WI: Africans had never been brought to colonial America as slaves?

Lateknight

Banned
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Legally correct. Slavery disappeared from Ireland sometime after Saint Patrick.

In practice, slavery was easier on the body than indentured servitude.

However, hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrated to North America as indentured servants. Working conditions were so brutal that many indentured servants died before the end of their 7-year contracts.

The only people who got treated worse than indentured servants were poor, immigrant, day-labourers who got "adrenaline sport) jobs like felling trees, breaking horses to saddle and draining snake-infested swamps.

Compared to actual slavery the Irish had it easy.
 
For Africans to never have been transported to the Americas, you'd have to butterfly away the Atlantic Slave Trade and more than likely the Arab Slave Trade. Africans had resistance to tropical diseases and they were plentiful and cheaper than indentured labor.
 
Most likely you'd you see Irish slaves. They weren't seen as the same race as Anglos and Scots, there was already history of using them as slaves, the treatment of Native Americans by Anglos was based on earlier experience conquering and colonizing Ireland. When building the Erie Canal and railroads the Irish weren't treated much better than slaves (they were the Chinese of the Eastern states). The Irish didn't get a better life, especially in NY dominated by the Dutch aristocrats, until they started dominating demographically and they themselves had the Italians, Eastern European Jews, and African-Americans to discriminate against as the Anglo/Dutch had discriminated against the Irish.
 

Benevolent

Banned
You would see a very lightly touched economy and landscape until a stable mestizo population came into place.

For some reason most people think slave labor as the sowing of seed to harvest, maybe the creation of beds but not the other reservoirs of knowledge and skills that really facilitated the expansion of European interests in America.

Blacks were among the first fleets of ships to the new world, they having been acculturated and themselves a part of the process of European trade and cooperation provided a necessary blueprint I believe Europeans needed to have before making massive militaristic and economic waves in various lands.

If you mean if no blacks free or slave were in the new world you'd have to remove the European/North African economy and line of communication

Also Irish Slaves were not and have never been a real thing, I have some lines that I descend from. Those formerly bonded people weren't anything more than debted future settlers and overseers/slave masters.
 

yourworstnightmare

Banned
Donor
If you want to remove Transatlantic slavery messing up the early Portuguese experiments would be the best way to go. However you quickly start a butterfly storm (Labour problem in colonies, never solved, plantation economy fails) which probably butterflies away the existence of the US down the line.
 
How different would U.S. history turn out to be had African slaves never been brought to VA or any of the other colonies?

Why are Africans going to be imported to sugar islands but not the north american colonies?

yours,
Sam R.
 

NothingNow

Banned
Also Irish Slaves were not and have never been a real thing, I have some lines that I descend from. Those formerly bonded people weren't anything more than debted future settlers and overseers/slave masters.

Eh, all it'd take is a pissed off judge and a single legal decision making indenture a permanent state of affairs. It's not hard to see if there's a particularly massive demand for labor. It's pretty much what happened in Virginia anyway.

It's honestly what'd be expected if you kept importing Irishmen to work in fever zones, where they'll die off that much faster than African labor would. Besides, they were Catholic and uniformly peasant-y and as a result, not actually people by the (English) standards of the day.
 

Benevolent

Banned
Eh, all it'd take is a pissed off judge and a single legal decision making indenture a permanent state of affairs. It's not hard to see if there's a particularly massive demand for labor. It's pretty much what happened in Virginia anyway.

It's honestly what'd be expected if you kept importing Irishmen to work in fever zones, where they'll die off that much faster than African labor would. Besides, they were Catholic and uniformly peasant-y and as a result, not actually people by the (English) standards of the day.

The institution of slavery would never have continued had White Servants been made the primary source of Chattel slaves and secondly one only needs to look at Montserrat history to see just how much they desired and succeeded in joining English social structures. They very quickly turned against their black bondsmen to further their social climbing.
 

NothingNow

Banned
The institution of slavery would never have continued had White Servants been made the primary source of Chattel slaves and secondly one only needs to look at Montserrat history to see just how much they desired and succeeded in joining English social structures. They very quickly turned against their black bondsmen to further their social climbing.

All of which only lasts as long as there's something to be othered against.

And I wouldn't say that the Redlegs succeeded in joining English social structures, since they're still dirt-poor, and are a discrete (and increasingly inbred) population on every island they're found on.
 

Benevolent

Banned
All of which only lasts as long as there's something to be othered against.

And I wouldn't say that the Redlegs succeeded in joining English social structures, since they're still dirt-poor, and are a discrete (and increasingly inbred) population on every island they're found on.

Redlegs are a mere remnant of the Irish servant population, those too stubborn to both work in the plantation system or work manual labour.

Most Irish married black eventually and formed the mixed race buffer classes in the US and Caribbean or melded into the white working class as racial notions solidified the notion of whiteness amongst low class English and Scottish migrants.

At anytime they're mixing now, the no longer really exist in St Lucia and barely exist in their former Barbadian stronghold.
 
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