This article was originally published in the fourth issue of the OAH Magazine of History in 2005, by Philip D. Morgan. Morgan is the Sydney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the American Revolutionary Era at Prince University, and his masterpiece "Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry"(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) won the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Douglas Prize. Authorized by Professor Philip D. Morgan, this article was translated by Zhou Chenzhao, a master's student at the School of History of Wuhan University, and proofread by Professor Du Hua. The subtitle was added by the translator.

Slavery is often considered a "special institution" in the southern United States. However, slavery was not unique to the United States. In world history, almost every society has experienced slavery to some extent. To date, the Aborigines of Australia may be the only group that has not experienced slavery. Moreover, this omission was mainly due to lack of evidence rather than other reasons. Therefore, understanding slavery in the United States in a comprehensive international context is essentially telling the history of global slavery. Due to space limitations, this task is basically impossible to complete. Therefore, this article will mainly explore some key precedents of slavery in North America and attempt to reveal the uniqueness of slavery in North America. This article hopes to strike a balance between discussing the continuity of slavery and analyzing its major changes; the trick is to propose prerequisites, expectations, and connections, but not to regard them as decisive factors.[1]

Slavery in the Classical Era

Several important precursors of American slavery can be found in the classical period. There were only a few truly slave societies in world history, two of which were born during this period. Slave society refers to a society in which slaves account for a large proportion (more than 20%) and play a key role. Ancient Greece and Rome (or at least some parts of these two entities or at specific times) fit this definition and can be regarded as models for the expansion of slavery in the New World. Especially in Rome, slavery went hand in hand with the expansion of the empire. Remote areas of the empire provided a large number of slaves, who mainly entered the latifundia in southern Italy and Sicily to engage in large-scale agricultural production. Coordinating slavery with reason and universal law was a classical tradition that was later exploited by slave owners in the United States; ancient Rome provided important legal rules and justifications for modern slavery. There are many similarities between ancient slavery and slavery in the New World: The dehumanizing practice of calling male slaves of any age "boys" included branding and shaving as a way of humiliation, giving them comic names (a practice that American slave owners could continue by simply using classical names), allowing slaves to own "peculium"(the ability to enjoy partial and temporary enjoyment of a range of objects), the common practice of wearing metal collars for fugitive slaves, and wearing special clothing for domestic slaves. In the first century BC, a fictional biography of slaves appeared in Egypt-"The Life of Aesop"(Life of Aesop）。It reveals the anxieties and fears that exist in any slave society, and some of the sexual tensions are reminiscent of later slavery in the United States. Of course, ancient slavery was fundamentally different from modern slavery. It was a system of equal opportunity: all races could become slaves. Moreover, slavery was primarily seen as a social institution rather than an economic institution. Cultural practices in the classical era were also unique: the Greeks enslaved abandoned babies, and the Romans often tortured slaves to obtain testimony. Although the Stoics were willing to recognize the humanity of slaves, in classical times, no one, including the Stoics, seriously questioned the place of slavery in society. After all, Aristotle believed that some people were "born slaves."[2]

The illustration, titled "Slave Market in Cairo", is derived from "Egypt and Nubia: From Drawings Made on the Spot by David Roberts" and shows the long history of the slave trade in North Africa and the Middle East. (Photo provided by Library of Congress Printing and Photography Department, LC-USZC4-4043.)

Trans-Saharan slave trade

The first to exploit black people in sub-Saharan Africa were Arabs and their Muslim allies. They began the long-distance slave trade in the seventh century and continued into the twentieth century. During this period, millions of Africans were forced to cross the Sahara Desert, across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, and were transported to North Africa, the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf. Although the trans-Saharan or Indian Ocean slave trade lasted longer and more female slaves were trafficked, the total number of African people trafficked was not much different from the subsequent transatlantic slave trade, or may even be more. These pre-existing slave trade promoted the establishment of slave markets and facilitated the subsequent Atlantic slave trade. At a certain period, if there were a large number of black slaves in a certain area, a large-scale slave uprising may break out. For example, in 869, a slave uprising broke out in what is now southern Iraq. The rebels were black slaves known to the Arabs as the Zanj (mainly from the Kiswahili Coast and further north), where they worked hard work such as draining swamps. Although the Koran and Shari'a do not inherently discriminate against skin color, and Muslims enslaved many so-called "white people," by the Middle Ages, the Arabs gradually associated the most degrading form of labor with black slaves. The Arabic word "abd" derives from the meaning of "black slave". Many Arab writers were racist against blacks, and medieval Middle Eastern stereotypes of blacks may have spread to the Iberian Peninsula.[3]

