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Originally Posted by iheartthed
European governments also banned enslavement of Europeans and mostly outlawed slavery in Europe itself. This is why slave ships could not ever stop in Europe while carrying African slave cargo.
But capitalism without the appropriate law structure to protect human beings is why slavery proliferated. Landowners in the New World wanted cheap labor for their plantations. What's cheaper than free?
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Slaves weren't "free labor" though - not unless you inherited them from your parents and then bred more (icky way to talk about it, but still).
Again, you can go back and look at the cost of things back the 18th century. Native American slaves were dirt cheap. White indentured servants were middling price. African slaves were the most expensive. It was well known that anyone coming from Europe had to be "seasoned" first - which basically meant the period it would take after they contracted malaria and/or yellow fever to see if they would survive and get strong enough to do field work. Black slaves could essentially work as soon as they were taken off of the slave ships.
Note this wasn't ever an issue with the native-born white population however, because for the most part they got the deadly tropical diseases during childhood, meaning they were fine as workers by adulthood. But even in these cases sometimes in the worst climates (like around Charleston and Savannah) the slaveowners would leave the plantations in the summer, sometimes even leaving them in control of black overseers because the local climate was just too deadly for white people.
It's also worth noting that a big part of the reason why some parts of the Caribbean (Guyana, Trinidad, etc) developed a large South Asian population is because after slavery was abolished in the early 19th century by the UK, there was still a need for agricultural labor which a free European population wasn't going to be able to meet.
Quote:
Originally Posted by badrunner
You are completely ignoring the moral and intellectual arguments for slavery popular at the time, in favor of simply focusing on the proximate economic causes.
There were entire fields of pseudosciences (which can be grouped together under the umbrella term " scientific racism") that were used to justify the institution of African chattel slavery. It was the natural order of things. And these weren't fringe ideas at the time - it was mainstream science. It might make some people uncomfortable, but to ignore this aspect of slavery is intellectually dishonest, and yes, it is a whitewashing of history.
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I am not ignoring them. The racism mostly came later, as a justification for practices which developed organically due to economics and climate. If you look back to the writings of the 17th and the 18th century, people were much, much less racist than the 19th century. They more or less justified slavery for the same reason that the ancients did - they had the power, Africans did not, hence it was fair game.
Racism developed because of slavery. Slavery didn't develop because of racism.