In my Jan. 29 newsletter, I wrote a little about the development of the domestic slave trade in the United States, apropos of my Sunday Review story on the SlaveVoyages database and the effort to measure and quantify the trans-Atlantic slave trade. That newsletter focused on the economics of slave-based cultivation and how it led inevitably to a surplus of enslaved people who could be sold at great profit after the United States ended its participation in the trans-Atlantic trade.
Because that particular story begins in the late 18th century, it takes the existence of chattel slavery for granted. But it occurred to me this week that it would be worth saying a little more about how the enslavement of Africans developed in the English colonies of the New World, if only to underscore the fact that a thorough grasp of this history must rest on the foundation of an objective analysis of class, labor and property relationships. I won’t hit every detail, but you will get the gist.
“Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the Negro,” wrote the Trinidadian historian and political scientist (and later politician) Eric Williams in his 1944 book “Capitalism and Slavery.” “Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan.”
Williams goes on to note that the first instance of slave trading and slave labor during the European colonization of the Americas involved Native people. “The Indians rapidly succumbed to the excessive labor demanded of them, the insufficient diet, the white man’s diseases, and their inability to adjust themselves to the new way of life.”
“The immediate successor of the Indian,” Williams continues, “was not the Negro but the poor white.” In the English colonies, most of these laborers were indentured servants. Some were “fleeing from the irksome restrictions of feudalism”; some were “Irishmen seeking freedom from the oppression of landlords and bishops”; others simply had a “burning desire for land” and an “ardent passion for independence.” Some were kidnapped by unscrupulous traders; others were convicts forced into servitude.
The conditions of servitude were bad to begin with, from the dangerous voyage across the Atlantic to the difficult work on small farms and plantations. They became worse as servitude itself became a “property relation which asserted a control of varying extent, over the bodies and liberties of the person during service as if he were a thing.” Even still, as Williams points out, “The master at no time had absolute control over the person and liberty of his servant as he had over his slave” and “the conception of the servant as a piece of property never went beyond that of personal estate and never reached the stage of a chattel or real estate.”
Most important, a servant’s term of service could eventually come to an end. When it did, he often demanded land. That’s one reason the importation of white servants became politically untenable. It was also true that “the need of the plantations outstripped” the supply of servants. There were only so many convicts England could send, only so many people to kidnap, only so many who would willingly make the journey. African slavery, then, emerges within the context of the instability of white servitude.
“The Negro, in a strange environment, conspicuous by his color and features, and ignorant of the white man’s language and ways, could be kept permanently divorced from the land,” Williams explains. “Racial differences made it easier to justify and rationalize Negro slavery, to exact the mechanical obedience of a plough-ox or a cart-horse, to demand that resignation and that complete moral and intellectual subjection which alone make slave labor possible. Finally, and this was the decisive factor, the Negro slave was cheaper.”
It was more cost effective, for merchants, to purchase captives from the Atlantic coast of Africa and ship them to sites in North America and the Caribbean: “The money which procured a white man’s services for ten years could buy a Negro for life.” For kidnappers, it was easier to steal an African man or woman than an English one. And the experiences of the servant trade informed the emerging slave trade: “Bristol, the center of the servant trade, became one of the centers of the slave trade. Capital accumulated from the one financed the other.”
“The features of the man, his hair, color and dentifrice, his ‘subhuman’ characteristics so widely pleaded, were only the later rationalizations to justify a simple economic fact that the colonies needed labor and resorted to Negro labor because it was cheapest and best,” Williams writes. The planter, he continues, “would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn was to come.”
One thing I’d like you to consider, and this is something I will return to in the future, is the extent to which racial distinctions and racial divisions are rooted in relationships of class, labor and property, even when they take on a life and logic of their own. And if that’s true, I would like you to think about what that means for unraveling those divisions and distinctions, and consigning the ideology of “race” to the ash heap of history.
What I Wrote
My Tuesday column was on a supposedly “pro-worker” proposal from Senator Marco Rubio that does little more than give employers another avenue for union busting.
If an “employee involvement organization” cannot bargain and cannot negotiate and can be dissolved at any point by the employer, then what purpose does it serve other than to subvert union organizers and channel worker unrest into a front organization for management? The same goes for the nonvoting board representative. Without power to act, what does it matter that someone is permitted to watch and listen?
My Friday column was, yet again, on how the Supreme Court cannot be trusted to defend the civil and voting rights of all Americans.
It is Congress, and not the Supreme Court, that has, over time, done more to defend the civil and voting rights of all Americans. To do the same, the court has had to reverse its own work. As Nikolas Bowie, an assistant professor of law at Harvard, has written, “As a matter of historical practice, the Court has wielded an antidemocratic influence on American law, one that has undermined federal attempts to eliminate hierarchies of race, wealth, and status.”
Now Reading
Brian Highsmith and Kathleen Thelen on the role of the courts in American political economy for the Law and Political Economy Project.
Michael Hobbes on “cancel culture” in a video essay for YouTube.
Musab Younis on “whiteness” for The London Review of Books.
Teresa M. Began on equality and egalitarianism for the Boston Review.
Natasha Lennard on liberal immigration policies in BookForum.
Feedback If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to your friends. They can sign up here. If you want to share your thoughts on an item in this week’s newsletter or on the newsletter in general, please email me at jamelle-newsletter@nytimes.com. You can follow me on Twitter (@jbouie) and Instagram.
Photo of the Week
Another photo from the archives, of an old theater in Waycross, Ga., taken with a 4x5 press camera on transparency film.
Now Eating: Oven-Roasted Chicken Shawarma
This is a staple recipe for when I don’t have the energy to do anything more than marinate and cook. The recipe does not call for it, but I added a cup of full-fat yogurt to the marinade for more flavor. I made pita bread, tzatziki sauce and a salad to complete the meal. Recipe from NYT Cooking.
Ingredients
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2 lemons, juiced
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½ cup plus 1 tablespoon olive oil
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6 cloves garlic, peeled, smashed and minced
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1 teaspoon kosher salt
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2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
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2 teaspoons ground cumin
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2 teaspoons paprika
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½ teaspoon turmeric
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A pinch ground cinnamon
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Red pepper flakes, to taste
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2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken thighs
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1 large red onion, peeled and quartered
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2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
Directions
Prepare a marinade for the chicken: Combine the lemon juice, ½ cup olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper, cumin, paprika, turmeric, cinnamon and red pepper flakes in a large bowl, then whisk to combine. Add the chicken and toss well to coat. Cover and store in refrigerator for at least 1 hour and up to 12 hours.
When ready to cook, heat oven to 425 degrees. Use the remaining tablespoon of olive oil to grease a rimmed sheet pan. Add the quartered onion to the chicken and marinade, and toss once to combine. Remove the chicken and onion from the marinade, and place on the pan, spreading everything evenly across it.
Put the chicken in the oven and roast until it is browned, crisp at the edges and cooked through, about 30 to 40 minutes. Remove from the oven, allow to rest 2 minutes, then slice into bits. (To make the chicken even more crisp, set a large pan over high heat, add a tablespoon of olive oil to the pan, then the sliced chicken, and sauté until everything curls tight in the heat.) Scatter the parsley over the top and serve with tomatoes, cucumbers, pita, white sauce, hot sauce, olives, fried eggplant, feta, rice — really anything you desire.
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