The long-standing trans-Saharan slave trade shows that slavery existed in sub-Saharan Africa long before the Atlantic slave trade. In some places-and perhaps most places-slavery tends to be a secondary institution, and over time slaves can change from outsiders to members of the family. In other regions, especially in some regimes that have become Islamized, slavery is more important, and it is more obvious that slaves are subjected to violent abuse and economic exploitation, and lack of kinship rights. This is mainly because Africa is sparsely populated and has various dependencies, of which slavery is just one; slaves play a wide range of roles, from farmers to soldiers, from domestic servants to managers. There are diverse ethnic groups in sub-Saharan Africa, and this division means that few countries are strong enough to prevent speculative African kings or businessmen from profiting from the plunder of slaves. Those kingdoms that opposed the export of slaves had no way to stop it. Because Africa lacks common religious beliefs and has not achieved political unity, the concept of "Africans" has not been formed. Therefore, Africans can enslave other Africans. Sub-Saharan Africans have adapted to tropical climates, are accustomed to agricultural labor, and are able to grow up in harsh epidemiological environments. As a result, they are considered efficient slaves.[4]

The rise and fall of slavery in Europe from the Middle Ages to early modern times

In the 10th and 11th centuries, as European economies began to expand, the wealthy Mediterranean region received widespread attention. By the 12th century, multiple crusader countries had been established on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Venetian and Genoa merchants pioneered the development of sugar industries in these conquered Arab regions and provided slaves to the region. The first victims of trafficking were Slavs on the Dalmatian coast. After that, residents of the Black Sea coast such as Circassians, Georgians, and Armenians were also gradually involved in the slave trade. It was during this period that the Latin word "sclavus", which referred to Slavs, became the etymology of the English word "esclave", Spanish "esclavo", and German "sklave") and replaced the non-racial Latin word "servus". Therefore, during the Middle Ages, the vast majority of slaves in Europe were "white". The sugar industry gradually spread from the eastern Mediterranean, via Cyprus and Sicily, to Catalonia in the west. The white slave trade also spread. This trade was very similar to the later transatlantic slave trade. It had a complex organizational structure, built strong fortresses, and eventually sold slaves by sea to markets in multiple countries. But after 1453, the Ottoman Turks occupied Constantinople and Christian Europe's main source of slaves was cut off. Sub-Saharan Africans became the only viable alternative.[5]

At that time, Africa had two sources of labor. First, the long-standing Arab caravan trade across the Sahara Desert provided more black slaves to Libya, Tunisia, and the Western Mediterranean. Secondly, Genoa's capital and technology enhanced Portugal's maritime power. Since the 1440s, Portugal imported a large number of black African slaves across the Atlantic Ocean in Lisbon. However, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the number of North African and Muslim slaves exceeded the number of black slaves on the Iberian Peninsula. However, by the beginning of the 17th century, the number of slaves had reached about 15,000, accounting for 15% of Lisbon's total population. The influx of African slaves into the Iberian Peninsula was largely due to the Black Sea-Mediterranean slave trafficking network providing a large number of slave traders and related technology to the emerging Atlantic slave trafficking network.[6]

At the same time, the sugar industry is expanding westward in search of new land. So, by the late 15th century, the Iberians began to colonize Atlantic islands far from their shores. At first, they drove the Guanche of Concern in the Canary Islands into slave labor. The indigenous peoples of the Canary Islands looked similar to the Berbers, and their enslavement by Spain and Portugal hinted at the future fate of Caribbean, Mexican, Central American and Brazilian Indians. In addition, the Atlantic islands of Madeira and S？o Tomé became pioneers in the spread of racial slavery and sugarcane plantations in the New World. It is true that the number of slaves in Madeira is limited, the wealth created by slaves is usually small, and most of the sugar cane is provided by small farmers and tenant farmers. But by the end of the 15th century, Madeira had the largest sugar industry in Europe. Later, Brazilians also followed its business model, learned its production techniques, and soon became the main sugar supplier to the Atlantic world. From the late 15th century to the mid-16th century, the island of Sao Tome in the Gulf of Guinea imported more African slaves than Europe, the Americas and other Atlantic islands combined. In addition, in Sao Tome, slaves were used extensively, much like in America.[7]

