History of the United States I / Unit 1 USH1 0028 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
How African Bondage Differed, and What Replaced It
The idea
The anchor states that most civilisations have practised some form of human bondage and that African empires were no different. Famine or fear of stronger enemies drove some tribes into protective bondage resembling the European serf system. Debt could be worked off, and servants typically became part of the extended tribal family. The distinction the chapter turns on is this: in Africa permanent, inherited slavery was unknown, and children of those bound in slavery to the tribe usually were free and intermarried with their captors.
In practice
Portugal carrying enslaved people to the sugar plantations of the Madeira Islands by fourteen forty-four, and the trade expanding as New World colonies demanded workers for tobacco, sugar, rice and cotton.
Where people slip
Do not read American slavery as a continuation of African practice. Under mercantilism the New World wanted a permanent, identifiable and plentiful labour supply, which produced a race-based system unlike any bondage that had come before. In the English colonies slavery became permanent and hereditary, children born to enslaved people being enslaved themselves. That inheritance, joined to racial identification, is what changed the institution.
Your place on the trail
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