A South WITHOUT Black Slavery/Oppression?

I was under the impression that the vast majority of those sacrificed were POWs :confused:


Which is how most societies including Aztecs got their slaves. For example Black slaves sold in America were usually POWs of various African tribes that were sold to Europeans. Because the life expectancy for a European was 1 year during the slavery era Europeans never kidnapped slaves in Africa.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
Which is how most societies including Aztecs got their slaves. For example Black slaves sold in America were usually POWs of various African tribes that were sold to Europeans.
Oh yes, I knew that. Thing of it was, the Africans understood slavery to mean something more akin to indentured servitude, not "I own you so now I can work you to death."
 

Winnabago

Banned
@WolfPaw:

The Europeans generally tended to side with Christian Ethiopia against its Muslim opponents, and they weren’t even Catholic.


If a Catholic state formed in Africa, it would be generally well-liked and supported by European governments over Muslim opponents, at least for a while.

The idea would be to have an Ethiopia in WEST Africa.
 
The main idea I've had is for partus sequitur ventrem to never be enacted by the House of Burgesses in 1662, either due to the existence of alternate means of manual labor (e.g. more indentured servitude amongst the Africans brought overseas)...

Great way to butterfly this less than 2 years prior -- have Spain suppress the Portguese rebellion, meaning the latter don't reestablish their slave trade, meaning circa 1662 Africans are more expensive.

As to the wider OP, another thing to consider around this time is the establishment of the Province of Carolina -- of which John Locke played a prominent part. So there's stuff there to work with...
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
One of the early excuses for slavery were that Africans were "heathens".
Yeah, but so was everybody who wasn't the right kind of Christian. Sharing a similar religion to the Europeans will gain the Africans all of four minutes before somebody rationalizes it as "Mark of Cain" or whatever other legitimation the Europeans pull out of their ass.
 
How would their being Christian stop anything?

Try reading up on the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705, which explicitly "defined as slaves those people imported from nations that were not Christian, as well as Native Americans who were sold to colonists by other Native Americans". Under that definition (albeit one of a later piece of legislation), one couldn't enslave a fellow Christian. Could somebody get a working loophole in place? Maybe, but they'd have to somehow "discredit" the religious nature of those black settlers in order to have legal legitimacy. As it stands, IOTL most slaves were either Muslim or some variety of animist.

EDIT: And yes, there was plenty of inter-Christian religious strife in that time period. However, that was never used as an excuse for placing people in lasting bondage outside of the Irish Catholics who were placed into indentured servitude early on. And one could make the argument that those persons were bound over political or cultural grounds, and not strictly religious ones.
 

Winnabago

Banned
@WolfPaw: If there were Muslim states in West Africa as well, the Europeans would generally support the Christians over the Muslims.

It would be difficult, however, to make sure the slave trade doesn’t start with the Christian West Africans as the sellers.

I know! Make all of the American South totally unsuitable for plantation agriculture! Just bump a few blobs of gas and rock in different directions a few billion years ago and you’re golden.
 
@WolfPaw: If there were Muslim states in West Africa as well, the Europeans would generally support the Christians over the Muslims.

It would be difficult, however, to make sure the slave trade doesn’t start with the Christian West Africans as the sellers.

I know! Make all of the American South totally unsuitable for plantation agriculture! Just bump a few blobs of gas and rock in different directions a few billion years ago and you’re golden.

Lol if only :p Seriously though, there's no reason for the economy of the South to totally deviate from a plantation economy (although an industrialized Upper South still sounds like a great idea to me); to me, the key is to shift/maintain the emphasis from chattel slavery to using free yeoman sharecroppers doing the heavy lifting.
 
Oh yes, I knew that. Thing of it was, the Africans understood slavery to mean something more akin to indentured servitude, not "I own you so now I can work you to death."