Just as slavery was being revived in southern Europe, it was gradually dying out in northwest Europe. Economic development helps explain this change, but cultural constraints may play a more critical role. Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians often committed heinous atrocities among themselves, but they increasingly avoided enslaving each other. Clearly, Christian Europe has developed a sense of unity and effectively banned the enslavement of fellow Europeans. The long-standing struggle between Christianity and Islam has undoubtedly played an important role in this process. From 1500 to 1800, Muslims enslaved more than 1 million Western Europeans. Many of them were later redeemed and viewed as symbols of freedom, leading a growing number of people to believe that Europeans should never become slaves. However, it was these so-called countries that advocated free labor that developed one of the harshest slavery systems in the Americas. As David Brion Davis put it,"It is a staggering paradox-that the first countries in the world to free themselves from movable slavery-such as Britain, France, the Netherlands, and even Scandinavian countries-became leaders in the 17th and 18th centuries in support of plantation colonies based on African slave labor." He likened the dividing line to a primitive Mason-Dixon line,"drawn somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, separating sovereign states in free lands from dependent states in slave lands."[8]

The rise of slavery in the New World

This paradox illustrates the unpredictability of events in the Americas. No European country went to the New World to enslave others. The Europeans did not formulate a complete plan, and the implementation of slavery was more an accidental result of pragmatism. The Europeans initially forced the Indians to work (implementing "encomienda," a semi-feudal system of tribute and tax services), but as the Tainos found in Hispaniola, they paid the price. In the early days, the number of Indian workers declined rapidly. To make up for the shortage, Spanish conquistadors attacked the Bahamas and other islands in the 16th century, transporting more than 50,000 Indian slaves from Central America to Panama, Peru and the Caribbean. Similarly, from about the 1530s to the 1580s, the Portugal relied on Indian slaves in Brazil to produce sugar. Early South Carolina also relied on Indian slaves. In the first decade of the 18th century, Indian slaves accounted for one-third of the total slave population in the South Carolina colonies. From 1670 to 1715, as many as 50,000 Indians from the Carolinas and Florida were sold to the West Indies and Northern Continental colonies in an Indian slave trade. However, there are some basic problems with the use of Indian slaves. First, the Indians believed that any type of agriculture was a job suitable for women only. Secondly, European views on enslaving Indians are clearly contradictory, as the famous debate between Juan Ginés Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas in Spain in 1548 revealed. Most importantly, Indians were very susceptible to Old World diseases. Indian slaves could not survive long enough, which meant that their masters could not make enough profits. Due to catastrophic losses, the Indian labor force was devastated. On Hispaniola, the total number of Taino Indians was about 500,000 before coming into contact with the colonists, but they were almost extinct half a century later. In central Mexico, there were approximately 15 million Indians in 1500. A century later, it was reduced to 1.5 million. The scale of this disaster is staggering.[9]

As a result, Europeans face a huge labor shortage. The Ottoman Turkish Empire blocked access to the Black Sea and Baltic Sea. European countries no longer enslave Christian prisoners of war. Some ideologues talk of enslaving the poor or other marginalized groups, but restoring slavery in Europe will face considerable theoretical and practical difficulties. Another stopgap measure is transporting prisoners, but their numbers are far from enough. Temporary slavery, such as indentured servants, was one of the most obvious and widely used options, especially during the early days of American colonization. But if the servants stay alive, they will eventually be free. Therefore, most servants will hardly go to places where labor is most needed. As a result, African slaves have become almost the best labor force to date. From 1500 to 1820, approximately 9 million African slaves were sent to the New World, compared with less than 3 million white slaves. In terms of immigration, there are more blacks than whites in the New World.[10]

In Brazil, slavery of Indians gave way to slavery of Africans until Brazil abolished slavery in 1888. This painting depicts Africans in Brazil: "Peddlers or Hawkers from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1819 - 1820" is from Henry Chamberlain's "Views and Costumes of the City and Neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil". The paintings were painted by Royal Artillery Lieutenant Chamberlain between 1819 and 1920 and are accompanied by descriptive explanations. (London, 1822).

