Alternative to African slavery

Slavs most likely - keep russia divided and the tatars strong and you have an ample market

While the British were certainly capable of treating other Europeans cruelly (just ask the Irish), would Western European colonial powers really do business with Muslims to purchase massive numbers of light-skinned Christians to toil as slaves in the fields? That seems like a move that could easily garner huge backlash, though perhaps the folks behind the slave trade could justify it by saying that these people will be treated better in the Americas than they would under the Turks. Even that seems like a stretch, though.
 
From my understanding isn't forced labor an inherent feature of large scale pre-industrial societies?

You need to be more specific on what do you mean by ‘forced labor’. Most of the pre-industrial European states did not have slavery and some of them did not have even servitude as the main ‘institution’. OTOH ‘forced labor’ as in ‘forcing convicts to work’ was pretty common even for the industrialized states.
 
You need to be more specific on what do you mean by ‘forced labor’. Most of the pre-industrial European states did not have slavery and some of them did not have even servitude as the main ‘institution’. OTOH ‘forced labor’ as in ‘forcing convicts to work’ was pretty common even for the industrialized states.

The African-Atlantic slave trade was founded by... who, again? Right. Europeans.
 
While the British were certainly capable of treating other Europeans cruelly (just ask the Irish), would Western European colonial powers really do business with Muslims to purchase massive numbers of light-skinned Christians to toil as slaves in the fields? That seems like a move that could easily garner huge backlash, though perhaps the folks behind the slave trade could justify it by saying that these people will be treated better in the Americas than they would under the Turks. Even that seems like a stretch, though.

People will do anything for money. Expect a shift in ideology to say that orthodox christians arent really christians and that slavs are basically mongols.
 
The African-Atlantic slave trade was founded by... who, again? Right. Europeans.

You did not pay attention: I wrote about the European countries, not their colonial practices, and as such your objection is hardly relevant to what I wrote.

Anyway, most of the European pre-industrial countries did not participate in it by the obvious reason of not having colonies. The question was about the “forced labor”, which is a much broader issue. Probably you should read more carefully the post to which I was answering.

Of course, there were the whole European societies that were heavily into slave trading (admittedly, not across the Atlantic) without having colonies even in the XVIII century. It just happened that the slaves were .... “Europeans”.

Of course, bashing “Europeans” is fashionable but don’t forget that the term includes a wide variety of ethnicities (BTW, the same goes for the term “Africans”: population of the Barbary Coast tended to be on an enslaving part of the slavery schema) and that slave trading was a very old and widely spread institution going well beyond the Western European practices and not limited to African slave trade. BTW, even African slave trade existed well before the “Europeans” came into the picture: hopefully, you do not think that, say the black eunuchs ended up in their position and situation voluntarily?

So, while I fully agree that slave trade to the Americas was a bad thing, I don’t quite get why (except for a narrow subject of this specific thread) it should be singled out of a much broader context of the phenomena.
 
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African people were not enslaved just because they were unlucky enough to have their name picked out of a hat. There were a lot of reasons why the trans-Atlantic slave trade developed, and it'd be hard for another region to take its place.

South and East Asia are too far away. Sailing from Africa to the Caribbean was already long enough where a large portion of people didn't survive the trip. Few people are going to survive the terrible conditions of a slave ship going all the way from Asia to America. Asia also has more powerful governments that were on par with the European states for longer, which would make it harder for the Europeans to strong-arm them like they did to African states until later on.

They wouldn't use other Europeans en masse the same way they used Africans. Europeans, even Eastern Europeans and Irish, were still seen as Christians and a tier above the "savage races." There is also an economic problem with using European people, since they don't fare as well in tropical environments. Plantation owners in the Caribbean tried using Irish indentured servants and found that their workers were dying faster than they could be brought in. African people were better adapted to the hotter climate and had a better immunity to the tropical diseases endemic to those places.

Native American peoples were enslaved, but their lower numbers and greater ability to escape made it unfeasible outside of densely populated areas like Mexico or the Andes. To get enough natives to build a slave system off of, you would have to change the genocidal practices in North America.

North American settler countries can either develop around African slavery, or not develop such an entrenched system of slavery in the first place. They can't realistically draw their slaves from some other source.
 
It is worth noting that the slave trade in East Africa was entirely devoted to providing slaves for the Islamic/Arabian world, and there were establishments on the coast that specialized in producing eunuchs - you will have losses from complications doing this without anesthesia, antisepsis etc even with experienced technicians. In West Africa, where the bulk of the slaves for the Americas originated, the bulk of the European presence were the forts on the coast. Slaves were brought to the collection centers primarily by other Africans, captives or sometimes folks from the kingdom of a ruler who wanted to get rid of them and wanted muskets and powder in trade. Especially in West Africa the climate and geography was quite hostile to white Europeans so Africans did the slave raiding. Arab slave raiding in sub-Saharan areas and on the East Coast was more prevalent due to less harsh conditions for outsiders, but in any case the bulk of African slaves were acquired by Africans and subsequently sold to outsiders.

