

• Tobacco: was the 1st exotic luxury to become an article of mass consumption

• The growth of capitalism in Europe sucked in a stream of exotic commodities

From the Baroque to the Creole

• Baroque: principles of power and harmony which could reconcile discordant elements

  • Favoured a sanitized and controlled vision of civil society

  • Sought to address the impact of other cultures upon Europe

  • Illuminated the transitional character of colonial slavery, allowing it to be seen as an ancient and traditional form of domination transformed and thrown forward. It helped to propel the forward movement

• The slave systems became attuned to more industrial rhythms, losing first their baroque and then their colonial features

• The creole mixtures thrown up by plantation development became increasingly confident and coherent, escaping beyond European forms and models

• New spaces gave rise to new languages, music, religions, and laws

• Creole: mixture of European, African and Amerindian elements

• The new forms of life born in the colonies were often called creole and represented a new synthesis or mixture, arrived at through the struggles within and between the various components of the colonial population

• New sources of productivity were being tapped, new needs met, and new motivations discovered

• From the perspective of the “longue durée”, the blockages and costs of the slave systems appear more clearly than they do in the New Economic History