Oh, you're welcome. And I basically just stopped there because it was late and I wanted to get down my response to the first half before I read the rest.
I didn't know about the hut taxes, although I did take a look at the Dutch cultivation system in their colonies in what would become Indonesia for my timeline, and certainly the system you adopt here seems closely analogous to that.
There's a whole very rich scholarly literature about early modern Europe and Africa, much of which gets picked up in scholarship about the Shakespeare play "Othello", which was where I first encountered it.
The evolution's actually very interesting: people's feelings of fascination and sometimes revulsion at others who looked different in a way they had never seen before at around 1600 is at the other (say, around 1800) these rigidified notions of supremacy and hierarchy supported by their own pseudo-science.
And to some degree the relationship of the planters in the West Indies to the development of European anti-African racism isn't that controversial.
Most of the really egregious ideas that circulated in the nineteenth century about Africans got their start in Edward Long's 1774 History of Jamaica, the publication of which was financed by Jamaican sugar planters to defend their labor practices to a British audience. (By the way, you may want to read Long's History of Jamaica if it's in a library near you. It's very uncomfortable stuff, but it explains a certain mindset with absolute clarity, and it gets cited by every pro-slavery polemicist for a long time afterward).
It's a really fascinating chicken-and-egg problem. Now, to the best of my memory from when I researched all this ten years ago, in the late seventeenth century there was an evolution in the North American English colonies away from indentured servitude and the use of the Irish and lower class English in colonial field labor towards more use of slaves, and at the same time enslavement on the basis of religious difference proved problematic because once the slave converted to Christianity the master had to set him or her free. So both problems were solved by the legal evolution of slavery to a race-based category tied to an immutable characteristic (in short, the idea is that someone can convert from Islam or an indigeneous religion, but can't convert from their skin color). Once this class of permanent slaves became established under English law, the chasm between they and the rest of the society in terms of their treatment and the estimation of their value as persons could only widen, really. And the rest of society had only an incentive to rationalize their subordination.
Now, here's the fascinating bit for purposes of this timeline: everything I just said is specific to the English colonies of North America and the Caribbean. The French experience in the Caribbean, much less what went on in the actual Dutch Cape Colony, I can't speak to. And fascinatingly, you've developed a timeline where these same forces and prejudices confront each other, and like I said, have a very realistic evolution over time.
DW,
Thanks for taking a look. The 20th Century and 21st Century are even more fun to read about than the earlier ones--if anything, because there are more wars and more gadgets.
It is actually the first time I can recall anyone telling me it is more realistic than Stirling.
About the use of taxation, my model was the "hut taxes" the Europeans imposed to get the Africans out of their villages and into the cash economy (when they simply didn't outright enslave them).
About slavery, I read once that the King of the Kongo visited Portugal and was treated with all the respect a European monarch would have had. I think back then, religion was the big issue, not race.
What are you referring to when you ask about the Africans and religion? I know the Afrikaners briefly practice slavery. Did I include the historical anecdote about the practice of communion (which I believe is from OTL)?
