Effects of non-racial based slavery in the New World?

Reflection

Not sure if this is unlikely (it sounds like it but it's an interesting thing to think about), but what if slavery in the Americas wasn't based specifically on race (ie no slavery solely to Africans) but more on things like social structure? As in, criminals, POWs, war opponents, objectors, and (on a smaller level) purchased slaves all over, are sent to the Americas to work on sugar and tobacco crops by the European Powers?

How might a a non-racial based system of slavery affect the development of the world going forward?

This was largely how Rome did it, which gave me the idea to ask about this.
 

jmc247

The natives didn’t take slaves based on race and the early Europeans actually used religion as their core justification. You started seeing more racial justification by the late 1600s though not quite fully.

“Act. V, Laws of Virginia, Oct. 1670:

“No Negro or Indian though baptised and enjoying their own freedom shall be capable of any such purchase of (white) Christians, but yet not debarred from buying any of their own kind.”
 

Fabius Maximus

Reflection said:
Not sure if this is unlikely (it sounds like it but it's an interesting thing to think about), but what if slavery in the Americas wasn't based specifically on race (ie no slavery solely to Africans) but more on things like social structure? As in, criminals, POWs, war opponents, objectors, and (on a smaller level) purchased slaves all over, are sent to the Americas to work on sugar and tobacco crops by the European Powers?

How might a a non-racial based system of slavery affect the development of the world going forward?

This was largely how Rome did it, which gave me the idea to ask about this.
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Probably "culture-ism" remains the dominant form of prejudice going forwards. Which might have interesting ramifications in later centuries: if a sufficiently Anglicised or Gallicised Indian or African is considered just as English or French as anybody else, what impact would that have on decolonisation? I think it quite possible that the most ambitious and educated colonial subjects would move to the metropole to pursue political careers there (kind of like you had all these Romanised Gauls and Spaniards moving to Rome and joining the Senate) rather than trying to lead their countries to independence.
 

Nathan Bernacki

Reflection said:
As in, criminals, POWs, war opponents, objectors, and (on a smaller level) purchased slaves all over, are sent to the Americas to work on sugar and tobacco crops by the European Powers?
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Would there be enough of these malcontents to make up for the millions of African slaves that were used in OTL? With African slaves, there was a near-endless supply of Africans being brought across the Atlantic.


Reflection said:
How might a a non-racial based system of slavery affect the development of the world going forward?
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Cody from AlternateHistoryHub tackled a question similar to this. His conclusion was that without the Africans having an entrenched place in the European caste system, then Africans are seen as even more foreign to Europeans than in OTL. As a result, the European colonies in the New World are majority Anglo and Africans are seen as perpetual foreigners.
 
FleetMac

FleetMac

Nathan Bernacki said:
Would there be enough of these malcontents to make up for the millions of African slaves that were used in OTL? With African slaves, there was a near-endless supply of Africans being brought across the Atlantic.




Cody from AlternateHistoryHub tackled a question similar to this. His conclusion was that without the Africans having an entrenched place in the European caste system, then Africans are seen as even more foreign to Europeans than in OTL. As a result, the European colonies in the New World are majority Anglo and Africans are seen as perpetual foreigners.
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- If we're not talking sugarcane (which had a high mortality rate for workers, like orders of magnitude than the other cash crops combined IIRC), why not? That was the major product cultivated by slaves, so butterfly that sector away completely and there'd be less reason to have slavery to begin with. Certainly in the numbers required, if what's being grown are things like coffee or cotton.

- I have a problem with how you (or if Cody, then I direct this at him with my apologies to you) phrased this part, since it implies the dynamic of viewing Africans as either foreigners or subservient being an exclusively Anglo one (remind me how nice the French were to black people in Saint-Domingue, again?). That narrative needs to stop, the entirety of colonial Europe was shitty across the board, with all points of difference being mere distinctions without relevance, and other countries get undeservedly left out of the firing line because of crap like this. Yeah the English were dickhead colonizers, but by the numbers they were a middling- to low-body count offender compared to their contemporaries (not that they couldn't be that much nastier, it's location/settlement location to do with it).

Anyway, hobby-horses aside, I have to wonder if language being a distinguishing factor couldn't occur to separate who the 'slave' Africans and the 'trade' Africans would be. At least that way there'd be a route to de-foreignizing some African nations and peoples that may be traded with for things like gold and other precious goods come the growth of real maritime commerce (although would being 'foreign' to European eyes be all that bad, all things considered?).
 
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Vabasion

Where do you get those non black slaves tho? Natives are too weak to diseases and know the land and can escape. Muslim Arabs and Turks are too feisty and demand way too many resources to enslave. On top of that they didn’t sell each other into slavery. Europe had no non Christians outside of Ottoman Balkans and Lapland, first of which is too hard to attack and second are too rare. Asians are way too far for any feasible slave trade. Africa is the only place where local powers were fractured, locals were willing to sell the defeated tribes for a relatively low price in a high enough number, Africa is right there opposite of Brazil which is the highest importer of slaves for sugar production.
 

Reflection

Vabasion said:
Where do you get those non black slaves tho? Natives are too weak to diseases and know the land and can escape. Muslim Arabs and Turks are too feisty and demand way too many resources to enslave. On top of that they didn’t sell each other into slavery. Europe had no non Christians outside of Ottoman Balkans and Lapland, first of which is too hard to attack and second are too rare. Asians are way too far for any feasible slave trade. Africa is the only place where local powers were fractured, locals were willing to sell the defeated tribes for a relatively low price in a high enough number, Africa is right there opposite of Brazil which is the highest importer of slaves for sugar production.
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I was thinking stuff like winning whatever war, and then sending the survivors off to the New World as slaves for the equivalent of a prison sentence. That kind of thing.

Keep in mind that battles, conflicts and war happened every Tuesday back then.
 

Vabasion

Reflection said:
I was thinking stuff like winning whatever war, and then sending the survivors off to the New World as slaves for the equivalent of a prison sentence. That kind of thing.

Keep in mind that battles, conflicts and war happened every Tuesday back then.
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Slavery in Americas was economic. Occasional wars do not provide enough slaves to replace the ones lost nevermind expand. Sugar cane took people like water.
 

Landmass Wave

That was OTL at first.

Slavery evolved into what we know and hate for a number of reasons. One was that natives could escape and rejoin their tribe, or hide in terrain they knew well. Whites could start over under a new identity 100 miles away. Africans ended up being easily identifiable and therefore convenient.

Introducing west Africans to Christianity was a rationalization at first, but it raised the inconvenient issue of enslaving fellow Christians. And then you would actually have to pay a fair wage. (The horror!)

White supremacist ideology "justified" African slavery in spite of those issues. But it didn't really take off until Bacon's Rebellion. Then the elites had to arrange society so poor whites had something to lose if they allied with blacks again.
 
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