No, that is political correct BS for the most part. They were treated as slaves back in Africa as well. They were beaten, raped and worked very hard in Africa as well as America. Also most slaves in the US at least were not worked to death. It would be stupidity akin to working a horse to death. A slave was worth $1000 1860 so if they die you are out $1000 worth of property.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
No, that is political correct BS for the most part. They were treated as slaves back in Africa as well. They were beaten, raped and worked very hard in Africa as well as America.
Slaves, yes, but were they worked to death the same way that Portuguese and Dutch worked the Caribbean and Latin American slaves to death?
Also most slaves in the US at least were not worked to death. It would be stupidity akin to working a horse to death. A slave was worth $1000 1860 so if they die you are out $1000 worth of property.
I was talking more about during the 16th-18th centuries, when the Slave Trade allowed for them to be much cheaper.
 
Slaves, yes, but were they worked to death the same way that Portuguese and Dutch worked the Caribbean and Latin American slaves to death?
I was talking more about during the 16th-18th centuries, when the Slave Trade allowed for them to be much cheaper.

Sometimes, yes. It depends on the circumstances. Black slave-owners are not intrinsically more humane than White ones. Nor did they consider them the same people as people didn't think racially yet. The word slave and Slav are related as historically most slaves in Europe were Slavs before the African slave trade got really big. They were treated no better than Black Africans were later.
 
Slaves, yes, but were they worked to death the same way that Portuguese and Dutch worked the Caribbean and Latin American slaves to death?

I believe they were, if for different purposes (no cotton crops, to my knowledge, in those parts of Africa). One thing to remember is that the African slave trade wasn't started up by Europeans, they just cashed in on it during the colonization of the New World. It was fellow Africans, and Arab tradesmen even moreso, that began the widespread practice of chattel slavery of African tribesmen and women in that time period.
 
How about a Christian African state that operates as a stop for the Atlantic trade routes, and settlers from there often hitch rides to America?
But said Christian African state would probably try to get rid of its various ethnic and religious minorities by selling them to the Europeans as slaves.
 
Maybe, but then again maybe there'd be the same thing in the Muslim nations in West Africa....only those "dissidents" and minorities could be Christians themselves :p

Besides, I think what Winnebago was talking about was free, non-slave blacks leaving Africa (why? perhaps sufficient monetary incentives from the Europeans, or to get away from a hostile government), and not so much as chattel.

So far, I'm leaning towards either;
-My POD idea (the partus sequitur ventrem omission),
-Bacon's rebellion never kicking off to start with,
-A Christian African kingdom sticking around long enough to influence the flow of Africans to the New World (more like that of indentured servants/contract laborers, less chattel property)
 
Is it viable to replace the emergence of African slavery in British possessions with a policy of forced British and Irish Catholic enslavement and transportation?

Of course, this means tens or hundreds of thousands of dead Irish in the sugar islands.

yours,
Sam R.
 
The reason importing African slaves and keeping them in slavery (rather than gradually emancipating them on an individual basis) happened on such a massive scale in the Americas is that it was immensely profitable. There was no way to persuade free workers to do all the work slaves did (though once established as an institution and on such a large scale, slaves did also do work that free workers could be enticed to do for decent wages).

Another thing to remember is that in the 18th century, the British American continental colonies that eventually formed the United States were actually pretty peripheral to the main action of exploiting American resources, which was mainly in the sugar islands of the Caribbean. There, slaves were brought in in truly massive numbers, and the infallible logic of the humaneness of the market fails yet again--those sugar plantation slaves often were worked to death within just a few years. Yes, a slave worth a thousand dollars is an awful lot of capital to write off--but if in the interim of a few years that slave generated a lot more than 1000 dollars in revenue by being worked to death, the plantation owner and his financial backers are ahead of the game.

The continental colonies were, from the point of view of British officials and other such powers that be in Britain, auxiliaries that helped stock the plantations in the islands with food and other essential goods, were good places to get naval stores and so on (but of course the British had lots of such resources all over the world) and by the way there were a few plantations here and there, making on the whole chump change compared to the main action in the islands to the south.

This is part of why the question of emancipation could at least be considered seriously in the Revolutionary and Articles of Confederation years. To be sure, some Southern colonies/states were more deeply committed to slavery than others; South Carolina in particular had some serious investments in plantation crops (the place being fairly tropical in climate).