However, the center of gravity of slavery did not immediately shift to the West Coast of the Atlantic. It was not until 1700 that Africa's income from slave exports exceeded its exports of precious metals and spices. In addition, it was not until the late 17th century that the number of black slaves in the New World exceeded the number of white slaves in the Old World (at that time, white slaves were mainly distributed in the Middle East, North Africa, and Russia, where they believed in Islam). The Maghrib had a large number of white slaves, and they launched many major rebellions. For example, in 1763, 4000 Christian slaves in Algiers revolted and killed their guards,"probably the largest slave uprising in the Atlantic and Mediterranean world between the end of the Roman Empire and the Haiti Revolution."[11]

Characteristics of slavery in the New World

If the practicality of African slaves and the lack of available alternative labor are enough to explain the development of racial slavery in the New World, is racism irrelevant? Does anti-black racism or proto-racism specifically target African slaves to meet the huge labor needs of the new world? Or did racism intensify only after a long interaction with black slaves? Was racism present from the beginning, or was it a result of the development of the slave trade? This is a complex issue, and this article is limited in space to discuss it in detail. There were more exaggerated descriptions of black people in the art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome. Although such descriptions are rare, they are the most telling. Images of Africans in the Middle Ages range from dark magicians to agents of the devil. In many cases, there is a close connection between blackness and belittle. For example, in medieval Europe, farmers were often depicted as "black" because they worked in the sun and came into close contact with the soil; modern Russians even claimed that the bones of serfs were black. In Western culture, black has a strong negative symbolism, reminiscent of death and sin. But despite these negative connections, Europeans 'attitudes towards sub-Saharan Africans are contradictory. For example, medieval Europeans did not proactively associate the biblical word Ham with Africa. On the contrary, Asia is often considered to be descendants of Ham, and the "curse" Ham was used by Europeans to justify his practice of serfdom and enslavement of Slavs. However, in any case, in the Western Hemisphere, slavery was indissoluble with people of African descent. The humiliation, dehumanization and brutality of people prevalent in movable slavery were combined with black in the New World. Racial factors became one of the most prominent features of slavery in the New World.[12]

Another of the most distinctive features of slavery in the New World was its high degree of commercial nature. Although plantations-large agricultural businesses that require them to be as profitable as possible, grow crops for export, and establish hierarchical organizations-can also be found outside the New World, the plantation system has developed to its peak in the New World. Economies of scale, the expansion of unit sizes, the almost total use of black slaves, the high degree of commercialization and regulation of labor, and tight management systems have significantly increased the profitability of the plantation. This production system requires a considerable amount of labor. As early as the 1730s, when a tourist visited a sugar plantation owned by the Jesuits in Brazil, he vividly described the unbearable horror at the time: "People's skin color is like the night, busy working, and groaning, without a moment of tranquility or rest. Even people who have seen Mount Etna and Mount Vesuvius will admit that they are indeed a scene in hell after seeing these chaotic and noisy scenes."[13]

Slavery in the New World also changed internally with time and space. Among them, there are three most prominent points. First, although African men were imported more than women in all regions of the New World (which partly explains the cruelty of slavery in the New World, because the large male group would bring security problems), over time, the sex ratio of slaves in the New World tended to be balanced. In this regard, North America's slave population is the most noteworthy because the number of female slaves here is growing fastest, making it one of the few slave groups in world history to have achieved self-reproduction. This early but rapid natural increase explains why the number of slaves purchased in North America represented such a small proportion of the entire transatlantic slave trade: only about 5%. Second, North America is also much less tolerant of racial mixing than in Latin America or the Caribbean. Demographics, especially the ratio of white men to white women (North America is more balanced than Latin America and the Caribbean), and the availability of black women, are once again key to explaining this phenomenon. However, the role of churches and cultural practices is equally important, which are largely based on Old World patterns of racial coexistence or segregation.

