Colonial Slavery

In this lecture, Professor Totten argues economic motivations and white supremacy led to the rise of slavery on the North American continent. The creation of the plantation complex enabled large scale cultivation of sugar, which in turn, fueled the desire for more labor and land. West Africans were knowledgeable about harvesting sugar and their rulers had an economic incentive to sell war captives into a form of European slavery that was hard for these rulers to imagine. After leaving the slave forts on the coast of Africa, enslaved Africans suffered through the horrific Middle Passage. During their journey, they experienced physical and psychological torture, murder, and rape. Slavery was worst in the West Indies, where human beings were literally worked to death as part of a cruel economic calculation to maximize profits. Slavery in the Deep South was little better, where whites used alternating Indian allies as slave catchers, before eventually selling their former natives into slavery abroad. Initially, Georgia was not a slave state, until the colonists there wanted to exploit slavery for financial gain. The Chesapeake and Deep South saw an explosion in the number of enslaved Africans from natural reproduction, which later fueled the inter-state slave trade. The enslaved were subject to slave codes, which regulated every aspect of their lives. Despite the abject cruelty slaves suffered, African traditions endured in the Americas, and the enslaved resisted in acts of everyday sabotage to outright freedom rebellions. Thus, colonial slavery represents an unfortunate aspect of history that has a direct connection to modern day economic and racial inequality in the United Sates and abroad.