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The Wages of Slavery: From Chattel Slavery to Wage Labour in Africa, the Caribbean and England: Michael Twaddle: leondumoulin.nl: Books.
Table of contents

There is new activity in the field of colonial history which supersedes the work of the Consensus historians. This work is stimulated by various influences : like in other fields of historical research there is a general turning away from the more narrow confines of political and institutional history towards the economic, social, demographic, and intellectual aspects of the development of societies.

The questions, concepts, and methods of the social sciences are being put to use by historians. Of special importance is the influence of the "histoire totale" of the Annales school and of those English social historians engaged in the study of early modern England. These new concerns had the effect of turning the attention to the study of entire social units or societies and to the interrelated processes of all the forces and factors within them.

There is interest again in the "colonial period", but now the colonies are increasingly seen as an integral part of the English colonies in the New World and these in turn within the context of European colonization of the Americas. More important, the colonies are not being studied as seedbeds for the development of American liberty or character, as sources for American exceptionism, in other words not under a teleogical aspect, but as objects for historical study in their own right, on their own terms of reference. Even so, colonial America remained a field where answers to urgent contemporary questions were sought 1.

The events of the s pointed rather to conflict in American society and questions of the recruitment of labor, of the legal status, conditions and wages of those who labored, and of who had the power to determine these became very relevant. Together with the vast interest generated in the s for American slavery as a socioeconomic institution and for the lives and culture of the American slaves throughout the existence of slavery, the question of its colonial origins became important.

The concern with slavery produced a variety of approaches : how bad was it, compared to servitude, to the condition of the poor whites often the ex- servants , to other slave-owning societies? How did it function, what was its relation to racism? And American historians began to investigate the class divisions within American society. Here too, colonial society was of particular interest, since it had long been the soil in which the roots of American exceptionalism were sought.

It became now a focus of interest of a whole group of younger historians who have adopted the approaches and methods of the new social history and who are collecting the elements for a "histoire totale" of English colonial society in local records, such as deeds, wills and probate inventories of estates, court orders, tax lists and parish records.

Their work is very much in progress still 2. New World Context of English Colonization. There is a tradition in Anglo-American history that the colonization of the New World was a good progressive thing and that it was perhaps an unavoidable, but certainly very unfortunate accident that much of the work had to be done by slaves.

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In fact, for all the Euroean maritime powers the purpose of colonization was to develop these newly found resources in order to make a profit, be it for the crown or state for some of them, or for chartered companies of merchants and businessmen for others. This was true from the conquistadores to the English colonists. In all of the Western Hemisphere European capital developed and exploited American land. The labor needed for this was during the first phase of colonization exacted under some form of slavery or other forms of involuntary servitude by all of the colonizing powers.

There were immense resources to be exploited, but the question of an adequate and permament supply of labor presented itself in all colonizing ventures, since there was never any assumption that those who directed these ventures and provided the capital would do the physical work 3. In the world of the 16th and 17th centuries manual work was performed by people who were in some way or other subject ; in some regions of Mediterranean Europe they were even subject still to a form of chattel slavery. A natural assumption of inferiority was associated with manual labor - it was not an occupation of free men.

What was new was not slavery, but slavery exclusively based on' race. The first colonizers wanted to find Eldorado, the land of gold and needed workers to mine it for them. They tried to enslave the Indians and caused their extermination in the islands where they first landed. When they reached the developed societies of the highlands of Mexico and the Andes they did find precious metals and in the labor - tribute system of encomienda they developed a method to make the Indians work for them.

The subsequent attempt to cultivate sugar in the lowlands wiped out the lowland Indian population. Other laborers had to be found to develop the plantations which pioneer agricultural capitalism installed across the entire lowlands of the subtropical Atlantic areas : the littoral northward from Brazil all around the coasts of the Caribbean Sea to what is today the US South, as well as the Caribbean islands. This became one vast region producing subtropical agricultural staples for exportation to Europe which were eventually far more important than precious metals : tobacco, sugar, rice, indigo, coffee.

slavery | Definition, History, & Facts | Britannica

It was for this enterprise that African slaves were brought in. A trade in slaves developed in the early years of the 16th century and by a regular trade in slaves was fully under way even though it involved at first very small numbers. To the Mediterranean colonizers this was not new : there was trade in slaves from the Black Sea across the Mediterranean as well.