For centuries, the Spaniards have been mixed with Muslims; the British have established specific control areas in their settlements in Ireland. Only in North America is the extremely arbitrary concept of "black"-anyone said to be of clear African descent-considered a significant stigma. Third, in different societies, black slaves had different opportunities to gain freedom. Except before and after the American Revolutionary War, at other times, the North American colonies and later American states imposed strict restrictions on the release of slaves. Similarly, demography-the ratio of whites to blacks in the population-has as much explanatory power as economic and cultural factors.[14]

It is difficult to regard slavery in North America as a whole. It includes various forms: "family slavery" in New England, which is closely related to slaves; slavery in the mid-Atlantic region, which combines slave labor and labor labor; slavery in the Chesapeake region is dominated by small patriarchy plantations, mixed with agriculture and tobacco industries, with a large number of native-born slaves; Slavery in the lowlands consisted mainly of large impersonal plantations, mainly producing cotton and indigo, with a larger number of black slaves in Africa. In addition, what forms of slavery existed in the border areas: in the Lower Mississippi Valley, there was a fluid world of interracial alliances; in Spanish Florida, there was a free world of fugitive slaves and former slavery; and in French Canada, Indian slaves transformed from symbols of the union into exchangeable commodities.[15]

Racial slavery played an indispensable and important role in the colonization process of the New World. This system is neither an anomaly nor an insignificant part. On the contrary, the development of slavery was a harsh and unstoppable theme that governed the development process of the Western Hemisphere. The most essential feature of slavery in North America (and to some extent, the New World) is that it was completely commoditized on a racial basis. The opposition between freedom and slavery has become increasingly apparent, because the belittle of slaves liberates others, allowing them to control their own destiny and dream of freedom and equality. This is the core contradiction in the United States, that is, a country founded on freedom is rooted in slavery. The American Dream always has a dark side. However, dream chasers will eventually try to get rid of the nightmare. At the same time, victims are also working hard to change this reality. Unlike other forms of slavery in the past, slavery in the New World did not gradually die out over a long period of time, but came to an abrupt end. The process of emancipating slaves lasted just over a hundred years: from the emergence of the first anti-slavery society in Philadelphia in 1776, to the landmark Haiti Revolution in 1792, to the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888. A system that had been in place for thousands of years disappeared in about a century. Thus, the last feature of slavery in North America was the rapid and novel process of abolition.[16]

Notes:

[1] The term “peculiar institution” became commonplace among Southerners in the nineteenth-century United States: Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956).

[2] Moses I. Finley, “Slavery,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, in David L. Sills and Robert King Merton, eds. (New York: Macmillan, 1968) 14: 307-13; Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, reprint (Hammondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1983, 1980) 9, 96, 102, 111, 113-14; Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Hopkins, “Novel Evidence for Roman Slavery,” Past & Present, 138 (1993): 3-27; Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 12-13, 87; Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Keith Bradley, “Animalizing the Slave: The Truth of Fiction,” Journal of Roman Studies 90 (2000): 110-25. For studies that explore the classical legacy over a long sweep of time, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), especially 29-90, and William D. Phillips Jr., Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). In addition to the sanctions for slavery that the classical literature of antiquity provided and that assumed new force during the Renaissance, the religious undergirding for slavery evident in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles ideally should be explored.

[3] Ralph A. Austen, “The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade: A Tentative Census,” in Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn, eds., The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 23-76; Austen, “The Mediterranean Islamic Slave Trade out of Africa: A Tentative Census,” Slavery & Abolition 13 (1992): 214-48; and his most recent, “Slave Trade: The Sahara Desert and Red Sea Region,” in John Middleton, ed., Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara (New York: Scribners, 1997) 4: 103; Pier Larson, “African Diasporas and the Atlantic” (unpublished paper, 2004); Ghada Hashem Talhami, “The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 10 (1977): 443-61; Alexandre Popovic, The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the IIIrd-IXth Century, trans. Léon King (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1998); Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). For newer works on Ottoman and Islamic slavery, see Ehud R. Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998); Shaun E. Marmon, ed., Slavery in the Islamic Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1998); Minra Tora and John Edward Philips, eds., Slave Elites in the Middle East and Africa: A Comparative Study (London: Kegan Paul International, 2000); John O. Hunwick and Eve Trout Powell, eds., The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2001); and Paul Lovejoy, ed., Slavery on the Frontiers of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2004).

