No African slavery Trade.....offer voluntary "employment"

Suppose there was no African slavery trade. Instead the British went to the tribes offering employment and a "new life" in America....

How would our nation's demography have changed?
 
You have to have a POD further back than English colonization, since the Spanish and Portugese were well involved in enslaving the Caribs and Brazilian Indians respectively 100 years before Jamestown. How about a POD circa 1500 involving a Papel decree, enforceable by excommunication, that no Christian King allow slavery within his realm?
 
You have to have a POD further back than English colonization, since the Spanish and Portugese were well involved in enslaving the Caribs and Brazilian Indians respectively 100 years before Jamestown. How about a POD circa 1500 involving a Papel decree, enforceable by excommunication, that no Christian King allow slavery within his realm?

Papal decrees are overrated. As we say in Spain the Pope can say mass - wether people on the other side of the world will listen him is other question.

Anyway, in the case of Spain the slavery of Indians was already abolished in the 1500s. What remained, of course, was the encomienda system where you just took Indians under your "protection" and they worked for you in exchange of being taught the Christian faith and culture... of course it's just slavery under ther name. If the colonies run out of Indians, nobody is going to stop the colonials from building "encomiendas de negros" instead.
 
Actually, the notion of indentured servitude for Africans is not as far-fetched as you might think. American slavery evolved slowly, with the notion that children of slaves were also slaves for live. The founding fathers (c. 1783) saw slaves getting freed (because the economy was lagging) and even George Washington did not think slavery had a long-term future.

My point: the atrocities with which we associate 19th century slavery evolved from 1810 to the 1840's, after the application of the cotton gin, as labor was needed for industrial cotton plantation work. Importation of slaves was no longer legal after 1808.

Actually, one way to mitigate the cruelty of slavery may have been to allow immigration of Africans under the conditions of indentured servitude, with the condition that the children were born free. Even the ancient Romans granted the rights of citizenship to the children of slaves.

Eventually, indentured servitude would be outlawed (maybe before 1865 as in OTL) and slavery wares itself out without a civil war.
 
Howard Zinn's People's History has a bit about slavery that I think is pretty close to the mark. Africans were treated as indentured servants in the British colonies in the early years, but after Bacon's Rebellion the colonial elite decided that they needed a more reliable and pliable source of labor (Bacon's Rebellion being a primarily ex-indentured servant affair). This source of labor was the Africans who had formerly been sold as indentured servants. The Africans began to be bought as slaves, racial laws were passed, and soon the color barrier was made more important than the class barrier. Thus racial tension, allowing the Africans to be used as chattel slavery, provided a method to bind the white under-class to the colonial elite.

So then . . . . figure out some way around this (I don't know if there is one), a POD that will keep the English colonies from making the switch of Africans from indentured servants to chattel slaves.
 
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