Why We Can't Compare Chattel Slavery to Other forms of Bondage

The Genoese occupied a leading position in the Mediterranean trade and sought to establish themselves in the atiantic trade as well. The Portuguese sailed down the coast of Africa to secure direct access to the African markets and became the first major traders on the Atlantic route. They furnished the new plantations of the Spanish Lowland colonies with slaves. But we should be careful not to consider this as a purely mercantile operation or as the spread of Catholic tyranny of which the propagandists of English colonization, the Richard Hakluyts and Samuel Purchas accused them.

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The English had no monopoly on their errand into the wilderness. The two Catholic nations considered themselves equally as bringers of civilization ; the Portuguese conceived their trade as a new crusade to convert the heathens and took care to baptize their unfortunate charges before landing them in the New World. They were displaced from the trade by the Dutch who enjoyed a near monopoly in the early 17th century. By ousting the Dutch at the end of the XVIIth century the English became the major traders and presided over the slave trade during its greatest expansion in the XVllIth century.

It is an interesting illustration of this sequence that the English name for Africans became the Spanish word "negro" with its equally Spanish "mulatto" inspite of the existence of the well established English words "Moore" or "Blackmoore". The trade was outlawed by all the maritime nations during the first half of the XlXth century but continued illegally for another half century : for four centuries it brought millions of laborers for the plantations and workshops of the New World.


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It was not an accidental factor : the "American" plantation - large or small - manned by slave labor was an essential element in the history of the continent, one of the foundation stones of American development, "a fixture of the New World" 4. Enter the English. The English were late comers to this world. By the time they appeared the two Iberian nations were making huge profits from slave labor on their plantations and slave trade routes and markets were well established. In fact, the English entered as interlopers. They began by raiding the Spanish Main with John Hawkins1 famous slaving voyages in the s Hawkins entered Spanish ports by force and sold slaves at great profit or with Francis Drake pirating the Spanish treasure train on the Isthmus of Panama.

Their exploits were celebrated by Queen Elizabeth, but the English were not ready then to win in this competition for colonial riches since they lacked bases on the African coast and colonies of their own. Even after they had established themselves : the. After the Restoration the Royal African Company was founded to break the monopoly of the Dutch traders.

Members of the Royal family invested in it and it was granted a monopoly, a fact much resented by private traders. The company understook to deliver slaves to the English colonies on a regular basis and for the first time there were regular deliveries to places north of Barbados which until mid-century had been the northern-most slave market in the Americas.

Now slaves were being brought directly instead of being reexported to places further north : to Charleston, the Chesapeake Bay and eventually Newport. The Company lost its monopoly after the Glorious Revolution and private traders rushed in including the New Englanders from Rhode Island, and Newport became the major trading center on the American coast. In the hands of the Anglo-American traders who also supplied slaves to the other colonial powers, the slave trade experienced its greatest expansion ever ; for most of the XVIIIth century the black flood poured in in numbers not seen before 5.

The colonization of the Western Hemisphere took place in a context of buccaneering and piracy, of conquest and rivalry and perpetual warfare between the colonizing powers of which colonial possessions and trade - including the trade in slaves - were the object. All nations that participated in this conquest of the New World fought for the same things and adopted the same methods.

Even if in England villainy and slavery had ceased to exist she had easily adapted herself to the struggles of the Atlantic trade - and that also meant trade in slaves ; the English buccaneers who undertook slaving voyages in the mid-XVIth century, even before there were English colonies, were celebrated as national heroes and knighted by the Queen of England. The English Colonies. The beginnings of slavery in the English colonies cannot be studied in Virginia and Maryland alone as some of the earlier scholars have done 6.

These were but two of the colonies planted by a London company or an English proprietor ; the investors, merchants, or "adventurers" of early X V Nth century England did not think of "America" in terms of those colonies which later rebelled and formed the United States ; to them "America" meant the New World. When they spoke of the "American plantations" they meant the settlements of Barbados as well as those of Massachusetts Bay or Maryland 7. They obviously distinguished between the "islands" and the "mainland" or continent , but this distinction was purely geographic.

Even the meaning of "Virginia" was at first vague as "the voyage to plant the fifst colonie in the Northerne parts of. Virginia" in the Mayflower compact attests. Servants signed their indentures for the "colonies" or the "plantations" as often as for any specific one and with such indenture they might go to Jamaica or Carolina or any other.