It is true "outsiders" provided the market for slave exports, slavery was already a "thing" in Africa, but without the active participation of Africans on an official basis, not just random raiders, the slave trade would have been very much smaller. This is in no way a defense of what happened, just simply a recitation of fact. African participation as a key factor in the slave trade, and the Arab/Islamic slave trade from Africa tend to be ignored in a general trend to blame it on the "Europeans". It is worth noting that the Arab/Islamic slave trade was substantial, although less than the European, however it started sooner and lasted longer (in to the mid 20th century) than the "European" slave trade.
 

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African slavery was first tested large scale by the Portuguese in Brazil, taking model of what worked on Sao Tomé. The colonies of both Portugal and Spain had serious labot problems with both native and white labor being hard to control (both tended to escape). When the Portuguese realized Africans just had less reasons to escape from terrible working condition, due to them being unable to return back to Africa (white laborers that ran off usually snuck aboard ships to Europe, natives just ran back home) and it was unfortunately a success. The Spanish soon followed suit, mainly through buying slaves from the Portuguese, and every other colonial power used the model for their own colonization schemes. The most profitable place for African slavery ended up being the Caribbean, especially islands you could grow sugar in large quantities on.

To avoid having slavery in the US you might want to look back at why African slavery became a thing and why it was succesful, or rather more succesful than other forms of labor.
 
Well, we often forget about Le Grande Dérangement (I think that’s how it’s spelled) in Acadia which dispersed the Cajuns throughout North America. Perhaps the Cajuns are simply enslaved instead? Or maybe they’re not enslaved, but put into a system of inherited indentured servitude, and more Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and later Italians are brought over as indentured servants.
Acadians never made up more than 30% of the francophone regions they migrated to.

Regardless they die like flies in the sugarcane fields.
Slaves from Asia, but generally from India, Nusantara and East Asia. I made a thread once about the subject: WI: Asian slaves in 16th century America.
OTL Malagasy died at higher rates than West African due to time and distance, I doubt many South and East Asians could make it in the chattel ships.

Though OTL the occasional Malay was sold in West African slave markets and there were occasional Asian slaves in Portugal mostly due to being the servants and hand slaves to merchants.

The numbers for the plantation society of the Americas? Nah.
 
So, I appreciate all of the talk about why West Africa was the most likely candidate for slaves in the plantation societies of the New World, but the OP wasn’t really asking how something else could evolve from the start, but rather, how something else could be instituted in response to the banning of the enslavement of Natives and Africans.

So, given what has been discussed in here in terms of how other forms of slavery are infeasible, how would the early plantation economies of the West Indies, which in turn inspired later economies on the continent, develop in response to the new legislation?
 
So, given what has been discussed in here in terms of how other forms of slavery are infeasible, how would the early plantation economies of the West Indies, which in turn inspired later economies on the continent, develop in response to the new legislation?

Indentured servitude becoming slavery-in-all-but-name would most likely be the go-to solution here. As has been previously stated, European countries pre-industrialization did in fact rely heavily on forced labor (serfdom, for instance) and were quite used to the idea of unfree labor (as were, indeed, most pre-industrial states). What they were not used to was the specifically racial slavery that emerged during the Atlantic Slave Trade, and which is to a certain extent as much something caused by economics as by the example of the Moors.

To put it plainly, one of the many reasons that indentured servitude declined in the American colonies was that there was a very large boom in colonial industries in the 17th century, to the point that existing immigration (even taking into account the number of indentured servants who were merely kidnapped and forced into contracts IOTL) and population growth simply could not fill the needs of the labor market. Thus, slaves.

I will focus on the 13 Colonies since that's what I know best. The largest problem, then, facing our unintentionally abolitionist 13 is the fact that immigration will not fill the needs of the plantation economy. Indeed, by the 17th century, the vast majority of British colonies grew naturally, with foreign-born populations rarely exceeding 10% (as per Wikipedia). Pennsylvania, which doesn't really enter into this equation, and Georgia, which does, were exceptions to this rule. As per this document, the overwhelming majority of the young United States identified as English, with the Scots and Irish being tied for a very distant second-place.

What this indicates is that the majority of settlers who did come were from England or its territories in Europe until after the birth of the United States, which makes sense to a certain degree; immigrating to the United States, a young, fresh country (from their point of view), comes off as a lot more doable than immigrating to an English colony.

The solution therefore must involve making people outside of the British Isles want to immigrate to OTL English colonies and especially the plantation states. This could be accomplished through more English possessions in Europe (Duchy of Normandy and/or Aquitaine, for instance), a more internationalist Eastern Seaboard that lasts (in particular, a non-English New England could shunt most of the OTL British immigration there to the plantation economies, possibly fixing our little problem), or perhaps an incentive system to encourage colonists from other European countries.
 
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How large was African participation in the Arab slave trade? As you know, the Atlantic slave trade, African people, tribes, and kingdoms would sell slaves to European clients. Was the same thing prevalent in the Arab slave trade, or did Arabs themselves along with Arabized Africans enslave people?
 
There was both direct Arab slave raiding and African involvement in the slave trade to the Islamic world from Africa. In sub-Saharan areas, and some spots on the east coast the climate/geography allowed direct raiding much easier than on the west coast. However there was still a fair bit of Africans selling Africans to the Arabs.
 
The annoying thing about how this thread is going is people not understanding that Arabs can be black and African and Portuguese Identified and/or aligned people could be considered consider.

African is a Eurasian concept.
 
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