Without the cotton boom, there's a chance slavery might simply have withered as a core institution and thus eventually have been abolished.

But all these boom markets in plantation crops are a core part of the development of capitalism; it's conceivable that the USA might not have been involved but someone somewhere would be, unless the whole European-dominated Atlantic economy were to stagnate and collapse. Given that the opportunities existed, it would be a massive deviation from both OTL events and the American character if Americans didn't try to cut themselves in to the deal. (And I'm not sure how many other places in the world could have suitably provided the European markets with cotton if the US didn't).

Slavery is offensive to me for many reasons, but a major one of them is that it does indeed tend to be associated with brutal work (and poor living conditions) and if by some historical meander the concept of legally owning other human beings outright were to be omitted or banned from the American colonial/republican history, some other way of coercing some large group of people to work hard for very little gain for themselves would have been found--or much of the wealth of the USA OTL would have been developed very slowly or not at all. Given that a nation is going to have a large class of people doing this hard work while someone else collects the profits, slavery does make a lot of sense compared to the alternatives. More indentured workers, for instance, involves a larger throughput of imported workers to make up for the ones who serve out their indenture and walk away legally. And all those former indentured workers are quite likely to politically side with the current batch. Of course the colonial society might be stratified so that former indentured workers don't have full political rights and can't vote, for instance--but even so they have plenty of informal political power, as a potential mob if nothing else. The alternative to slavery is not to have the same nation with similar people but all the work being done by free hiring--the alternatives are either slavery by another name or something darn close to it, or a much slower pace of economic development, with much less capital available in the colonies.

Emancipation, by the way, came to those sugar islands a lot sooner, for the most part, than it came to North America. The reason being, once the islands were well populated, free labor does indeed become more competitive with slavery as a way of getting the crop in--because now there are many potential workers living on a finite island where there is no easily reached frontier. Wage labor beats slave labor when first of all, there is a well-established population that, if free or freed, would have a hard time maintaining itself on what little land is freely available (if any) and must perforce hire themselves out.

Plantation booms, on the other hand, had a strong tendency to offer the best prospects for quick profits on the frontier. For one thing their land husbandry was as brutal and prodigal as their labor policies were--they tended to exhaust soil and otherwise ruin once-prime land. So they needed a labor force right where a free labor force would have many more appealing opportunities available to them. Somehow or other, the labor force needs to be coerced to stay and work on the profitable plantation, rather than freely walk away to the open land surrounding them.

Another problem with the OP challenge is, if the British colonists in North America were not going to be bringing in Africans as slaves, why else would Africans migrate to North America? Even if we suppose a fair number of people living in Africa heard rumors of some earthly paradise in the west where they could start a new life with some hard work on their own behalf, why would any British sea captain offer to transport them there? Or recently self-liberated American one?

If slavery were somehow weakened, I guess European traders would have simply stopped trading with Africa very much.

So if slavery is frowned upon or even banned, I'd suppose far fewer Africans, if any at all, would have come west of the Atlantic; the US in general and the South in particular would be a lot "whiter."

Pretty much anything that avoids the atrocity of US slavery also would tend to make the USA a much less rich, more slowly developing, and probably geographically much smaller nation. And much whiter too.
 
Anyone know if 'panisses' where also in modern USA, be it Louisiana, the 13 Colonies, Hurons and Iroquois, etc?

Did Iroquoians societies had a slaves system too?
 
SNIPPITY-SNIP

Well....shit. That pretty much blows up the OP, doesn't it. I'd known the Caribbean tended to see more profits (and harsher lifestyle) as a result of slavery, but I'd forgotten how the Colonies were more of a sideshow, economically speaking.

This is part of why the question of emancipation could at least be considered seriously in the Revolutionary and Articles of Confederation years. To be sure, some Southern colonies/states were more deeply committed to slavery than others; South Carolina in particular had some serious investments in plantation crops (the place being fairly tropical in climate).

Is this a possibility? For the Colonies to simply say, "slavery's wrong, period" and to hell with South Carolina, and still have a decent shot of breaking away from the home country?
 
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