Their settlements were tied to the English Atlantic trading system and last, but not least, they existed within the imperial political and military context, were drawn into the warfare with the other colonial powers both locally and in the international context in addition to warfare with the Indians, and depended for their defence on England. Within the larger New World context colonial English America was a broad socio-economic, cultural and political unit and experienced as such by XVIIth century Englishmen. The question of servitude and slavery must therefore be seen in this context of the English colonies.

The English followed the example of Spain and tried to enslave the Indians, but from the beginning they also brought in white indentured servants before they turned to black slaves. All English colonies produced either commercial crops staples or became trading and shipping colonies, inspite of the fact that some began with independent yeomen engaged in either commercial or subsistence agriculture, and inspite of the fact that in most mainland colonies mixed subsistance agriculture continued to exist in the hilly backcountry - the mainstay of the colonial economy were either staples or shipping and trading.

Indian labor was never of any real importance in English America, slavery and servitude were essential. The relation between them was complex : slavery was not in every case related to the crop cultivated - even though sugar was everywhere by slaves ; tobacco was grown by indentured, even free white labor in Barbados and Virginia before Barbados turned to sugar and slaves and Virginia to slave grown tobacco. Even after the development of large scale slavery white servants continued to be sent to some colonies in great numbers - this was the case in Jamaica and Maryland.

Many questions concerning this relation remain open and debate continues. A number of things can be said with certainty : in no colony were Africans brought in from the beginning ; in all there was a first phase when the workers were white English servants. Both white servitude and black slavery furnished at one time or another and in some cases side by side the essentiel element in the growth of the colonies.

The promoters of the colonial enterprises thinking in the terms of their social world were looking for "servants" to do the work. In the following lines written by Emmanuel Downing of Massachusetts to his brother-in-law John Winthrop in we find it all in a nutshell : "If upon a just warre vwith the Narragausett Indians'! And I suppose you know verie well how wee shall mayne- teyne 20 Moores cheaper than one English servant" 8.

Descriptions of colonies in terms of their economies and societies go back some time ; on of the most influential has been the distinction that Herman Merivale made between farm and plantation colonies in his Oxford lectures on "Colonization and Colonies" ; he claimed that involvement in the international market was the crucial distinguishing factor that determined the colonies' production and social relations : i.

Recent students of American colonies have found a regional classification more useful, but even so in the five regions they describe a predominance of one or the other type can be observed. The first region of permanent English settlement were the shores of the Chesapeake Bay from on, organized later in the colonies of Virginia and Maryland. These settlements were followed 13 years later by the different colonies in the region of New England - Massachusetts and its offshoots of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. The next group of English colonists entered the world of the Caribbean islands ; they went to Barbados in the s and from there to the Leeward Islands end finally to Jamaica after it was captured from the Spanish in The English Civil War interrupted the colonizing ventures, but after the Restoration colonial expansion continued vigorously : Dutch colonies situated on the Atlantic coast between New England and the Chesapeake were captured by the English to become the colonies of New York and the Jerseys ; together with the quaker colony of Pennsylvania this is the region of the Middle colonies.

Finally, the last region still settled in the 17th century was the Lower South of the Carolinas to which Georgia was added in the early 18th century. Two of these regions, the Caribbean and the Lower South were predominantly plantation colonies, New England was a region of farm colonies with the exception of the Narragansett Bay and both the Middle colonies and the Chesapeake contained both types altough in opposite proportions : there were plantation subregions in NY and Jersey in what were rather farming colonies, where as the Chesapeake contained farming subregions in a greater plantation economy.

The staple of the Caribbean was sugar, of the Lower South rice and indigo, and of the Chesapeake tobacco ; shipping and trade were the principal activities of the economies to the North. In the end, by the 18th century each region had developed its specific labor system, slave labor predominating in all.

New England had become the one region where workers were no longer brought in from across the Atlantic and work was done by native born family or wage workers. The development towards these final forms was in some cases very rapid, in others took almost a century.

If a laborer is defined as someone who is not working for himself - a slave, a servant, an apprentice, a wage or dependent family worker, then the majority of the colonial population were dependent workers The foregoing points to a larger context in which slavery was a well established and important form of unfree labor and in which the slave trade was not only a means to an end, but an economic enterprise in which enormous profits were made.


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The English not only participated in this early on, but in the end became the leading entrepreneurs. Viewed from this angle it would not seem important which arrangements of labor - servitude prevailed in England herself since she did not act differently in the context of Atlantic commercial and military expansion. We might now look at some of the English colonies in more detail because here we should expect English domestic relations and ideas to play a larger role. The Story of the Chesapeake.