[4] Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977); Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

[5] Charles Verlinden, “L’Origine de ‘sclavus-esclave,’” Archivum latinitatis medii aevi 17 (1943): 97-128; Verlinden, L’Esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale, Vol. 1: Pénisule Ibérique-France (Bruges: De Tempel, 1955); Vol. 2: Italie, Colonies Italiennes du Levant, Levant Latin, Empire Byzantin (Ghent: 1977); and Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization: Eleven Essays with an Introduction, Yvonne Freccero, trans. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970). For newer work on medieval slavery, see Ruth Mazo Karras, Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); David A. E. Pelteret, Slavery in Early Mediaeval England: From the Reign of Alfred Until the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1995); Steven Epstein, Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Sally McKee, “Inherited Status and Slavery in Late Medieval Italy and Venetian Crete,” Past &Present 182 (Feb. 2004): 31-53.

[6] A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441-1555 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 21-24, 48-86.

[7] Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The Canary Islands after the Conquest: The Making of a Colonial Society in the Early Sixteenth Century (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1982); Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), especially 1-26, 42-84, 201-236. For more on S？o Tomé, which requires more study, see Tony Hodges and Malyn Newitt, S？o Tomé and Príncipe: From Plantation Colony to Microstate (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988) and Robert Garfi eld, A History of S？o Tomé Island, 1470-1655: The Key to Guinea (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992).

[8] David Brion Davis, “Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives,” American Historical Review 105 (April 2000): 458, and his Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 14; Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003). For more on the development of freedom and slavery, see David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Sue Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

[9] Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966) and Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise & Decline of the People who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); William L. Sherman, Forced Native Labor in Sixteenth-Century Central America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979); Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Joyce E. Chaplin, “Enslavement of Indians in Early America: Captivity without the Narrative,” in Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas, eds., The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 75-121; for a recent discussion of Indian population decline, see David S. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 60 (October 2003): 703-42.

[10] David Eltis and William G. Clarence-Smith, “White Servitude,” in Eltis and Engerman, eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery (forthcoming). For slavery compared to other forms of coerced labor, see M. L. Bush, ed., Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage (London: Longman, 1996); Stanley L. Engerman, ed., Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Bush, Servitude in Modern Times (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2000).

[11] David Eltis and William G. Clarence-Smith, “White Servitude,” in Eltis and Engerman, eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery (forthcoming). For slavery compared to other forms of coerced labor, see M. L. Bush, ed., Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage (London: Longman, 1996); Stanley L. Engerman, ed., Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Bush, Servitude in Modern Times (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2000).

[12] Frank M. Snowden Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970); Snowden, Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat, eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, Vol. 2: From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery” (Cambridge, MA: Menil Foundation, 1979); Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 133-73, 300-03; Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 170-73; Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996); the essays in “Constructing Race: Differentiating Peoples in the Early Modern World,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 54 (January 1997): 3-252; David M. Goldenburg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); and the best account is David Brion Davis, “The Origins of Anti-Black Racism in the New World,” chapter 3 of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of New World Slavery (forthcoming).

[13] Robert Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: Norton, 1989); Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons, 3.

[14] Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946); Carl N. Degler, Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1971).

[15] For some examples, see William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Daniel H. Usner, Indians, Settlers, & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); and Brett Rushforth, “‘A Little Flesh We Offer You’: The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France,” William and Mary Quarterly 3d Ser., 60 (October 2003): 777-808. To this list might be added other forms of aboriginal slavery: see Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979); William A. Starna and Ralph Watkins, “Northern Iroquoian Slavery,” Ethnohistory 38 (Winter 1991): 34-57; and Leland Donald, Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

[16] Slavery, however, continued in Africa until about the 1930s. There the abolitionist moment was rather prolonged and slavery underwent what has been termed a “slow death.”