The Origin Of Negro Slavery - Essay Example

In this the east went to Portugal and the west to Spain. After this partition, England responded by Cabot's voyage to North America in 1497. Francis 1 of France celebrated this partition. Denmark and East Indies opposed the pope's decision. Even Sir William Cecil the Elizabethan statesman denied the pope's ruling. England, France, and even Holland began to challenge the Iberian Axis and claimed their place in the sun. Adam Smith says that the British colonial possessions were of two types. First the self sufficient and diversified economy of small farmers which included the Northern colonies of the American mainland and second type were that colony which could produce on large scale for an export market which included the tobacco colonies and sugar islands of the Caribbean.

Caribbean colonies had no choice but to adopt slavery as it was coming on from the Georgian history. Adam Smith later propagates that slavery was also due to pride and love of power that the master had through slavery. It was also known that to hire free labor was more profitable as Slave labor was given reluctantly, it was unskillful, it lacked versatility. But slavery at that time was not chosen out of choice but there was no other choice besides it. Therefore Slavery was necessary, and to get slaves the Europeans turned first to the [Caribindian] aborigines and then to Africa.

In Caribbean colonies where sugar and t. Though slavery was alien to scientific farming and crop rotation.Indentured servants were not forthcoming to the West Indies in sufficient quantities to replace those who had served their term. On the plantations, escape was easy for the white servant; less easy for the Negro who, if freed, tended, in self-defense, to stay in his locality where he was well known and less likely to be apprehended as a vagrant or a runaway slave. The servant expected land at the end of his contract; the Negro, in a strange environment, conspicuous by his color and features, and ignorant of the white man's language and ways, could be kept permanently divorced from the land.

Racial differences made it easier to justify and rationalize Negro slavery, to exact the mechanical obedience of a plough-ox or a cart-horse, to demand that resignation and that complete moral and intellectual subjection which alone make slave labor possible. Finally, and this was the decisive factor, the Negro slave was cheaper. Kidnapping in Africa was less difficult then England, therefore when slaves stopped coming themselves they were kidnapped. Captains and ships had the experience of the one trade to guide them in the other.

Bristol, the center of the servant trade, became one of the centers of the slave trade. Capital accumulated from the one financed the other. White servitude was the historic base upon which Negro slavery was constructed.This is how the Negro slavery started. It was not due to racial factors but the cheapness of labor. Negro slavery, thus, had nothing to do with climate. Its origin can be expressed in three words: in the Caribbean, Sugar; on the mainland, Tobacco and Cotton. A change in the economic structure produced a corresponding change in the labor supply.

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