What you’re much better off doing is getting people from outside. It’s always been really difficult to enslave people on their own territory. What happens in Mesoamerica is interesting because the Spanish make a conscious decision not to enslave the indigenous population there. So, you have this really interesting coincidence that, when the Europeans start to push out into the Atlantic in earnest and start to establish centres of population in Mesoamerica and the Caribbean, the slavery technology, that is the combination of commodities and slave labour, is resting there on the west coast of Africa. It goes through Cyprus, Sicily and, ultimately, ends up in the Canary Islands on the west coast of Africa just before Columbus sails. What happens as the Middle Ages proceed, from the 13th to the 15th century, is that the combination of sugar production and the use of slave labour gradually moves west through the Mediterranean. So, you have to choose an ethnicity that’s understood to be foreign to you and they often used Slavic peoples.
Crusaders who controlled territory in Palestine were, like colonial slavers in the 17th and 18th century, keen to use people not like them to do the work of slaves. You have, in the Levant, the cultivation of-what we would call by the 18th century-plantation crops, using enslaved people.
You can trace that story back to the Crusades without too much interruption. How did it actually kick off – did it start a week after Columbus arrived in America, or did it develop as a result of particular constraints in developing colonialism in the Spanish experience? Foreign Policy & International Relationsīefore we get on to the books I want to start by asking about the origins of the Atlantic slave trade.By century’s end, more than half of Virginia’s labor force was enslaved. They brought slavery to Virginia by buying “slaves instead of servants” (304). The men who arrived garnered more prestige in England. Therefore, men who wanted to get into plantation production went to Virginia. Virginia planters had advantages over other planation economies: They could replace slaves at a lower rate than sugar planters, giving a greater return on investment a rise in the price of tobacco meant they could pay for them and tobacco required “a smaller outlay of capital for production equipment” (303). But the Navigation Acts prevented buying and transporting them to the colony. So, in 1660, with a decline in immigration largely due to an end to England’s population problems, it likely became more advantageous for Virginia planters to buy slaves. But forcing servants into slavery might have led to massive rebellion, so rather than enslave Virginians, they bought “men who were already enslaved” (297). Morgan suggests that as soon as Virginians found tobacco, the colony was on the road to slavery. Virginians imported workers from England to ensure their profits.
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