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In Capitalism and Slavery, Williams writes: Slavery was not born out of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery (7). The author proves this fact by describing the historical development of slavery; in this essay, a similar attempt at proving the thesis will be done.
First of all, Is should be pointed out that slavery is not limited to the race-based kind of it: in fact, as stated in the Cambridge World History Of Slavery, it is a ubiquitous phenomenon that has been existing for centuries, including the present day. Various forms of slavery were based on different reasonings that incorporated religion, nationality, the status of the defeated party and so on. Their similarities (including the ownership of one human by another, and the ability to buy and sell the human chattel such ownership creates ) allow treating them as the variations of one phenomenon that appeared for economic reasons, not cultural clashes (Bradley et al. 4). In fact, the injustice of slavery based on racism was pointed out by the witnesses of the phenomena. For example, the article African Slave-Trade published in the United States Chronicle in 1789 features the subscriptions of twenty men who, being deeply impressed with the injustice, inhumanity and reproach of the Slave-Trade, petitioned for its abolition (par. 9-10). Similarly, the Germantown Friends Protest against Slavery, 1688 contains the comparison of racism-based slavery to the forced labor of criminals: in Europe there are many oppressed for conscience sake; and here there are those oppressed who are of a black color (par. 1). In other words, slavery is not necessarily dependent on racism, and people have always realized the fact that skin color discrimination is not a valid ground for slavery if anything is (for example, crime).
The process of the development of slavery and racism has certain patterns. The Summary Statistics of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database states that since 1501 and until 1875 9,986,402 people had been forcefully shipped and forced into slavery. The trade was particularly active between 1726 and 1850 with more than 1,000,000 people sold every 25-year period. As shown by Adams, the experience of witnessing slavery as a legal norm has a major impact on people who grow up in this environment (112-116). Their perception of right and wrong is distorted, and it is not surprising, therefore, that the peak of slave trade took place about four-five generations after its introduction.
In the same way, in the Southern States (where racism-based slavery survived for far longer than in Northern), the slavery was evolving slowly since the middle of the seventeenth century. In the beginning, setting a slave free was easy and could be done for money or to the children of the owners. But as new laws were introduced, freeing was becoming more complicated (Monaghan 36). This gradual process served to create stereotypes about the people of color and cement the idea of their inferiority in the minds of several generations. As a result, in 1810, about 10% of the African American population was free, but by that time they were hardly treated as persons. The few rights they had were mostly formal; their status was somewhere between a citizen and slave, even though they were native to the land (Friedman 223). What is more, the freedmen avoided calling themselves Negros as well as mulattoes (a census word used in official documents). They preferred being called Creoles, while their neighbors might describe them as people of color or coloreds to avoid the word Negro (Monaghan 36). In such a way, full-fledged racism was developed as the words denoting the black color of skin became tabooed for free people regardless of their race and social status. Therefore, while slavery could not be caused by racism, it definitely contributed to the development of prejudices against the people of color and led to their discrimination even after they were formally freed.
Works Cited
Adams, Kenneth Alan. Psychohistory and Slavery: Preliminary Issues. The Journal of Psychohistory 43.2 (2015): 110-9. ProQuest. Web.
African slave-trade. Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. Rhode Island Historical Society, 2006. Web.
Bradley, Keith et al. The Cambridge World History Of Slavery. 2011. Print.
Friedman, Lawrence. A History of American Law. New York, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. Print.
Germantown Friends Protest against Slavery 1688. American Memory. The Library of Congress, n.d. Web.
Monaghan, Tom. The Slave Trade. London, United Kingdom: Evans, 2008. Print.
Summary Statistics. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Emory University, 2013. Web.
Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Print.
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