Anemone's Notes on Chapter 6

Comparing Slave Systems: The Significance of “Racial” Servitude

While race and slavery are closely connected in the North American context, we have seen that slavery existed in the Old World for thousands of years without a trace of race ideology.  Slavery also developed differently in Latin America from the situation we are familiar with in English North America, and we also know that racial ideology is distinct in these two regions of the New World.   This chapter seeks to unpack these historical developments centering around issues of slavery in the Old and New World in order to gain a better understanding of the development of race ideology in N America.

The Background Literature and the Issues of Slavery

The historians Frank Tannenbaum and Stanley Elkins developed the thesis that different institutionalized forms of slavery in N and S America led to different structures and ideologies of racial difference.   These historians focused their attention on supposed “cultural-historical” differences between English and Iberian colonialists as the root of these differences.  Other historians have looked to economic and ecological differences – rather than to cultural and historical factors – in their attempts to explain the differences between how race and slavery were institutionalized in English North America and Latin America.  One major difference between Old and New World slavery was that only in N America were slaves explicitly and legally denied their humanity. 

The Nature of Slavery

Typically, the nature of slavery includes two opposed notions: the slave is both property (a thing) and a person (a conscious human being).  “All slave-owning societies have had to deal with the paradox expressed by this question.”  Smedley argues that on p. 127 that  “”race” evolved in the Judeo-Christian society of North America in large part as one way of dealing with this dilemma, by defining Africans and their descendants as something less than fully human, or as a form of human being different from and inferior to whites.”  Smedley than argues that, in her view, slavery was more than an economic system, and that its most important aspects are “the social and human relationships”…”it is the consequences of slavery for human social systems and social relationships that matter”.  She then (on p. 127) goes on to enumerate a series of other factors of anthropological interest that relate to slavery as more than mere economics.

A Brief History of Old World Slavery

Very ice discussion of the importance of kinship in human societies, and the slave’s place as an “essentially kinless people”.  This section is of great interest to an anthropological analysis of the role that slavery can play in society, with interesting material from the ancient historian MI Finley.  On p. 130 the anthropological notion of “bridewealth” is discussed and how it relates to a notion of people as property.   Thus in the Old World, “slavery evolved, then, in traditional societies where the concept of “rights-in-or-over-persons” was part of a nexus of understandings, customs, and beliefs about human relationships”  (p. 130).  We learn here too that in many traditional Old World societies, slaves could be incorporated into the family or other kin unit (p. 131).  On page 135 Smedley discusses the brutalization of both slave and slave-holder that the institution creates (something that was referred to by some of the slave-holding Founding Fathers).  On p. 135 et seq., the ancient Roman distinction between common or civil laws and the laws of nature is seen as illustrative of how even slaves in the Old World were considered to have natural rights that superseded any civil or property laws or statuses, and the influence of these considerations on the concept of the slave as a person (in addition to being property).  The contrast between the rights attributed to slaves in the Old World and their status in the New World is very illuminating. And reflects the fact that (p. 137) “of greater importance is the fact that Old World slavery never developed as “racial” slavery.”

Colonial Slavery Under the Spanish and Portuguese

Basic difference between Spanish conquest and English colonization of the New World is discussed, as is the development of the caste (castas) system of social and ethnic distinctions was transported to the New World and modified to include “mixed blood” and other “types” in the New World that resulted from intermarriage between conquerors and the conquered.  Interesting material here on miscegenation and the development of “whiteness”, hypodescent, “pigmentocracy”.  Very nice summary of this section on p. 144.

Uniqueness of the English Experience of Slavery

Discuss the many ways in which the English in North America came up with a very different form and institution of slavery compared to what we have just read about in the Old World and in Latin America.  Harris’ idea of “hypo-descent”  and its relationship and influence on the development of race and race relations in North America.

The Significance of Slavery in the Creation of Race Ideology

The dehumanization and denial of basic human rights to slaves in the New World forms the basis for the eventual dehumanization of slave races.  See p. 151.  Final summary of how “slavery was seminal to the creation and development of the idea of race in the North American colonies” with 4 points made on pages 152-153.