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Not to mention the hereditary nature of American slavery that ensured your grandchildren would be slaves the moment you were even born, and the erasure of your
by hydrogen7800 2y ago
Not to mention the hereditary nature of American slavery that ensured your grandchildren would be slaves the moment you were even born, and the erasure of your history and culture to further untether you from anything but the utility of your labor.
- busterarm 2y agoThere's nothing uniquely American about that. Chattel slavery in Africa goes back uninterrupted to ancient Egyptian times. Heck, if you just want to look at the Atlantic slave trade, the United States was _second to last_ among nations in terms of trade volume.
- Wytwwww 2y agoNorth America was at the end of the logistics chain which resulted in higher prices, though. Also Native American slavery in the 1600s and 1700s was pretty huge (relative to the size of European populations) so there wasn't as much demand for African slaves until that "source" was depleted. e.g. most of Carolinas and the area between Spanish Florida and English colonies up the coast was almost entirely depopulated largely due to slave raids (and at least by then the Spanish and English had a very different attitude towards enslaving natives so British-American colonies were somewhat unique in that respect). And this extended to the North as well. Supposedly the proportion of households that owned Native American slaves in Rhode Island in the early 1700s was comparable to that in Virginia in the 1860s (of the average number of slaves per household was probably much lower)